The McWetlog

Gizmodo’s prank at CES was wonderful: they walked around with a TV-B-Gone turning off televisions at display booths and even during presentations. Many of Gizmodo’s commenter’s aren’t happy about it, but I’m delighted. In too many fields, journalists (including bloggers) are too damn close and cozy with their subjects, because their subjects are also their advertisers. It’s always a good sign to see someone willing to bite the hand that purportedly feeds them. Ostensible displays of independence are always appreciated.

Update: Banned!

Update #2: The point is not to suck up to the consumer electronics industry; if it takes a dumb prank to signal that you’re not completely servile to the industry you cover, so be it.

Update #3: Gizmodo in its own defence:

[W]hen I see some fellow press damning us for the joke, I feel sorry for them: When did journalists become the protectors of corporations? When did this industry, defined by pranksters like Woz, get so serious and in-the-pocket of big business? … Consumer electronics tech journalism is very tricky. Those who strictly cover commercial CE depend on a powerful handful of companies for the very lifeblood of their content. That’s a dangerous position. …

Many of our harshest critics have done far worse than clicking off a few TVs. I’m talking about ethical lapses such as accepting paid junkets to Japan by Nikon, or free trips to Korea by Samsung. Turning a blind eye to Apple’s mistakes when they didn’t make an iPhone SDK and sought to lock down the handset. Stock prices torn downward by publishing incorrect leaked info. Writing about companies that also pay you for advertorial podcast work. All of these examples are offenses from the last year. And I consider those offenses far worse than our prank, because it ultimately it puts the perpetrators on the wrong team. As one reporter put it while chiding me, “Journalists are guests in the houses of these companies.” Not first and foremost! We are the auditors of companies and their gadgets on behalf of the readers. In this job, integrity and independence is far more important than civil or corporate obedience.

Repeat after me: Journalism. Is. Adversarial.

This whole fracas between Wired reporter Fred Vogelstein and bloggers Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer — the former prefers interviews by e-mail or recorded audio, the latter prefers to blog responses to media questions; both decline to be interviewed by phone — reminds me of what I learned both during my brief journalism career and when I was in media demand during DFL’s first season:

One, the reporter needs to talk to you much more than you need to talk to the reporter. It meant that as a reporter soliciting information from my small-town neighbours, I had to be on my best behaviour. It meant that they weren’t necessarily awed by the prospect of being in the paper (especially not the local weekly). It also meant that, when the shoe was on the other foot, once I reminded myself that I didn’t have to reply to every media inquiry (especially when it became clear that off-line media coverage had no impact on my traffic), I felt a good deal less put upon.

And two, the story the reporter is working on is not necessarily your story. It’s not a question of objectivity, simply that there’s a compelling story that’s driving the reporter (or at the very least her desk editor). That story may not match up with what you want to talk about, so your words may be put to unexpected purposes.

Reporters, in turn, need to realize that regardless of the “gotcha” implications of phone or in-person interviews (which is what has been getting most of the attention in this debate), any media interview is an inconvenience to the interviewee. An e-mail response may take as much time as a brief phone interview, but it’s much less emotionally and mentally taxing, and is minimally disruptive to a busy schedule. (Live interviews are the worst, even if it’s by phone and you don’t have to go into a studio.) That, more than anything else, is why I’d rather do things by e-mail than by phone or in person: it’s less work and stress.

It’s probably not wise for a newspaper editor to argue that a critic of his paper is “way over the line of free speech” and that the paper may sue that critic. But that’s what Charlottetown Guardian managing editor Gary MacDougall is apparently saying about an anonymous blogger who’s been criticizing PEI businesses and institutions. That just strikes me as the kind of rhetoric that no one in the journalistic profession should be using, and that could come back to bite him in the ass someday, because it’s professionally foolish: MacDougall will not now be able to use freedom of speech as an argument to defend himself or his paper without looking silly.

Bloggers and media organizations are filing amicus briefs in the Apple suit against rumour sites (my take on which is here). Paul McCleary writes, in his excellent summary of the case on CJR Daily, “One can’t help but notice that in a certain sense, Judge Kleinberg and the media types seem to be talking past each other.”

In his March 11 ruling, which is being appealed (hence the amicus briefs), Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg ruled that Apple could go after the rumour sites for their sources. Kleinberg ruled that the question of whether the rumour sites constituted journalism was irrelevant. From his decision:

But even if the movants are journalists, this is not the equivalent of a free pass. The journalist’s privilege is not absolute. For example, journalists cannot refuse to disclose information when it relates to a crime. […] Whether [O’Grady] fits the definition of a journalist, reporter, blogger, or anything else need not be decided at this juncture for this reason: there is no license conferred on anyone to violate valid criminal laws.

In other words, your obligation to obey the law is not affected by your status as a journalist, so whether or not you’re a journalist is irrelevant.

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The CBC has RSS feeds. Go nuts. Laugh at the clueless EULA. Via Boing Boing.

Two thoughts, now that I’ve subscribed to a few:

• There aren’t any descriptions; it’s just the headlines. That’s not very useful: it forces you to load the web page. It’s not like the Holy Mother Corp is relying on ad revenue from those pages. Not having at least a summary or an excerpt is quite dated.
• A single news feed for their non-local news would really be handy; I have to download five separate feeds to get it all.

The verdict: surprisingly lame, but it’s better than nothing.

“In the wake of” is how journalists avoid the post hoc fallacy: instead of saying that it happened because of something — which they either cannot or are disinclined to prove — they say that it happened “in the wake of” something, or words to that effect. They’re implying a connection, but they can’t come right out and attribute causality. (For example, this CNet article says that Apple increased its online storage limits for its .Mac customers “as other e-mail providers … have been increasing limits” — as, not because.) Sad to say, I used this expression a lot during my brief journalism career: clearly I’d picked it up through news-junkie osmosis. And because it was so very useful.

Newsdesigner.com is a weblog about newspaper design. That’s not to say that it’s about fonts and layout; rather, it’s about things like choices in headlines and photography — for example, whether to include pictures of mutilated American corpses from Fallujah (the most recent entry at this point). This is gold. (via Matt)

Here is Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine’s response to a Michigan news channel report that the magazine, sold through a child’s fundraising drive, was full of dirty, dirty material.

And here is the original story. I have never seen an example of contemporary journalism that defamed the profession simply by pretending to be a part of it; its author, Kristi Andersen, is an embarassment to her peers. “The magazine has now been pulled from the list, but 24 Hour News 8 wanted to warn other school districts in case their students had already ordered it.” Oh really. Not a journalist’s job to warn other school districts, missy. Get over yourself.

In its heyday, the National Post had more columnists than opinions had assholes. No, that’s not how goes. Wait. “Opinions are like” — okay. Never mind. Let me start again. Suffice to say there were a lot of them. I suppose it was necessary, after all — they didn’t have all that much in the way of advertising to fill up the column inches — and it did make for some interesting reading. Now, after a whole pile of profit-making and pre-purposing under the Aspers, there are more ex-columnists from the Post than … I’ll just stop there. Anyway, Toro has reminiscences from five former Post columnists, via Inkless Wells — and I probably should have started and stopped there. But you know, you used to be able to make $80,000 a year writing like this.

Don’t miss Paul Wells’s rant about the misplaced priorities of the journalists working in the Parliamentary Press Gallery. And oh, does he have a point. Political news coverage has always been too horserace-ish at the worst of times, but, as he points out, obsessing about the details of Jean Chrétien’s departure date, the makeup of Paul Martin’s cabinet, or the guest list at the Irvings’ fishing lodge, to the exclusion of all else that goes on in official Ottawa, is a bit much. His list of what the media has ignored is particularly telling.

Newspapers love to cover their competitors’ bad news, but there’s a fine line between being fair, albeit enjoying it, and just being mean. A local case in point: this week, our competition published an article about a lawsuit between my paper and its former editor. (Nothing like having your competitor airing out your laundry.) This, after using a readership survey meant to show that people read community papers to claim, on the front page last month, that they “beat” us — a misuse of the data, and not exactly true. They’ve been running a table showing it in every issue since. They even argued that municipalities were wasting taxpayers’ money if they advertised with us! It’s one thing to compete, quite another to wish for your competition’s humiliation and destruction. Not nice.