Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley

Photographer John Moore of the New York Times was a witness to history Thursday. He was there for Benazir Bhutto’s final rally and her subsequent violent and public assassination. There’s been a headlong rush by newspapers into video, and audio slideshows that mesh ambient sound with pictures. But on this day, the Times kept it simple. A simple slideshow (which I could watch full-screen, thank you very much) and the quiet narration of photographer Moore as he described the events of the day. Moore was just a few feet away from Bhutto’s car as she was shot, and he captured the explosion of the suicide bomb.

Perfect.

On the morning after Bhutto’s surprising assassination, I didn’t want a cacophony of noise and video images flooding onto my computer screen as I sat in my home office. Moore’s slideshow was quiet yet powerful. The images, and Moore’s narration, gave me all the information I needed to absorb the horrific event.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately (and I would say, whining) by news photographers worried that video is supplanting still photographs as the visual medium of choice. I don’t buy it. Great still photography does and always will have an important place in journalism. In this case, the Times appropriately promoted Moore’s slideshow on the home page, above the “fold.” The editors knew the images were powerful and emotional and an important part of the story.

One regret: I imagine Moore must be kicking himself a bit for letting his camera drop moments before Bhutto was shot. A Pulitzer probably slipped through his hands.

Ev Williams (of Blogger/Twitter) felt the need to clarify some points about the new Economist story about him. As a longtime journalist, I cringe whenever I see a blog post like this because I believe it erodes the credibility of the profession. In this instance, the Economist paraphrased Williams as having said that he “hated every minute of his time” when he worked at Google. Williams (very politely) says that’s not true. The article also notes that Williams was at Google less than a year, when in fact he was there longer.

These are perhaps small errors on the part of the Economist, except that maybe Williams doesn’t want to burn every last bridge at Google by publicly badmouthing the company, or be known as “the guy who hated working at Google.” When you’re the subject of a news story, nuance is everything.

The problem with these situations is that we really don’t know what Williams said. Only the reporter and Williams do. The reporter may have inadvertently (or intentionally) put words in Williams’ mouth. Or it’s possible that Williams did tell the reporter he hated every minute at Google (either explicitly or by implication), but when he saw the words in black and white, they didn’t ring true or they were too strong to acknowledge. We often surprise ourselves with what we say.

Regardless, there are ways to avoid these situations. The most obvious is for the reporter to call the source of a story once it’s written and to read back quotes and how they will be used in context. I’ve only met one reporter who does this religiously. Few reporters do this because it’s time-consuming and sometimes difficult to reach the sources. Some reporters stubbornly believe they are infallible. And a lot of reporters just don’t want to open the door to sources backpedaling from good quotes or trying to reshape a story after-the-fact.

Those are understandable concerns. But with media credibility at an all-time low, journalists have no excuse not to make the extra effort to get it right.

(BTW, the Economist story is an otherwise nice read. Check it out.)

Every once in a while (see here and here), someone will comment on how the Mercury News let its most popular blog, SiliconBeat, slip away. SiliconBeat was a popular and well-respected technology and venture capital blog that colleague Matt Marshall and I founded in 2004. We published it, day-in and day-out for about two years, until Matt left the Merc and launched a very similar VentureBeat blog. SiliconBeat’s archives live on, but the blog is defunct.

There is a long story about how SiliconBeat died. No one wants to hear that, I’m sure. The short story is this: Matt passionately wanted to become an entrepreneur and start his own news web site. He was set on leaving the Merc. And the Mercury News and Knight Ridder, then the Merc’c parent company, couldn’t think creatively about how to take a stake in that venture and keep SiliconBeat in the family.

We tried. Matt and I met with Knight Ridder and Merc executives many times over the course of a year to try to convince them to invest in a new, bigger and better SiliconBeat. We had a detailed business plan. We had revenue-sharing ideas. The works. But Knight Ridder was in the midst of imploding, and couldn’t make a move. And the Merc…well, investing in a start-up just wasn’t a concept that publisher George Riggs could wrap his mind around.

It’s too bad for the Merc. SiliconBeat is still a top-10 blog for the Merc just from Google searches alone. It could have been so much more. Instead, the credibility that we built in the Silicon Valley start-up community largely went out the door with Matt when he launched VentureBeat, in my view.

But I’m also not surprised it worked out this way. Blogging is often a second full-time job for newspaper reporters (it often felt that way for Matt and me), but rarely do they get paid extra or otherwise compensated when their workload doubles overnight, or when they cultivate a new niche audience for their employers. The temptation to strike out on your own and go independent is strong, particularly when companies such as Federated Media are standing in the wings waiting to help. There’s money out there, if you’re smart and lucky.

I’m quite sure we’ll see other high-profile, popular newspaper bloggers go independent, taking their audiences with them. I have no inside knowledge about what’s happening with TV writer/blogger Tim Goodman at the San Francisco Chronicle. But I find it interesting that in his most recent post on SFGate, he says he going on vacation, but that he’ll be blogging on his new, personal TV blog. “I’m working out what role The Bastard Machine will play for me in the future,” he says cryptically. His new blog, meanwhile, is humming along, with many comments per post.

What’s a newspaper to do when a blogger gets too big for his britches? I don’t have all the answers, but acknowledging that he might need new pants is probably a good place to start.

Minneapolis School Board adopts wide-ranging strategic plan recommendations

Can we just stop writing headlines like this, please?

Local public radio talk show host Michaek Krasny came to the law school last week for a media training for faculty. Krasny was funny and smart. And at one point, he asked the audience to pitch him story ideas for his morning show. One of the professors hit home for me with his story idea. He told Kransy that he lamenetd the state of the newspaper business, noting the layoffs industry-wide. Then he ripped into to the Mercury News - where I worked for a decade until last month - complaining that a paper once known for investigative reporting had lost its way. The tone was angry, as if he’d been betrayed. All the Merc cared about nowadays was the financial bottom line, not good journalism. Krasny lamely tried to defend newspapers, but there was little he could say.

Even though my Merc days are behind me now, I felt a sting. I could have spoken up and said that there are still good journalists at the Merc who are passionate about good journalism. But we all know that the truth is more nuanced than that. That money problems do loom large for papers these days. And that newspapers are making hard choices - not always the right ones - about the content they produce. Good, revealing investigative reporting will get harder and harder with each passing day.

But what struck me most was the anger and the disappointment in the voice of the professor. Some people do still care about newspapers - a lot. To some people - an older generation, perhaps - neswspapers are like a public trust. And they hate what they’re seeing.