Category Archives: New York Times

September 5, 2012 · 10:44 am

The digital future is here

By Christopher B. Daly

Exhibit A: today’s New York Times politics section.

The on-line version shows the rapid evolution of a news organization from what used to be a print-only operation into a full-fledged multimedia operation.

Among the many features:

–A dynamic map of the Electoral College vote totals.

–Many color photos, including a slideshow. Plus, a trip through the Times photo archives with a b&w slideshow from 1968.

–Videos of the key speeches.

–Blog posts by beat reporters discussing their specialties.

–An old-fashioned “lede-all” main story, but one that has 416 comments (and counting).

–A behind-the scenes “TimesCast” in which a Times editor interviews a Times reporter.

–More than a dozen sidebars.

–Lots of old-fashioned “eat-your-peas” civics information, including a helpful side-by-side comparison of the two party platforms.

–Material carried forward from the GOP convention (which newspapers could never do when they were print-only).

–An interactive feature about undecided voters.

–An iPhone App, twitter feeds, a Facebook page. . .

It just goes on and on. All of which raises a question: which business is the New York Times really in? After more than 150 years in the newspaper business, I would say the Times can say it is in the news business, period.

Well, almost. That politics homepage that has so many features (and which reflects the work of I don’t know how many trained professionals — many dozens, certainly, maybe in the low hundreds) has mighty few ads. I see:

–a banner near the top from CNN,

–a second ad from CNN in a box in the right column.

–a couple of “house ads” touting NYTimes services, which bring in no money.

–a small ad from Corcoran Real Estate about waterfront estates in Delray Beach

–A “GoogleAd” for Trader Joe’s coupons.

I have no idea how much revenue those ads are bringing in. All told, however, I  am sure that they don’t amount to a fraction of the cost of putting all those reporters and editors in Charlotte, NC, plus the cost of the team in NYC who are helping out.

For now, then, it must be acknowledged: the tools and the philosophy of online news have outrun the business model. This is impressive but not sustainable. Yet.

Will it be self-supporting by 2016?

 

 

 

 

 

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July 19, 2012 · 3:22 pm

NYT error: Fox News is not top rated

By Christopher B. Daly 

Today’s Times has an interesting (though somewhat thin) story about the relationship between president Obama and Fox News.

One thing caught my eye:

But now, with the presidential campaign entering its most competitive phase, the simmering tensions between Mr. Obama and the country’s highest-rated news channel threaten their fragile détente.

Problem is, Fox News is NOT the “country’s highest-rated news channel.” It is the highest-rated cable news channel, with about 1.3 million viewers. But it comes nowhere near the size of even the lowest-rated broadcast news channel. And it is still a tiny fraction of the combined audiences of ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS, which have well over 20 million viewers in all.

(Yes, there is a bit of an apples/oranges issue here, but, come on: Fox is in a different universe from the broadcast networks.)

(A further thought: in a nation of 300+ million people, does Fox News with 1.3 million viewers deserve the attention it gets?)

 

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July 16, 2012 · 10:05 am

“Quote approval”: A new low in journalism?

By Christopher B. Daly 

When a journalist interviews someone (anyone), the normal ground rules that govern the interaction amount to this:

I am a journalist working on a story. I want to talk to you and use the things you say in my story, based on my judgment of what is important. I will use none, some, or all of what you say, as I choose, to further the pursuit of the truth. Whatever quotations I use will be verbatim — nothing added, nothing left out. I will also use your real name (and title, if you have one).

This is the essence of the standard known as “on the record.” Journalists prefer it because we believe that, on the whole, it holds people accountable for the things they say. In certain (ideally rare) situations, however, journalists will negotiate some lower standard. Almost always, these retreats from the “on the record” standard come at the initiative of the people we are speaking to. These other arrangements are known by a bewildering array of terms, which do not always mean the same thing in different cities or beats. The problem is that these departures usually serve the source rather than the audience.

Today comes word from the Times that political reporters for all the major news organizations have adopted a new — and, I think, pernicious — practice. They allow the people they are interviewing to get a look at their own quotes before publication and censor them. That is, the big shots around Obama and Romney routinely demand and get the power to edit themselves before their words appear in print or online.

Well, you can hardly blame them for trying. Who wouldn’t want that option?

But the journalists should never have agreed to it. These spokespeople, senior officials, and top aides get paid lots of money for their ability to think on their feet and choose their words carefully.

At the very least, having agreed to this arrangement, the journalists have a professional duty to reveal the terms. What about transparency? I, for one, could live without stories in which members of the political class get to “clean up” their quotes.

Another question: in what other fields does this practice apply? Sports reporting? Business news?

(Props to Jeremy Peters of the Times for blowing the whistle on this practice.)

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June 20, 2012 · 11:41 am

Leaks (cont.)

By Christopher B. Daly

The able legal-affairs reporter Charlie Savage and Scott Shane have an interesting update in today’s Times about the issue of national-security leaks. The upshot is that the Obama administration has (surprisingly perhaps) emerged as the all-time record-holder among all U.S. presidential administrations for prosecuting leaks. (The piece has a helpful sidebar — which was better looking in print than online — that summarizes nine known leaks cases.)

A couple of related questions:

–Which administration holds the record for generating leaks? (probably a two-term president like Nixon, Reagan, G.W.Bush? or like Clinton?)

–Isn’t it worthwhile to distinguish between different types of leaks?

A. We might differentiate between authorized and unauthorized leaks.

B. We might differentiate between leaks to journalists and leaks to others.

C. We might differentiate between leaks that do harm and those that do not.

For example, it is one thing for a traitor to steal operational secrets and sell or give them to agents of a hostile power. That’s the kind of leak that should properly trigger Congressional outrage and lead to criminal prosecutions. That kind of leak raises no First Amendment issues.

It is quite a different thing for a troubled official to tell a journalist about a secret policy so that the public can debate whether that policy is a good idea. It is this kind of leak that usually induces partisan posturing and leak investigations that fizzle. It is also the kind of leak that requires a careful weighing of the First Amendment implications.

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June 14, 2012 · 10:12 am

Inside the Meme Factory

By Christopher B. Daly

That phrase, Inside the Meme Factory, is the working title of my next book. It refers to an idea that is well illustrated in a piece on page 1 of today’s Times by the estimable James B. Stewart (lawyer, book author, contributor to both the New Yorker and the Times — is there more than one of him?). In his article, Stewart seizes on a comment made by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and tries to walk it back to its origins. The phrase involved a rhetorical question raised from the bench by Scalia during arguments over the national health care law, asking whether the government could make Americans do other things that are good for them, such as eating broccoli. Here’s the nub:

It turns out that broccoli did not spring from the mind of Justice Scalia. The vegetable trail leads backward through conservative media and pundits. Before reaching the Supreme Court, vegetables were cited by a federal judge in Florida with a libertarian streak; in an Internet video financed by libertarian and ultraconservative backers; at a Congressional hearing by a Republican senator; and an op-ed column by David B. Rivkin Jr., a libertarian lawyer whose family emigrated from the former Soviet Union when he was 10.

 Stewart’s painstaking track-back shows that the idea of challenging the limits of the Commerce Clause originated with libertarian thinkers and was sustained in a series of hand-offs by other libertarians and conservatives, all working within the universe of conservative institutions (Cato, Reason, Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, Reagan-appointed judges, a former Clarence Thomas law clerk, et al.) And, as so often happens, several of those institutions get crucial amounts of funding from the Kochs and the Scaifes.

The “broccoli” story exemplifies a much larger truth: most of the themes, slogans, argument-stoppers, images, and jokes that shape our politics and much of our public conversation don’t come from nowhere. Many of them are the fruits of deliberate efforts, especially among conservatives, and many of those efforts take place in a nearly hidden network of institutions. Those institutions include an array of think tanks, publishers, and conservative media outlets that generate and amplify conservative “memes.” In my book, I trace the deliberate campaign to fund and build this network of interlocking conservative institutions in the decades after World War II.

Stay tuned.

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June 10, 2012 · 11:06 am

Leaks investigation

By Christopher B. Daly

The Times editors probably should have slapped an “Analysis” label on this piece (which it carries online, but not in today’s print version) or put in the Sunday Review section. In any case, Charlie Savage has an intelligent analysis of why “leaks” investigations so often come to nought.

He makes a key legal point here:

Many people are surprised to learn that there is no law against disclosing classified information, in and of itself. The classification system was established for the executive branch by presidential order, not by statute, to control access to information and how it must be handled. While officials who break those rules may be admonished or fired, the system covers far more information than it is a crime to leak.

Instead, leak prosecutions rely on a 1917 espionage statute whose principal provision makes it a crime to disclose, to persons not authorized to receive it, national defense information with knowledge that its dissemination could harm the United States or help a foreign power.

And he goes on to make the point that prosecutors have a difficult showing the harm that flows from disclosures of classified information. It is almost never the case that a news media participant in a leak will divulge real, active military secrets. Instead, the practice of leaking is usually someone’s way of trying to win or shape a policy debate. It is the pursuit of politics by other means.

 

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June 8, 2012 · 10:04 am

On national security leaks

By Christopher B. Daly

Here we go again.

According to today’s Times, members of Congress (especially Republicans?) are outraged at the leaks on national security matters that they believe the administration is committing. Not only that, they are shocked (shocked, I tell ya) that such leaks might be carried out to advance the president’s political fortunes. Reading between the lines, it appears that they are upset that Obama officials go off the record and whisper disclosures to the Times and other news media informing the media and thus, the public as well, of their successes in the secret drone campaign and in the secret cyberwarfare we are apparently waging against Iran.

Imagine that: Could it really be that the Obama administration has invented a tactic that no other president (such as his immediate predecessor) ever thought of? Hmmm… Ever since the passage of the Espionage Act in 1917 and especially since the rise of the National Security state after WWII, this issue has been a chronic point of friction at the intersection of law, military operations, spying, and politics.

In all these situations, I believe the first question that any honest citizen should ask is this: Where is the harm?

Who, exactly, is harmed by knowing what the government is doing in our name around the world? There is no indication that any operational details have been compromised. (Surely, the remnants of al Qaeda know that we are gunning for them; just as surely, the Iranians know that we are trying to mess up the computers that run their nuclear program. So what?)

Look at it this way: with the leaks, the American people know enough to debate whether these are good ideas or not (and whether we want to re-hire the guy who is ordering them).

Without the leaks, we would be ignorant.

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February 27, 2012 · 3:29 pm

Obama and Secrets

By Chris Daly 

As is becoming obvious, the Obama administration is developing a disappointment on the promises made by candidate Obama to run an open government. Instead of transparency, we are getting business as usual — or, in some areas, worse than usual.

The New York Times’ David Carr has a helpful update today on the government’s use of the Espionage Act under Obama. More often than not, federal prosecutions are brought against leakers who divulge secrets to the press. Rarely do we see prosecutions of real spies, the kind who steal or buy classified information on behalf of some hostile foreign government that then uses that information to defeat us militarily. Now, that kind of thing would justify the existence and the use of the Espionage Act. But no. The law is usually used to punish the people who are journalists’ sources. Rather than go after the reporters directly, the government (usually) settles for punishing the leaker, who is usually a government employee.

 

The Espionage Act, as I detail in my new book (which should in bookstores on Friday), Covering America, was passed in 1917 by a Congress that was unsure whether the American people would support a war that the president himself had said was unnecessary until right before the U.S. plunged into the fighting in Europe. Among those prosecuted under the Espionage Act (or its companion law, the Sedition Act of 1918) was the socialist leader Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned for giving a speech.

Carr’s piece, as I mentioned, is valuable, but it raises one beef I have with the Times’ coverage in general – that is, the paper’s use of links. In today’s piece, there are plenty of links, but they are almost all internal; they link to earlier Times stories or to the Times Topics database. There is nothing wrong with those, but the paper consistently misses chances to link to historical materials. There is no reason  the Times couldn’t link to the text of the Espionage Act, for instance. Actually, there may be a reason: these links are not always easy to find. But they would give the Times‘ reporting a lot more authority.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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February 17, 2012 · 5:44 pm

Times Co. business

Worth noting: NYTimes publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is proposing to add his brother-in-law to the paper’s board of directors. That would be Steven B. Green, an investor. (And presumably, not the Steven B. Green who is the author of a book called “Assholeology.”)

Times Company to Nominate Director

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: February 16, 2012

If elected, Mr. Green, would succeed Lynn G. Dolnick, 60, who has been a director since 2005 and is retiring. Mr. Green, 47, is general partner of Ordinance Capital L.P., a Florida-based investment firm.

In a statement, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and chief executive of The New York Times, said he was delighted to have Mr. Green nominated to the board. “Steven, who is married to my sister Cindy, a fourth-generation member of the Ochs/Sulzberger family, brings a superb understanding of complex financial issues and a deep appreciation of our company’s historic mission and long-term business objectives.”

The other 10 directors will stand for re-election at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on April 25.

 I’d love to be a fly on that wall.

 

 

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January 30, 2012 · 11:07 am

Don’t miss

If you are on the BU campus this Wednesday, we are lucky to be hosting a visit by Carlotta Gall, who has covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for the New York Times for more than a decade. Forget the analysts. Forget the politicians. Here comes someone who really knows what she’s talking about.

Place: CAS, 223. Time: 4 p.m.

 

 

 

 

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