Category Archives: In the News

Regardless of what you think about the Ines Sainz locker room brouhaha (she endured catcalls and lewd behavior from Jets players and coaches), can we all agree that interviewing grown men while they’re naked is just strange. As I heard one reporter say on an NPR broadcast on this story, business reporters don’t interview corporate CEO’s in the bathroom, fashion reporters don’t interview magazine mavens while they’re having their eyebrows plucked. I say let the interviews happen for everyone – male and female reporters – outside the locker room. I’ve read that many players have been arguing this for years.

Perhaps this is a case of, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Or maybe Rev. Al Sharpton figured he was spending so much time as a talking head on TV talk shows that he may as well start up one of his own. But the news is that the flamboyant self-described civil rights leader from Harlem is to launch his own media company and Sunday Morning TV show, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The controversial civil rights advocate will unveil his 30-minute show, “Education Superhighway,” Thursday morning at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 40th Annual Legislative Conference. It’s already cleared in 150 markets, including KCOP in Los Angeles.

Sharpton’s media company, ESH Holdings (named after the series’ initials) will produce the TV show as well as a planned print magazine.

I have to admit, I always enjoyed covering Rev. Al at his House of Justice in Harlem. He certainly makes for great TV.

Here’s a great piece from Mark Bowden – author of Black Hawk Down and former Philly Inquirer reporter – about his career LINK. (Hat tip to John Glenn.)

One of the great stories of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners is that of the Bristol Herald Courier from Bristol, Virginia, which won the coveted prize for public service journalism, beating some of journalism’s giants. The paper’s reporter, Daniel Gilbert, (pictured in the middle of the photo holding the portfolio) spent 13 months investigating local natural gas rights and compensation for landowners, impressing the judges.

The Washington Post, which itself bagged a few Pulitzers,covered the story of the Courier‘s win, as did other media.

But the Courier’s editor, J. Todd Foster, apparently didn’t like the Post’s story, which seemed to reopen a decades-old wound he’d been harboring since being rejected for a job at the Post years ago. So Foster fired off this pithy editorial attacking the quality of the reporting by the Post’s reporter, Ian Shapira, just stopping short of calling him an entitled brat because he went to Princeton and did manage to get a job at the Post.

As my husband, who showed me this piece, pointed out, the best part of Foster’s article is in the comments section, where a reader has sought to prove Foster’s charge of elitism by sending in a small real estate item which notes that Shapira and his wife bought a house for over a million dollars.

Foster’s diatribe is entertaining. But the Post’s piece is basically admiring of what the Courier achieved, proving that often the hardest stories for journalists to write are those about other journalists.

Jeff Bercovici from Daily Finance.com thinks so.

According to Bercovici’s story, Gawker Media, which runs the gadget site, Gizmodo.com, admitted to paying $5,000 to get its hands on the new fourth generation iPhone. The seller apparently told Gizmodo he found the phone in a bar in Redwood City, California. Gizmodo forked over the cash and got themselves a worldwide scoop. They say they were planning to give the phone back all along.

Paying for stories has always been bad journalism. Encouraging people to behave badly just to get a scoop, is also bad journalism.

Update: Now the case looks like it has become a criminal one LINK.

The Washington Post was a big winner in this year’s Pulitzer Prizes.

Here’s a reporter who just won’t quit and an elected official who takes perhaps the strangest approach I’ve ever seen to avoiding the question. This story from KTVI St. Louis was filed in October of 2002 by reporter Elliot Davis. Hat tip Al Tompkins.

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All for the sake of getting a still shot, ABC News switched in a fake shot of a tachometer (the dashboard dial which measures acceleration in a car) in a story about Toyota’s acceleration problem. Toyota is mad. ABC News looks bad. STORY.

This in from Virginia Breen: The Huffington Post is to take on college media with a new section called HuffPost College.

This from Megan Garber’s story in Columbia Journalism Review:

Enter…The Huffington Post. Today, “the Internet newspaper” added a new vertical, its nineteenth, to its array of specialized sections. “HuffPost College” features content aggregated from college newspapers from across the country—fifty-five of them at this point, including schools like Berkeley, Princeton, Iowa State, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the University of Montana, Harvard, and the Savanna College of Art and Design—who have entered into content-sharing agreements with the outlet.

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Well this is certainly an interesting development. According to the New York Times, The National Enquirer is now eligible to apply for a Pulitzer Prize.

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Published: February 18, 2010

The Pulitzer Prize administrators have decided that The National Enquirer is eligible to compete for the awards, a person briefed on the matter said Thursday.

Enquirer editors said they had submitted an entry before the Feb. 1 deadline for their work on the John Edwards scandal, but it was not clear whether the publication qualified for the Pulitzers, widely considered the most coveted honor for American newspapers.

The Enquirer uncovered the extramarital affair and out-of-wedlock fatherhood of Mr. Edwards, a former senator and presidential candidate — though much of that reporting took place before 2009, and so could not be considered for this year’s prizes.

Sig Gissler, administrator of the prizes, says he and his colleagues never publicly discuss the eligibility of any specific publication. “We apply our criteria, and if publications meet them, we allow them to participate,” he said.

The rules state that the journalism awards must go to a newspaper or news site based in the United States that publishes no less often than weekly. But the distinction between a weekly newspaper and a magazine can be blurry, and American Media, publisher of the Enquirer, has at different times referred to it as both a magazine and a newspaper.

But Pulitzer officials have decided that the Enquirer is, indeed, a newspaper, according to the person briefed on the matter, who was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential decision, which was first reported on Thursday by the Huffington Post.

This year for the first time, Mattel allowed the public to choose Barbie’s next career and girls overwhelmingly voted that she should be a TV news anchorwoman.  And guess what? She comes with her own camera, making her a multimedia Barbie. The results were announced last week at the International Toy Fair being held in New York. Apparently all voters taken together picked computer programmer for her new job, which will be her 125th. It was the girl voters – who are obsiously their target audience – who wanted her to report the news, so Mattel decided that would be her 126th line of work. Yay! The profession’s not dead after all.

An admissions guy at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism once told me that the best journalists aren’t often the best exam-takers. Excellent, I thought, this is the career for me. As a student I had never felt I’d done myself justice in exams. So I am sympathetic to my students as I stroll the aisles during exam week. Nevertheless, I’ve just finished grading and yet again I notice the same old mistakes that get made year after year. Here they are. Avoid them if you can.

1) “GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE” SYNDROME – Believe me, I remember well that urge to leg it out the door as soon as you’ve put the final period on your final sentence. But a thorough re-reading before you turn in the paper can save a few crucial points. Use spellcheck! Don’t ignore Word’s red squiggly lines. A journalist’s copy should be clean, even in an exam by golly! Your best editor is you. President Obama did not go to Norway to accept the NOBLE Peace Prize.

2) THE AP STYLEBOOK, LEARN TO LOVE IT – I can see how hard it must be to understand the importance of the AP Stylebook when you’re a freshman journalism student. The rule-lovers, love it. It’s something SPECIFIC TO study for a journalism exam. But some students simply refuse to knuckle down and commit to memory the few rules that even the most detail-disoriented among us need to know. I’m not talking attorneys general, that kind of stuff is gravy. I’m talking numbers, ages, titles, addresses and dates. Buy the book and hold on to it. It’s the industry’s bible.

3) TO HELL WITH THE NEWS – You may have ambitions in music journalism or fashion or gossip, but journalism students just have to be up to date on current events. The capital of Afghanistan is not “Arab.” The Defense Secretary is not Hillary Clinton. And if you don’t know who Elin Nordegren is married to, you need to change your major.

4) FORMAT FOR SUCCESS – Nothing makes you look like a rookie faster than failing to format your article properly. Slug it. Put your byline on. Give it a word count. Remember to double space and you’re already well on your way to looking like a pro.

5) LOVE YOUR LEAD – Never underestimate the power of a good lead. Don’t rush it. Craft it. Melvin Mencher says it should not exceed 35 words. I say make sure it scans.

2009 Scholarship Winners with Tom Hanks

This just in from my colleague, Mary Alice Williams, who has news of scholarships for female journalism students. Click HERE for information about the The New York Women in Communications Foundation 2010 Scholarship Program. The scholarship is aimed at students from NY, NJ, CT and PA, or students who are attending college in those states. There’s up to $10,000 on offer.