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this is the Media Project, a weekly discussion about issues confronting the media.
I'll tell you right for liability of the record about some charming people I have known.
For I meet politicians and grafters by the score, killers play and fancy,
it's really quite a bar, oh, and these Superman meets such interesting people.
They wallow in corruption, crime and gore tingling, wing city desk,
full press, full press, extra extra read all about it, it's a mess meets the test,
only Superman meets such interesting people. It's wonderful, the rep-present,
the press. So thanks to Pete Siger with the introduction there, the Media Project is underway.
The Media Project, always the best part of it is right here at the beginning, or if we cut the
program a little bit short, then we get Pete more at the end, which is good. Alan Shartak is here,
Rosemary or Mayo, I'm Rex Smith, we are the Media Project from Northeast Public Radio.
So and you actually talk to Pete, don't you? In live, in person. Pete just called me, he is
such a wonderful man, we love him so much, and he's doing a benefit concert for WAMC down in
Peak Skill New York, and it's going to be a terrific thing. In the last fun drive we gave out the
tickets as premiums, and I got to say this, it didn't take long. Yeah, it didn't take long. That's
a giant of chance to see Pete Siger in person, that's a really cool thing. Anyway, on to media
issues of the week, there are many, actually, we should start locally then, if we were talking about
down in Peak Skill New York, is right down around that way. One of the major newspapers just got sold,
News Corp, as in Rupert Murdoch, has just sold what we used to call the out-of-way newspapers. The
Dow Jones Local newspaper group, which includes the Times Herald Record of Middletown, New York,
which is a fine suburban tabloid, it includes the Cape Cod Times and the Record Instruction California,
New Bedford Mass, Standard Times, some of the other papers, just sold them to Gatehouse Media,
which is a big chain of small papers. The interesting thing about this, I think, is that there is
increasing evidence that publishers see that there is a future in the smaller papers that the
touted death of newspapers seems not to be applying so much to the community newspapers around us.
The Middletown Record has always been a nice big fat newspaper.
Of course, the out-of-way group, which you talk about, was run by James Audeway, Jr., and
Sr., I have to tell you, I'm a very good friend of at least, I hope I am, of James Audeway,
and he is a magnificent human being. He really is. He's got his headset on straight, he has values,
which are wonderful. He was for a while the head of Dow Jones, when the paper got sold,
and I'm a huge fan. Do you think that this is good news in terms of the people, as you know,
I'm not a Rupert Murdock fan, and I'm wondering whether or not this is going to be an improvement?
It's hard to say, because no one really knows what kind of margin the owners new owners will expect.
But what's clear is that Murdock has to sell off some of his properties to have the cash that he
needs if he wants to hold on to some of the others. This is his pattern, as he buys new property,
and gets real interested in investing it, and pays for that investment in interest by selling off
stuff that he's bought from before. So getting rid of Rupert Murdock has to be an improvement.
The problem with community news, I do think that there's demand and interest for it, but where's
the money? I mean, you got to pay a report or something. I've sometimes thought about
chucking it all and going back to work at a small newspaper community, newspaper like maybe on
the border of the country where there's lots of great stories to be told and to have experience
would be fun to work there, but I couldn't afford it. I couldn't live on it. No, you really couldn't
live on a reporter's salary at a, or even perhaps even an editor's salary at a small. It's almost
becoming like a hobby. You do journalism in addition to your real job. But a couple of papers,
for example, have had some success that are just noted recently. There's an article published by
pointer. The journalism think tank about the papers in Vermont, the Rutland Harold, sorry,
the Rutland Times Harold, and the Times Argus, which have a combined Sunday Prince circulation of
18,000, and they've put up a paywall in their website, and they seem to be having some
some real success. You know, it seems that it's working for them. I think the answer to
questions, whereas the money come from, it's the lots of the little businesses around the community.
In a small town, there isn't as much competition for information as there is in a larger place.
So they actually have that niche that we all always talk about. Journalism Interprises needing
these days. So it's really interesting to think of people changing their habits. I mean, my
wonderful wife, Rosal, loves to buy the Sunday Times. But by the time she buys it, I've read
everything in it on in my frequent nighttime excursions to the Times when I'm waking up. But the
real question is, will somebody in a small town take their iPhone, get the app, and read the
Berkshire Eagle all day long? And then obviously it's not huge. So there isn't that much in it.
It's always interesting. So it's a matter of habit. Will older people who tend to read things on
paper? Will they go change their way to their iPhones? That is an issue. There's no question. But
I think another issue here is that the small towns are not being covered. It's the lack of content.
You can have an app. You can have a smartphone. You can have an iPod. Everything. And you're not
getting it news, for example, out of water town. What's the state? We just were on a tour of the state
capital. Watertown used to have an official in the capital. And they would cover all issues of
concern dairy farms. A reporter, a correspondent, you said an official. They used to have a correspondent
in the capital. Right. So where do they get that news now? It's they can have. As I say, an iPad
or an iPhone, there's still not going to point it. Well, that goes directly to something that I
know Rex is going to, that's the moderator, is going to want to bring up with us. And if he
fails to read each other's minds, it's scary. And that is the whole idea of the new journalism,
which is that people are tweeting and tweeting and and doing social media so that that's the
new journalism. And we're seeing articles and the times about it way out ahead of what the
newspapers may be doing. Certainly is true. David Carr, the Times media columnist, wrote a piece
about how campaign journalism has been transformed by Twitter. Exactly. Because every little bit of
detail goes out on Twitter as soon as it happens in the campaign. Right. And it used to be one
story. You'd have a whole trail or a whole busload of correspondence who would be traveling around
with the candidates. And they would look for a story a day. And generally they would coordinate it
because they wouldn't want to miss the real big one story of the day. So it tended to be the same.
Well, and the editors would be demanding it. I've told this story before about following Michael
Lukakis. And when I called in to my editor because this is before the days of cell phones,
to say, well, I've just come from this housing event. He was in Cleveland or Cincinnati or one of
those Columbus. And he was doing something about affordable housing. And I said to my editor, okay,
I've got the Lukakis housing story. And I thought this would be the one time during the campaign
where Lukakis talks about housing, which is an important issue in the domestic economic conversation.
He said, can you match the AP story on the flag? What? Well, the AP had a piece. This was this big
controversy during that campaign. George H. W. Bush had gone to a flag factory to emphasize the
fact that Michael Lukakis as governor had vetoed a bill that required students to say the pledge
of allegiance every morning. I don't recall why he did so. But anyway, he had vetoed the bill and
it became pledge to the flag became a huge controversy wearing the American flag lapel pen became big.
And my editors were basically saying, I need you to give us the same story that AP has,
but under your byline. And I said, well, I wasn't with him when AP talked to him about this.
I've got a housing story here. And they said, we'd really like you to match the flag story.
So what ended up happening was my story about housing ended up being about a graph and a half of,
you know, about 90 words and the flag story from the AP ran above it in the paper.
So this rex as a great editor that I know you are. Have you ever considered saying that story,
which I have now heard? I don't want to confuse you, but I've heard it twice.
But only twice. In case people are shutting off the radios and saying, I heard this one already.
I wanted to ask you something, rex. Have you ever now be honest? Yes. It's an honesty question.
Okay. You know what an honesty question is, right? Lightning bolt comes out of the sky if you lie.
Okay. So here we go. Have you ever found yourself in an identical position to that editor
who said to you, I want the flag story knowing intuitively that that's what would get more readers.
Oh, oh, that we get more readers than the substantive story about housing. But, you know,
you're thinking of hits now. I see what you're saying. It's even reading the paper. Do you ask
a reporter for, you know, I think that actually it's become almost second nature now for reporters
to know the difference to know. And because in part because you know what the traffic is during the day
at the beginning of our 330 meeting where we decide what is going to be in the front page,
check every day, the first thing we look at is what the web traffic has been on various stories
during the day. That's not as the lawyers would say, despositive. We don't make the decisions
based upon that. But it is instructive. We get to learn something about what people find now.
It's not the same audience again. What's online is those who are reading in print. But it's worth
knowing anyway. Well, I wrote an article not that long ago for the Bertrand Eagle in my Saturday column
about yo yo mo. And I immediately heard from the the next day I heard from the editor, my friend Kevin
Moran, who said to me, Alan, that was the most red thing in the paper that day. The hot and then
comma pause. Could you do it again? Well, you know, car and his New York Times article says that
even the critics of the current system, which is 24 seven lots of stories, not you wouldn't pick
between the flag story and the housing story, be doing both. No one really wants to go back to
the old system. That that was not a good way to cover campaigns. So take that as you're given
before you go forward and talk about what it means that everything or candidate says or does or
drops or spills on a suit becomes a news story. The campaigns and the staffs of the politicians
in the non campaigns season simply hate it because there's so many blogs now that cover everything
that they say everything becomes a big deal. Everything gets out there and somebody has a chance
to latch on to it and take offense. And therefore candidates, they say again, this is the articulation
from the professionals. Candidates become less genuine because they know that everything they do
is a potential story. You never know where that's going to happen. What is it? The 47% who didn't
understand Romney? What was that? Those people will never never understand and it was done by
apparently a waiter or something like that. You're talking about the video that was made of Romney
making. There are more than 47% of the people dependent on government will not vote for him.
And that was done indeed by someone on the wait staff at the event he was speaking at.
But you never know, Rosemary, which of those things are going to take off.
Rex is right. What happens is you have candidates being so careful to make sure that that doesn't
happen that they don't say anything. They act, they even dress the way advisors tell them to.
And so you end up with plastic empty people that we can't really judge.
Well, yeah. And then of course there's something else that I think we might mention.
The New York City mayoral campaign, which in Akadoshia, Texas may not be playing that big.
But I can tell you that there's a man who is the public advocate, which is a nothing office.
It's the number two office, but it doesn't have any real power. And he's a classic liberal
Bill de Blasio. And what has happened is that as he has pulled out in the polls,
coming out ahead of the other candidates, he is gaining meta speed so that there is a ban wagon
effect, which is due to what the newspapers may be reporting the polls are saying.
Now where I come from, we call it the tumbleweed effect. You know, the tumbleweed rolls along and
picks up whatever's in its trail. It's path, I mean. But that's correct. And as stuff is,
it becomes almost self-fulfilling. And that's why when a couple weeks ago, when you were saying
that you really liked journalism that focused on polls, I was telling you that I didn't think it
was such a good thing because you write about the polls that will take on added importance more than
they need to have. I like polls when they go my way. But I also think you make a good point.
On the other hand, it's the way it is. Our governor has been known to say in here in New York
just the way it is. So that's the way it is. And you know, a new poll, Quinnipiac poll comes out
or in a close race, Rex, I doubt you're not going to have it somewhere in the paper.
Oh, absolutely. We're going to cover it. And I'm thinking polls are a fine thing. I'm just saying
that the overreliance on them, it is really striking to me how much attention now polls,
Maris Quinnipiac, Sienna, for example, who are which are all based at universities right
around the New York metropolitan area are getting how much attention they get when they come out with
a poll that says this person has pulled five points ahead and suddenly the person is eight points ahead.
I don't know how you avoid that. Two things I think, Rex, that make for compelling reason in the
newspapers are sex and polls. Uh-huh. Well, they're great things. So that the same as life.
You know, the thing about Twitter too is it is almost within the bubble. That is everybody
who is in the sort of inner circle of politics or inside the beltway in Washington or in the
in the circle of New York state politics and government or city politics pays a lot of attention
to it a lot more than ordinary citizens. And so it is amplified by virtue of the fact that there's
a lot more social media adoption by the journalists, the politicians, they cover the staffs most
significantly. I think of that. Um, the staffs of the politicians, the top journalist for members
of Congress, the person who has followed the most by members of Congress is Mike Allen of Politico,
formerly of the Washington Post. It isn't shing there. Then comes Rachel Maddo of MSNBC. But only
for Democrats. Is that right? Yeah. The interesting part about the study, uh, it's actually a study
of the statistics on Twitter. And they found that Democrats and Republicans, politicians listen
to and follow very different people on Twitter except for Mike Allen. And so Rachel Maddo comes out
number two. You're right. Number two for Republicans is a guy from Fox News Chad program. So isn't that
interesting? So the interesting thing is that Allen is read on both sides. I read that source,
very sure. So I just a couple paragraphs. And I'm not sure what the meeting of that is. I find it
fascinating. Well, I know what the meaning of it is. And that is that we tend to go. We're welcome.
We've always said that. In other words, people might go to some hokey station here in Albany,
which plays Rush Limbo on the rest of those guys all day long because they know they're going to
a like-minded place. But what is my gallon writing? Well, yeah, everybody. He created the genre.
Actually, if you think about it, if you look at what we do in the morning, our wonderful
look, Apple reporter Jimmy Vielkin, there's the newsletter city and state from down in New York City,
there's the Gotham Gazette. They put out morning newsletters.
Gotham, Mike Allen created this genre. He's the one who first put birthdays for politicians and
staffers. If you look at the new book, which is a hot nonfiction seller this summer called This Town,
about the culture of Washington DC these days written by the New York Times magazine,
Washington correspondent Mark Liebovich, that book points out that as he's known down in Washington,
Mikey. Mikey is everywhere and seemingly doesn't sleep like Dr. Shartak and is pretty much the guy
that everybody follows. So that's just he's sort of like Jim Romanesco and our video world.
Everybody, he was the go-to place to find guys up in information. I think we ought to be talking
a little bit this week if it's okay with you guys about Syria. Well, we were just about to make a
neat segue to that, which is a term that I understand you people, you radio professionals know,
because Syria is something where we're not talking about Syria. We're talking about Syria,
where we're relying on on social media. By the way, if you're just joining us, this is the Media
Project from Northeast Public Radio, investigative and journalist Rosemary Armeo, CEO of Northeast Public
Radio, Alan Shartak and I'm Rex Smith, editor of the Times Union in Albany, New York, from where
this program originates. So we were about to say it turns out that the way that people are actually
getting access to information, the way that journalists are getting it first in policy makers is
an awful lot of social media. Evidence of the atrocities that are leading the United States
government to say we're going to attack Syria came to John Kerry from social media. Interesting.
Could you as an example? Well, for example, I'm just talking about the chemical weapons attack.
Apparently, John Kerry got word of that 90 minutes within 90 minutes of that happening by social
media. I think he testified that the social media just went crazy like an hour and a half after
what's happened. It was evident to intelligence gatherers as something was going on. And that's
partly because for journalists, they can't really get there. Beirut, which is sort of on the border
of Syria, is about as close as they can safely get. And Richard Engel of NBC News was taken hostage
last year when he got into Syria. And he has recently been there. But most recently, he's been
broadcasting from the Turkey Syrian border. So social media is about the only way you can get
access to this. Now there's another side to this, of course. And that is when social media is
irresponsible or inaccurate. And that happens with some regularity. I have been receiving telephone
calls here about something that somebody having to do with a guardian or something picked up, which
is that somebody was interviewing one of the rebels who said, no, that was our gas. And it went
wrong. And really, it was not the government. It was us. And it is now being treated as fact
with these folks who are calling me up and saying, don't you know what really happened? No.
That is exactly the problem with social media. And this was just portrayed brilliantly on the newsroom.
My God. Such a great show. Aaron Sorkin so has it right. Sam Watterston. Yeah. He's wonderful in it.
Yeah. Well, anyway, they portrayed that whole idea so well. You want news on the war front.
The warfronts right in Damascus is right in the cities. It's in Aleppo. And we can't send
reporters there, which is another whole story. Why it's so much harder to cover wars now than it used
to be. So you rely on people citizens, but you can't that them the same way that you can.
Reporters that you're sending in, you can't check their information as well. They send you photos
and pictures and video and those can all be doctored quite easily on social media. So do you go
with it or not? It's a whole different world out there. I really is. So do you think guys that
we're I don't think an editorial in the New York Times means that much, for example, in an election,
we see that right now. But you think that since the time is clearly read in the White House,
that when they oppose saying it's premature to go into a war with Syria or to start loving things to
them, that it's more important than just a Times editorial on almost anything else because it's
being read in the White House. And it may be it may affect policy. What was the question? Is it?
Is it? Do you think? Okay. It's a hard conceptual question of Rick. So you really have to concentrate.
It was the phrasing that it needs to be out. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That certainly goes to you too.
So so here's the deal. The New York Times editorializes every day, right? Right. You can take it
to leave it. Obviously, New Yorkers, for example, in this election are leaving it because they made
an endorsement. Well, the New York Times, the Daily News and the Post, all three in
verse, Christine Quinn for mayor. She has not been she's been falling in the polls. So they're
blowing dramatically in the post. So right. That's the leave it side. Right. Okay. Now so that's the
New York, you know, people reading the Times and saying, okay, we agree with it. As opposed to
the Times landing on Barack Obama's desk and now it says, don't go in Mr. President. It's too early.
The facts aren't clear. Is that editorial much more important in that area than it is with the
general population? I suspect so. And certainly that's got to be on the minds of the Times editors
in writing that kind of an editorial. Even though the White House is aware of the fact that, you know,
we can go around the newspaper and go to the people directly, I think there's still some credibility
that attaches in the policymakers' minds in the in the minds of, let's say, the liberal elite to a
near Times editorial. Sure. If we haven't got the Times on our side, but that's not good,
it says the Barack Obama maybe. I think that could be. At least you just miller won't we need her.
There are those people out there, Rosemary, who will not remember who Judith Miller was.
In one sense, can you do that for us? She was a New York Times reporter who supported the idea
that there were weapons of mass destruction and that going to war in Iraq was a good idea.
It turned out that her sources were the same people who were talking to the White House and
they were no more reliable when talking to her than when talking to the White House. And the
New York Times lent great credibility to the push to go to war. Did not do their job to question
and the question the sources and the veracity of the reporting. And it can have a huge impact.
Even though other reporters were raising significant questions at that point, to notably the
Maclatchee Bureau in Washington and even in the last press conference before the invasion,
the report, if you look at the tape of that, the reporters were pushing bush with tough questions
and he of course just came back with politicians learned to answer exactly and the Times gave great
credibility. Times, yeah, he used it. The White House used what was in the Times, the Times used
the White House supports what we're saying and what you have was a collusion of the press and
the government instead of what ought to be the adversarial role. So traditional media and
new media have their own places. Interesting. Okay, great discussion folks. Sorry to have to,
that's it. That's all. Oh my god. That went fair. How can this be? Rosemary or Mayo
Island Shartock, Rex Smith here for the media project. Let's listen to Pete a little bit more.
Okay. And Rex and Rosemary, I know you join me in telling all our Jewish friends this week.
Happy New Year.
Now you remember Mrs. Sadie Smuggering. She wanted money to buy a new fur coat.
To get insurance, she employed Stolda Gering. She up and cut her husband's only throat.
She chopped him into fragments. She stuffed him in a trunk. She shipped it all back
yonder to her uncle in Kodong. Now newspapermen meet such interesting people.
It must have startled poor old Sadie's aunt. Hingling a lingon city disc.
Pull the press. Pull the press. Extra-experied all about it. It's a mess meets the test.
Oh, newspapermen meet such interesting people. Their policy is an acrobatic thing.
They claim to represent the common people. Funny Wall Street never has complained.
Oh, the publishers have worries for publishers must go. To working folks for readers and to big shots for their dough.
Now publishers are such interesting people. It could be prestige and I don't know.
Hingling lingon circulation tingling lingon advertising. Get those readers, get that pay off.
What a headache, what a mess. Oh, publishers are such interesting people.
Let's give free chairs a freedom of the press.
