media chinwag

August 30, 2015

Reporting from Egypt

Magdi Abdelhadi has a nice piece in Nieman Reports about the struggles of independent media in Egypt. Among other things it highlights the work of Mada Masr and its editor, Lina Attalah (American University in Cairo ’04):

In 2013, Lina Attallah and her colleagues lost their jobs at Egypt Independent, the English-language edition of the flagship daily, Al-Masry Al-Youm. After a dispiriting series of editorial and financial disputes with their bosses, Attallah and her colleagues decided to start Mada Masr (“Egypt’s Horizon”), an English-Arabic news and arts website that caters primarily to Egypt’s well-educated cultural elite, rather than look for jobs at other mainstream outlets. “There was nowhere else to work,” says Attallah. “It was a time when media freedom became more and more limited. No media outlet could afford to hire independent journalists who wouldn’t compromise the content. And that is why we had to build our own space.”

Amir-Hussein Radjy profiled Mada Masr in the Summer 2015 edition of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. Leslie T. Chang wrote an in-depth report on the organization in The Long Read section of the Guardian last January.

There are brave journalists out there doing the best work that can be done in Egypt under present circumstances. In August, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi signed a new counterterrorism law that, according to Human Rights Watch, “makes it a crime to publish or promote news about terrorism if it contradicts the Defense Ministry’s official statements and would allow the courts to temporarily ban journalists from practicing their profession for doing so.”

—Scott MacLeod

August 25, 2015

Digital Riptide Continues

The report from the Shorenstein Center on the transformation of the American news media was aptly titled “Riptide: What Really Happened to the News Business.”

The oral history published in 2013 is still worth a read (and a listen—see below), especially considering the inside knowledge of the report’s authors. John Huey was editor-in-chief of Time Inc. from 2006-2012 during years of digital upheaval in the Time Inc. stable of publications. Paul Sagan was president and editor of new media at Time Inc. from 1995-1997 when American media first started catching on to the threat/opportunity of digital. Martin Nisenholtz was the founding leader of nytimes.com in 1995 and chief executive of New York Times Digital from 1995-2005.

But Riptide is not a static report, it is an ongoing project based on the website www.digitalriptide.org. The website is an amazing repository of information, including videos and transcripts of interviews done for the project and documents such as internal memos about the digital transition written by industry leaders.

An excerpt from Riptide’s Introduction is below, but download the 2013 full report here.

For most of the 20^th century, any list of America’s wealthiest families would include quite a few publishers generally considered to be in the “news business”: the Hearsts, the Pulitzers, the Sulzbergers, the Grahams, the Chandlers, the Coxes, the Knights, the Ridders, the Luces, the Bancrofts—a tribute to the fabulous business model that once delivered the country its news. While many of those families remain wealthy today, their historic core businesses are in steep decline (or worse), and their position at the top of the wealth builders has long since been eclipsed by people with other names: Gates, Page and Brin and Schmidt, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Case, and Jobs—builders of digital platforms that, while not specifically targeted at the “news business,” have nonetheless severely disrupted it.

Reasonable people can—and do—debate whether the replacement of legacy media by new forms of information gathering and distribution—including citizen journalism and smartphone photojournalism, crowdsourcing, universal access to data and, of course, a world awash in Twitter feeds—makes democracy more or less vulnerable. Usually the argument is reduced to a couple of symbolic questions: Who’s going to pay for the Baghdad bureau? Who’s going to replace the watchdog function at city hall traditionally provided by healthy metro newspapers?

Not everybody is a fan of the study. Some critics complained that the insider perspective of the authors blinded them to some realities of the digital revolution. For example, they noted that of the 61 movers and shakers initially interviewed for the study, five were (white) women, two were men of color, and zero were women of color.

The authors retort that their study is a work in progress, that 20 new interviews have been added (there are now 12 women listed as interviewees), and that they welcome suggestions for further voices or topics. Email: shorenstein_center@hks.harvard.edu.

—Scott MacLeod

August 19, 2015

Superheroes to the Rescue

To see a brighter future for journalism, there are two people you should know: Christopher Callahan and Eric Newton.

Callahan is the visionary dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In the last 10 years he’s turned Cronkite into perhaps the best journalism program in the United States. His record of achievement is mind-blowing, but here are just a few highlights from his ASU biography:

Callahan has brought to the Cronkite School the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, the Carnegie-Knight News21 digital journalism initiative, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship program for international journalists.

He spearheaded the creation of Cronkite News Service, (a daily statewide news service providing content on all platforms to news organizations), the New Media Innovation Lab (a research and development lab), Cronkite NewsWatch (a nightly newscast that reaches more than 1 million households on PBS), the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship (where students develop their own digital media products), Cronkite News (a daily news website focusing on statewide issues) and the Cronkite New Media Academy (which provides multimedia training to professional journalists).

Now Newton has joined Callahan’s team as the Cronkite school’s innovation chief. According to ASU’s announcement, Newton “will work closely with the school’s leadership to drive new, cutting-edge ideas and initiatives at Cronkite News, the school’s multiplatform daily news operation. Cronkite News will serve as a test bed for news industry innovations and experimentation while providing critical content to news consumers in Arizona and across the country.”

Newton comes to Cronkite after an illustrious journalism career including the last 15 years at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he pioneered efforts to, among other things, reform journalism education and bring it into the digital age. His work led to the 2011 Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education, an effort to advance journalism by reinvigorating journalism schools and programs.

Newton knows his stuff. Before joining Knight, he was the founding managing editor of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and before that was city editor, assistant managing editor and managing editor of the Oakland Tribune. He memorably pinpointed the challenges we face in journalism and journalism education in a talk about the Carnegie-Knight initiative at Middle Tennessee State University in 2013:

We had entered the digital age, and it was a time of plenty and of paradox. More readers, less advertising revenue. More writing, less journalism. More information, less meaning. More opportunity, less predictability.

One point was clear. All institutions, including academia, suddenly were out of date. That created more questions than we had answers. Could universities embrace continuous change? Might journalism and mass communication education have a new role to play in the future of news?

Seven years later, I can tell you the answer is yes. Universities can help lead the way through the era of “creative destruction.” But only if they are willing to destroy and recreate themselves.

And that’s the way it is (sorry, couldn’t resist the Uncle Walter pun), a duo battling like superheros against the odds so that journalism (and journalism education) may live to see another day.

—Scott MacLeod

August 16, 2015

The Journalists’ Bard

It’s a grand, grand caper. You get to leave, go talk to strangers, ask them anything, come back, type up their stories, edit the tape. That’s not gonna retire your loans as quickly as it should, and it’s not going to turn you into a person who’s worried about what kind of car they should buy, but that’s kind of as it should be. I mean, it beats working.

—David Carr (1956-2015)

That’s from David Carr’s commencement address in 2014 at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, a paean to his profession that manages to be sentimental and hard-boiled at the same time. As the Media Equation columnist and culture writer for the New York Times, Carr captured the zeitgeist of a world turned upside down by the Internet better than anyone.

“David was a bard for journalists because he figured out how to connect our past with our present,” David Leonhardt wrote in an appreciation in the Times. “He venerated old-fashioned reporting and yet described today as a ‘golden age’ for journalists.”

Carr collapsed in the Times’ newsroom and later died of complications from lung cancer last February, at age 58. He lives on; for example, here in the video of his Berkeley commencement address, as well as in Page One, Andrew Rossi’s great 2011 documentary about the New York Times struggling with the transformation of the news business.

—Scott MacLeod