journalism

Nicholas Kristof has earned a reputation for taking on tough issues in the more dangerous parts of the world (with a particular emphasis on threats to women). But finding an approach that would get through to jaded Americans required a bit of work:

Interesting collision course here between 20th century insistence on journalistic 'objectivity' vs. the 21st century expectation of transparency (including regarding one's biases).

Things aren't looking much better in the newspaper business either. By way of BoingBoing:

"I think I'll remember last week as the moment when I finally knew, with a certainty approaching fatigue, that the newspaper industry – the business and passion that both shaped and warped me over the past 20 years – had chosen ritual suicide. The choice appears grimly reached and irrevocable."

As the Slashdot tag says, 'good luck with that':

"Rupert Murdoch says having free newspaper websites is a 'flawed' business model. Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a 'malfunctioning' business model. Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an 'epochal' debate over whether to charge. 'That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal's experience,' he said."

Not very surprising: the ongoing economic disaster is forcing people to give up non-essentials, and that apparently includes newspapers for many of them.

The article offers stats for several specific papers, but here is the aggregate:

According to ABC, for 395 newspapers reporting this spring, daily circulation fell 7% to 34,439,713 copies, compared with the same March period in 2008. On Sunday, for 557 newspapers, circulation was down 5.3% to 42,082,707. These averages do not include 84 newspapers with circulations below 50,000 due to a change in publishing frequency.