Quote:

---

Originally posted by Niki2:
Whatever happened to real journalists chasing real stories of importance? Today's journalism having turned into "newstainment" is shown by the fact that this afternoon they'll announce the Pulizer Prize...and the ENQUIRER is the top contender!

Quote:

---

On Monday afternoon, print journalism's highest honors will be announced, and among the candidates for investigative and national news reporting prizes is that bastion of supermarket check-out lanes, home of Elvis and Roseanne, The National Enquirer. It's being considered for its work breaking the John Edwards sex scandal, a story it followed when much of the so-called "mainstream media" was looking the other way.

The Pulitzer committee originally questioned the Enquirer's submission because of a dispute over whether it was a "newspaper" or "magazine" -- magazines can't enter. With the Enquirer -- whose paid circulation is just under 800,000 as of the end of 2009 -- now in the running, the paper's executive editor, Barry Levine, said winning would be an honor.



Video: Barbara vs. National Enquirer "It helps our credibility around the world," says Levine.

"Credibility" may not be the first word associated with the Enquirer -- but it has had some surprising journalistic scoops in years past, including the Gary Hart sex scandal and a number of leads during the O.J. Simpson trial. With the Edwards story, it has some support from mainstream media observers.

"Had the Enquirer not exercised a very tenacious reporting on this -- which we respect in the journalism world, right? -- would we not have known that this scandal was occurring?" said Geneva Overholser, director of the school of journalism at the University of Southern California. "Would Edwards perhaps have been nominated [for president]? ... I mean, there's no question the course of history would have been different."

But the Enquirer's reputation is as a scandal sheet that revels in humanity's foibles. Never mind that such publications have been a mainstay of journalism for more than a century, says Joan Saab, a cultural studies professor at the University of Rochester.

Indeed, the new respect for the Enquirer is another sign that, in the Internet age, the old divisions between "serious" news and tabloid-style coverage have broken down, Saab says. Levine, the Enquirer's executive editor, worked for mainstream outlets, including The Associated Press, before moving towards tabloid journalism.

"Even most [mainstream news organization] Internet homepages will have all the gossip," Saab says. "It makes us wonder about the validity of categorization."

The Enquirer has many forebears, but if it wins, it may want to tip a fedora to Confidential, the "most scandalous scandal magazine" of its time, in Tom Wolfe's wonderfully emphatic words.

But its impact, said Scott, lives on as the forerunner of today's gossip blogs, supermarket tabloids and celebrity glossies -- including the Enquirer.

Indeed, former Enquirer editor Iain Calder, who guided the publication from the '60s well into the '90s, riffs on Enquirer firsts with the brio of a character out of "The Front Page." His own book, 2004's "The Inside Story," describes searching through Henry Kissinger's garbage (which revealed allegedly secret memos), getting a photo of Elvis Presley in his coffin (it became the cover of the Enquirer's best-selling issue) and covering the "Dallas"/"Dynasty" TV battle.

It's the kind of coverage that's harder to do nowadays, said Calder, lamenting the financial squeeze that's hit media companies. "I had the highest-paid, best investigative reporters ever in America," he said in his engaging Scottish brogue. "I could hire a private jet and put 40 reporters on a major story."

Indeed, Levine faces a more competitive media landscape. Along with all the celebrity glossies and supermarket tabloids, there are a plethora of TV shows, Web sites and blogs treading on his territory. But he said the Enquirer is holding its own, thanks to such stories as the Edwards affair, the Tiger Woods scandal and the Sandra Bullock story.

And though more mainstream publications scoff at the Enquirer's "checkbook journalism" and in-your-face headlines, those same publications are doing things they might not have considered 10 years ago.

Media watcher and former journalist Richard Laermer, who believes the Enquirer deserves the Pulitzer, points out that The Washington Post has hired a raft of bloggers who "say the craziest but most germane things about our culture."

"I think more people are going to use the Web to get those pajama-clad journalists. They'll aggregate them instead of compete with them," he said. "Sometimes I think to myself that maybe we're too caught up in what is an opinion and what is fact. Maybe what people want is the mix."

Not to mention a mix of styles: gossip and hard news, celebrities and human interest, investigative exposes and mundane process pieces.

Not all of it will qualify for a Pulitzer, but maybe that isn't the point, said Calder.

"We didn't want to be like other papers," he said of his Enquirer days. "Why do [journalists] care what other journalists think? There was only one thing I wanted to do, and that was to get stories to sell papers."

---

http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/04/12/enquirer.tabloids.pulitzer/index
.html?hpt=C1


"I'm just right. Kinda like the sun rising in the east and the world being round...its not a need its just the way it is." The Delusional "Hero", 3/1/10

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Fremdfirma:

The newspapers mostly stopped makin print editions, the smaller ones, too damn expensive and most folk, after they've been lied to so many times, or get the feeling they're being toyed with as the propaganda gets so blatant... stop being willing to shell out money for that shit, as they should!

...It ain't even really about the money, for true journalists, it never was and never will be, which is why deep digging, hard hitting journalism THESE days is mostly by ordinary folk like you and me who stumbled on something nasty, and decided other people should know.

...And thanks to the internet, you can *DO* that, in a matter of minutes, and once it's been said, once it's been seen, it cannot be unsaid, or unseen, and don't the powers that be just HATE that, ehe ?

So eff the mainstream media, cause when it comes down to it, the REAL media - it's all of us, you, me, the cranky old git down the street blogging about local corruption, the office politicker sneaking evidence of his companies misdeeds to a blogger to clear the deck for his own promotion, any of us, all of us, and maybe not all accurate or with the best of intentions - but there, all the same.

-Frem

---

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Niki2:
Whatever happened to real journalists chasing real stories of importance?

---

Quote:

---

Pulitzer winner is from Michigan
Katrina's toll on a hospital chronicled
FREE PRESS STAFF

A West Bloomfield native who chronicled the frantic, life-and-death decisions made at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Dr. Sheri Fink writes for ProPublica, a nonprofit, public-interest news service. She spent more than two years interviewing more than 140 doctors, nurses and patients for "The Deadly Choices at Memorial," a 13,000-word piece published in the New York Times Magazine, recounting how doctors scrambled without power or running water, making crucial decisions with little guidance or precedent.

---