Whatever happened to real journalists chasing real stories of importance? Today's journalism having turned into "newstainment" is shown by the fact that ..."/>

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Whatever happened to REAL journalism??

POSTED BY: NIKI2
UPDATED: Thursday, March 10, 2022 15:59
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Monday, April 12, 2010 7:46 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


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

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Monday, April 12, 2010 9:02 AM

BYTEMITE


Agent Kay: We're gonna go check the hot sheets.
[cut to POS Ford pulling up to newsstand. Kay buys a pile of supermarket tabloids]
Agent Jay: *These* are the hot sheets?
Agent Kay: Best investigative reporting on the planet. But go ahead, read the New York Times if you want. They get lucky sometimes.

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Monday, April 12, 2010 10:04 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Yeah, I remember that one, and giggled at the time. You do realize it was satire, yes?

I miss the really hard newsmen, and I think we'd know so much more if Murdoch's entire empire fell and NEWS became a viable commodity. It was once; what happened???


"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

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Monday, April 12, 2010 10:17 AM

BYTEMITE


Well, of course. Except for the mutant Bat Boy. That story is very real.

<_< >_> He's actually an alien.

Also, Elvis is not dead, he just went home.

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Monday, April 12, 2010 10:22 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


I remember the Elvis one, too. Have we both seen MIB too many times, d'ya think?


"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

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Monday, April 12, 2010 10:32 AM

BYTEMITE


Hey, it's a great sci-fi comedy, somewhere up there with Galaxy Quest. Good characters, good acting, great writing, quotable lines, and the plot is paced just right.

There actually WAS a time I still watched movies, you know. Heaven forbid if I'd never seen Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, or Back to the Future. I wouldn't be a geek.

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Monday, April 12, 2010 11:49 AM

WHOZIT


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

It should win, (Enquirer) it did all the work while the MSM (liberal whores) were pulled along kicking a screaming. This was a big story, this douchebag was almost the VP of the USA. Storys like this proves how bias the MSM (liberal whores) are, it's not just what they print or report, it's how and IF they do. They were going to ignore this story at 1st, proving they're whores for the left.

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Monday, April 12, 2010 2:32 PM

FREMDFIRMA



You still got em, look at Maia Szalavitz, as a case example.

Problem is, the "mainstream" news is too damn stingy to spend the resources to investigate anything and thus generally shovels out a verbatim copy of someone elses press release which is then picked up and copy/pasted by half a hundred affiliates to where you can exact-text-match the whole bloody "story" 1500 times by the end of the day and not a ONE of em has even fact checked it.

I know this cause one journalism class at a local college had a kind of setup with me for a while, where I would slip a COMPLETELY FAKE news item into the stream, and the students were to detect it and track how it spreads as part of their classwork.

Of course, in doing so I discovered I wasn't the only one doin that, and some of the items were coming from specific IP ranges...
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Lincoln_Group
Project MOCKINGBIRD all over again in all but name.

So if you want *real* news, you actually have to go to the second stringers, idealogues (for stuff that matters to them) and crazy-talkers, then sift the bias from it.

I never did think I would see the day when Pravda outclassed american mainstream journalism, but several folks, whistleblowers in particular, had to take their stories to friggin Pravda to get em published, and that kind of horrifies me, it does.

But then, we also have the internet, where you can find, source and fact check, cross verify and validate an item in mere minutes - which, for folks with enough bloody sense to use it, is a DIRE threat to the american mainstream press ability to lead the public around by the nose.

And they know it too, which is why they're so hell bent on crippling and strangling it - not that is EVER gonna happen given it's too big to lock up completely, and too damn useful a tool for every "side" to where none of em will ever play along...

Besides, I have come to think lately the internet is in fact a representation of the collective consciousness of humanity itself.

Prolly why it's so fulla porn.

-Frem

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Monday, April 12, 2010 2:45 PM

PIRATENEWS

John Lee, conspiracy therapist at Hollywood award-winner History Channel-mocked SNL-spoofed PirateNew.org wooHOO!!!!!!





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Monday, April 12, 2010 2:54 PM

FREMDFIRMA



Measure the size of The Globe, there.

Measure the size of the bottom of a standard issue cat litterbox.

Coincidence ?

I think not!

There's a conspiracy for ya.

-F

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Tuesday, April 13, 2010 8:20 AM

FREMDFIRMA



Stumbled across this little tidbit, which is an interesting take on things as well.
http://www.pruningshears.us/pruning-shears/2010/4/8/you-cant-miss-what
-youve-never-had.html


And got to laugh as yet another pathetic whine fails...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100408/0930068936.shtml

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!

So then it goes online, and then they add all kinds of annoying, flashy-spinny, malware loaded invasive and intrustive advertisements, which people start BLOCKING after the second or third three day frustration fest of picking that shit out of their computer, all the while the site that delivered it disclaims all responsibility...

And then they whine and whinge and put up a paywall, well, yeah, good LUCK with that, cause unless you got something behind it WORTH THE FUCKIN MONEY, which most of these so-called newsies don't (come ON folks, even *I* can just sit there and copy/paste press releases, that is *not* journalism!) then your grand experiment in trying to get money for nothin is gonna fail.

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

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Tuesday, April 13, 2010 9:28 AM

OUT2THEBLACK


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




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Tuesday, April 13, 2010 9:41 AM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up


Quote:

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



They win Pulitzers.

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.


http://www.freep.com/article/20100413/NEWS06/4130354/Pulitzer-winner-i
s-from-Michigan


Also a first win for "New Media" in that both the Times and ProPublica carried the story.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Tuesday, April 13, 2010 9:58 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Quote:

the twisted model of access reporting, where the goal is to cozy up to senior officials by promiscuously granting anonymity and uncritically passing along spin ... the tendency is for conformity and a settled, conventional outlook to dictate priorities ... Instead of being adversarial the posture has become increasingly accommodating.
(From link provided by Frem).

That about says it for me.

And let's not forget Murdoch, and his tyrannical insistence on his people spouting the party line, as well as his making Wall Street Journal's website a "paywall", which he is considering doing for all his media. Tho' the paywall didn't work for the newspaper in Frem's link, won't it be fun if the bigger guys start doing it?

Print media is failing with the advances of the internet, and the fact that it's free (for now!); I miss it, for many reasons (we no longer subscribe to any), despite the fact that real journalists are an endangered species.


"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

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Thursday, March 10, 2022 3:59 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


What happened to Drudge?

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