Feral Beast: WSJ scooped on Bear Stearns buyout

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

WSJ scooped on Bear Stearns buyout

Slate's Jack Shafer reports:

Rupert Murdoch has promised that his Wall Street Journal will be a tidier, briefer, and more general read, one that concentrates on breaking news. And in the opening weeks of his ownership, the newspaper has largely conformed to that vision, as I commented in January. But in broadening the Journal, is Murdoch taking the newspaper's eye off the franchise, namely business news? This morning's (March 24) New York Times scoops the Journal with an Andrew Ross Sorkin Page One piece about JPMorgan negotiating to quintuple its offer for Bear Stearns. Murdoch can't be happy about getting trounced on the month's biggest business story. By softening the Journal's editorial focus, isn't he making this sort of humiliation inevitable? Imagine being the editor on the receiving end of a phone call from the rotten old bastard, demanding to know why his paper got creamed on a beat that it is supposed to own. …

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Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.