Pope-arazzi scrum in the Holy Land

A Papal Scrum and a clear case of a government flack manhandling a tough Jewess shooter at the sacred Dome of the Rock are featured in Julian Rake's post on the Reuters' Axis Mundi blog. Herding cats is a cinch compared to security gorillas' heavy-handed attempts to control the pope-arazzi and the local press on this historic visit, which required 80,000 security troops plus a popemobile and was codenamed "Operation White Cloak"!
Dion Nissenbaum at Checkpoint Jerusalem dubbed it Media Smackdown, round one, and perhaps there may have been a foreboding sense of a potential Vatican Celebrity Death Match in this volatile place. Ask Hedi Levine, of Sipa photo agency, aka the shovee.



It takes all kinds: A journalist named Jeff Israely on the Vatican pool and a cameraman named Tony Gentile were following the octogenarian German Pope B-16 - he da bomb! - whose Italian handler protested had never, never, never been in der Hitler Youth; oops, the Pope had detailed this youthful interlude in his official autobiography and in speeches at Auschwitz and Cologne. Whatever. Some of the pool journalists were gestured just to "talk to the hand" during these scuffles. Watch the professional comportment in this very controlled and accredited venue. The helipad from Hell!

London QualityStreet Freelancers check out commissions on US newspapers

qualitystreet, a cooperative of london freelancers with an online self-help group, recently turned their attention to freelancing in the States, and mentioned the McClatchy stalwart, The Sacramento Bee. This text is excerpted from one of their threads, and the paper's little mascot (right) was penned by Walt Disney himself.
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Hey, the Bee is a rather venerable newspaper, publishing non-stop
since 1857 and winner of five Pulitzer prizes. There's a Fresno Bee
and Modesto Bee, too, and all are owned now by the McClatchy
company. Disney designed their logo back in 1943. If you imagine
that a newspaper office is a hive of activity, meant to create buzz
and stinging commentary, it's not such a weird name. (I came from
California to the UK, hence the nostalgia for the Bee)

Consider these names: The Unterrified Democrat (Linn, Missouri), The
Daily Boomerang (Laramie, Wyoming), the Birmingham Eccentric, the
Bloomington-Normal (Illinois) Pantagraph , The New Orleans Times-
Picayune

Freelancing for smaller US papers can be problematical...section
editors of community papers sometimes commission outsiders, but most
recycle wire copy or increasingly get outsourced to India (where
content providers reportedly earn just $7.50 or three quid per 1000
words!) Not all are accustomed to wiring payments, and can be
daunted by exchange rates and time differences. Beware the pre-dawn calls from Yankee intern factcheckers!)
Syndication of previously published features or analysis is probably
more feasible, especially with a bridging site like "Featurewell".

As for these contract clauses... Marie Claire used to make
surrendering all your syndication rights part of endorsing the
payment cheque. They refused to wire money into an account for that
reason. One problem with this is if a writer wants to gather up
farflung articles and publish a collection, all the rights must be
sorted out first. Very aggravating!

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Roughedge Krap Policy
To: About the papers formerly known as broadsheets

1) Well there is the Sacramento Bee which is a weird name for a local
paper.

My favourite - though UK not US - is still the Keswick Reminder.

Melodramatic Murdoch style lowers reporting accuracy at Wall Street Journal

The Murdoch effect is already visible at the Wall Street Journal, if the latest hyperventilating article from reporter Bob Davis about the Erez crossing into Gaza is typical of the new corporate tone. His writing's more suited to a middle level college's student rag than for the informed readership of the venerable WSJ. Arrgh. A savvy McClatchy group blogger, Dion Nissenbaum, noted a distinct dip in quality, too, but observed that it was, after all, the guy's "first real reporting trip to the Gaza Strip".

His piece ended up revealing much more about his own misconceptions than it did about Gaza...Davis leaves millions of readers with the misconception that all Palestinians in Gaza are dangerous, conniving would-be terrorists waiting for the right opportunity to snatch Westerners and cut off their heads.

For some reason, Davis's fevered (and uninformed?) imagination conflates walking through a protected international crossing that is crawling with security with the ordeal of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was grabbed in the back lanes of Karachi, Pakistan, and eventually beheaded.
Different circumstances, different country. Hamas is not Al Qaeda. There have been no abductions of Westerners for more than a year, and the strip is under a negotiated ceasefire at the moment. But heh, these non-English speaking Muslims scare me, guys. Nudge nudge. Mind you, the Davis travesty was published in the travel section, where veracity is not the point.
But this is a heads up about the direction the Wall Street Journal is headed.