70% of Sunday news guests are Republicans

sugarazor:

86% are male, 92% are white.

Between June 2011 and February of this year, 70 percent of all one-on-one interviewees on the four biggest political talk shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday — were Republicans. The numbers were even more lopsided in favor of men and white guests:

Coupled with the news that came out earlier this week that only 3% of news stories ask scientists about global warming, the corporate media should be absolutely ashamed of itself. 

The media is soooo liberal.

brooklynmutt:

I also think that the diffusion of the media has complicated things. For example, I was just watching — I don’t know if you heard what I said in the other room — I was just watching MSNBC, and they had a woman that used to work for me and a couple of other people on there, and they were talking about the Republican primary. And I was laughing. I said, “Boy, it really has become our version of Fox.” And I say that because think of the economics of running cable channels. Suppose you and I bought a cable channel, and he [pointing] bought another. You know that to make a living out of it, you’ve got to get about eight hundred thousand viewers for all your major programs. So you can get eight hundred thousand, and you won’t be as wealthy as Fox, but you’ll do okay. And now if you get a slice that’s that small and still viable — and you know it’s not like when we just had NBC, CBS, and ABC. That’s all there was. Everybody had enough market share that they knew would guarantee some comfortable level of profit. And yet there was enough competition that everybody could keep each other honest, and when the Vietnam War came along, they could send fifty-five-year-old reporters to Vietnam for extended stays. They could afford to have correspondents in Europe to report. Correspondents in Asia. All that’s changed now. And so the good news is you can get a lot of information off the Internet for free and in a hurry. But I think the breaking up of the media, which is otherwise kind of healthy, has contributed to less actual reporting and a louder, more contentious, more divisive public discourse, highlighting conflict, sometimes falsely.

Bill Clinton Interview 2012 - Esquire

News.me: Getting the News — Anil Dash

Along the same lines of the Atlantic’s Media Diets.

newsme:

(This post is the fifth in News.me’s ongoing series, “Getting the News.” In our efforts to understand everything about social news, we’re reaching out to writers and thinkers we like to ask them how they get their daily news. Read the first post here. See all of the posts here.)

This week, we interviewed Anil Dash, founder of Expert Labs, co-founder of Activate, and publisher of dashes.com. Anil is a social media master, constantly looking for new solutions to global problems through media interaction. He’s both hilarious and thoughtful at his Twitter account, @anildash. He’s also an adviser to several startups and a United Nations Social Media Envoy. With all of this experience and insight, why wouldn’t we want to know how he reads the news?

soupsoup:

Working on spec: On the power of hard data, bad product reviews, and Jim Romenesko.

Media Diets

As noted in the past, I am pretty interested in what and how people read. I’ve linked to a few “Media Diets” in the past, but the Atlantic has more to offer, notably Jenny Slate, Jon Ames and Al Sharpton (yeah, that’s right).

Who Are These Journalists?

futurejournalismproject:

A new site called News Transparency is trying to bring transparency to journalists by publishing basic biographical information, recent stories and social media presences.

Via Poynter:

Ira Stoll is 38. He has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. His phone number is (718) 499-2199 and his email is ira@futureofcapitalism.com. He went to college at Harvard, has worked at the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Sun, and he considers Seth Lipsky a personal friend.

I know all this from Stoll’s profile page on NewsTransparency.com, a new site he just launched to make it easier for the public “to find out about the individual human beings who produce the news — human beings with opinions, relationships, history, and agendas.”

The site consists of journalist profile pages which, like Wikipedia, allow anyone to add information and, like Amazon, enable ratings and reviews. They also collect articles written about the journalist’s work.

If you’re familiar with Techcrunch’s Crunchbase, the idea should be familiar: Create a publicly accessible database that lets anyone learn more about the movers and shakers in a given field.

Created by Ira Stoll, News Transparency hopes to build trust between the public and journalists. Let’s see what happens when the journalists find their digital paper trail easy to find and read.

soupsoup:

via @newyorkist

Update: to be clear, the section about possible bridge misdirection by police was not removed by the New York Times, it was moved.

Huffington Post Recruiting Teens to Write for Free

futurejournalismproject:

Last Friday Forbes reported that AOL’s Huffington Post Media Group is launching HuffPost High School, a vertical aimed at the teen set.

The site will be edited by a paid 17-year-old but like much of the Huffington Post, content will be produced for free. In this case by unpaid teenage bloggers.

Running with the strategy, AOL will also solicit unpaid contributions from young teens and high schoolers for Patch, its network of 800 hyperlocal news sites.

“We’ll be expanding our sharing platform to teens,” an AOL spokeswoman explains to Forbes using the company’s social vernacular.  

Over at AdAge, Simon Dumenco is none too pleased:

Let’s get real here: AOL is not just another benign outlet for aspiring teen writers; it’s not the school newspaper writ large. It is, thanks to its combo with HuffPo, a massive, highly aggressive, cynically SEO’d page-view machine with a history of dubious ethics — and let’s not forget that AOL, despite all its troubles, still had second-quarter revenue of $542.2 million.

Back in February, AOL property TechCrunch reported that Patch “is churning out one piece of content every 9 seconds.” That’s what this is about, folks: churn. Page views. And getting unpaid children to help AOL shovel content — digital coal — into its page-view oven.

Quite simply, AOL/HuffPo intends to monetize the work of minors earning $0/hour. On Patch and HuffPost High School, it will sell ads against content created by minors — but it will not share advertising revenue with those minors.

Self-respecting advertisers have to ask if they really want to be a part of something like this.

Meanwhile, a $105 million class action lawsuit by former unpaid Huffington Post writers continues. So too a Newspaper Guild call for writers to boycott the publication.

HuffPo has long defended its practice of using unpaid contributors by arguing that consenting adults can share their labor in any way they please. True enough, but what happens when your writers aren’t old enough to legally consent?

Writes Jeff Berkovici:

Should teenagers who can’t legally vote, drink or have sex be allowed to decide for themselves what to publish in a place where it could potentially be read by millions of people? What if a 15-year-old wants to write confessionally about having an abortion, as this adult writer did, or joke about smoking marijuana, as this writer did? And what if that 15-year-old’s parent wants to have that posting deleted? And what if that parent is divorced, and his ex-spouse who shares custody gives her permission?

kateoplis:

10 years after 9/11 | The Atlantic

The set of solutions to common information problems that we call journalism is coming unglued as different types of publications become possible on the Internet.

Alexis Madrigal 

Media Diets: Malcolm Gladwell

Since my brain really only works in the morning, I try to keep that time free for writing and thinking and don’t read any media at all until lunchtime, when I treat myself to The New York Times—the paper edition. At this point, I realize, I am almost a full 24 hours behind the news cycle. Is this is a problem? I have no idea. My brother, who is a teacher, always says that we place too much emphasis on the speed of knowledge acquistion, and not the quality of knowledge acquistion: I guess that means that the fact that I am still on Monday, when everyone else is on Tuesday, is okay.

Please don’t be terrified by how omnivorous my day is.

Maria Popova, virtuoso curator of Brainpickings, describes her media diet to Erik Hayden. Read the rest at The Atlantic Wire.