Laying Less Cable

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Cable television viewership declined at the three largest cable networks, according to the Huffington Post, citing a report in Variety.

Fox News Channel remained the alpha dog among its competitors, but experienced a 13 percent drop in its prime time audience compared to a year ago, according to Variety. Likewise, MSNBC was off 29 percent and CNN 15 percent.  HLN actually showed a 21 percent gain over its 2012 audience.

With 2014 being an election year, polarized voters are likely to boost their favorite cable news network ratings.

Xtra! Xtra! Weep All About It: Newspaper Industry to Lose $1b in Ad Revenue in 2013

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The newspaper industry will lose $1 billion in advertising revenue by the time the sun sets on 2013, according to a press release by Gannett Co., the nation's largest newspaper owner.

As reported by The Huffington Post and Poynter.org web sites, the industry expects to earn $1.18 billion less in ad revenues this year compared to 2012 numbers. Ad revenues are off 5.9 percent at Gannett, which owns flagship national daily USA Today and 81 other newspapers.

The Newspaper Association of American reports seven consecutive years of declining print advertising in the newspaper industry.

Is Brazil Nuts for HuffPo?

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The eighth international edition of news aggregator supreme, The Huffington Post, will soon launch in Brazil, Media Week (www.mediaweek.co.uk) reports.

In expanding operations to its fifth continent, HuffPo, which is owned by AOL, targeted the world's fifth-largest online audience, as Brazil boasts 100 million Internet users, according to Media Week. HuffPo's partner in the deal is the Abril Group, which has 40 editorial Web sites.

Other global editions of HuffPo include the United Kingdom (see "TUOL" post 6/22/11), France (see "TUOL" post 1/23/12), Japan (see "TUOL" post 5/8/13), Spain, Italy, Canada and Maghreb. The World Cup, the Summer Olympics, and Arianna Huffington--it's almost too much for one country to bear.

UPDATE: Senate Judiciary Panel Approves Shield Law By 13-5 Vote; Full Senate to Decide

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The Senate Judiciary Committee today voted 13-5 in favor of the Free Flow of Information Act of 2013 (S. 987), setting the stage for a full Senate vote on a federal shield law to protect journalists' confidential sources and information.

According to accounts in The Washington Post and Huffington Post, the Committee, which was unable reach a consensus on the bill before summer recess (See "TUOL" post 8/2/13), found a compromise between Sen. Charles Schumer's (D.-N.Y.) broad definition of a journalist and Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D.-Calif.) narrow interpretation of who should be protected by the federal shield law.

The measure sent to the full Senate covers student journalists and "persons whom a federal judge has decided should be able to avail him or herself of the protections of the privilege, consistent with the interests of justice and the protection of lawful and legitimate newsgathering activities."  Groups such as Wikileaks, would not be shielded under the law.

The measure embraces journalists who had an "employment relationship" for one year within the past 20 years, or three months within the past five years, as well as someone with a "substantial track record" of freelance writing in the past five years. If enacted, the law would not provide an absolute privilege to journalists from having to disclose confidential information in all instances.

HuffPo Next Month to Require Commenters to Use Real Names

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Beginning in September, the Huffington Post will require commenters on their posts to use their full given names, founder Arianna Huffington said yesterday.

As reported in The Boston Globe and elsewhere, HuffPo, which claims to have generated more than 260 million comments on its posted stories (& sideboob images of celebs of the Miley Cyrus & Rhianna ilk, no doubt) since its inception in 2005, will no longer allow comments by pseudonymous posters. Presently, the mega-news aggregator employs 40 human monitors and an advanced screening algorithm, but Huffington says more is needed in our ever-coarsening culture.

The Globe story quoted Huffington as saying: "I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and not hiding behind anonymity."

The U.S. Supreme Court did not share those sentiments in McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission, 514 U.S. 334, 341-42 (1995). Anonymity, the High Court said, "exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular." In leaving it up to authors to decide whether to identify themselves, the Court wrote: "Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority."

Keep that in mind, Arianna, when you ask followers to add monikers to their reactions to stories such as Jen Aniston Wows in white bikini.

AOL Online Media Properties Still Hemorrhaging Money

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America Online-owned The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Patch continued to drag down AOL's financial performance during Q1, according to reports by TheStreet.com and CNBC.com.

Despite overall revenue growth of 2 percent, sales plunged 9 percent at AOL's dial-up online subscription division. The HuffPo/Patch/TechCrunch division was bathed in red ink to the tune of $4.9 million based on First Quarter results.

The media giant's CEO Tim Armstrong maintains a positive attitude toward his acquisitions of the three entities, but on Wall St., AOL stands for Armstrong's Operating Losers.

Like Mothra, Huffington Post Swoops into Tokyo; Launches Japanese Edition

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Partnering with Asahi Shimbun, Japan's second largest newspaper with more than seven million daily readers, AOL-owned news aggregator The Huffington Post this week launched a Japanese edition.

According to a post by the independent media publishing company journalism.co.uk, HuffPo also last week announced plans to debut an edition in Germany in a joint effort with Tomorrow Focus AG. HuffPo debuted its U.K. version in July 2011 (see "TUOL" post 6/22/11), the same year Canada's HuffPO went online (see "TUOL" post 5/26/11). Other European editions are online in France in collaboration with Le Monde (see "TUOL" post 1/23/12); Italy, in partnership with GruppoExpresso; and Spain in partnership with El Pais.

Shigeki Matsuura will be at the helm of Huffington Post Japan. The editor-in-chief previously helped to launch the online edition of Wired in Japan and political blogging site BLOGOS. Asahi Shimbun's digital division director hopes HuffPo will draw a younger demographic than the print edition, and aspires to reach 50 million monthly visitors, according to the journalism.co.uk post.

As HuffPo's plan for world domination moves apace, soon online visitors on every continent will be able to glimpse side boob photos of Miley Cyrus.

Fraying Cable News Audience

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The Huffington Post reported today that all three major cable news outlets, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, continue to suffer lower ratings than in Election Year 2012, with a notable loss among the age 25 to 54 demographic group that advertisers crave.

Fox sustained a 33 percent drop-off in its viewership, followed by CNN's 28 percent plunge and MSNBC's more modest 4 percent loss, according to the Huffington Post article. Fox News, still in first place among cable news viewers for its 11th straight year, may take note that bloviator Bill O'Reilly's demographic ratings sank 26 percent. Look for his next best-selling historical tome to be entitled: "Who Killed My Show?"

Lest one think the cable audience is smartening up, CNN's sister network, HLN, enjoyed a skyrocketing 17 percent increase in its audience (and a 23 percent boost among age 25-54 viewers) owing to its around the clock coverage of the Jodi Arias murder trial.

AP Stylebook Drops Use of 'Illegal Immigrant'

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The Associated Press Stylebook no longer will use the hot-button term illegal immigrant, the wire service announced this week.

The Huffington Post (which favors undocumented immigrant) reported that The New York Times and Washington Post have yet to decide whether to follow other newspapers nationwide in adopting AP's decision to avoid the term.

The AP Stylebook is widely used by all branches of the news media, so its policy change may have an impact on the national dialogue concerning immigration reform.

It's not likely to affect Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska.) who recently attracted unwanted attention to the GOP in an interview in which he reminisced about his family's ranch hiring wetbacks.  With a blogosphere eager to lambaste whatever term is used in public discussion of immigration reform, don't be surprised if visa-challenged immigrant and specially visiting immigrant enter the lexicon.

CNN Assembles Cast for A.M. Show Spring Debut

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Ratings-starved CNN, which will debut its new New York-based morning show sometime this spring, yesterday announced the team who will helm the program, the Huffington Post reported.

Chris Cuomo, who joined CNN two months ago after serving as co-anchor of ABC's 20/20 and as the network's chief law and justice correspondent, will co-host the morning show alongside Kate Bolduan, CNN's Congressional correspondent and Situation Room co-host.  Michaela Pereira, former anchor of KTLA 5 Morning News in Los Angeles, will handle the morning program's news anchor duties, according to the Huffington Post article.

CNN President Jeff Zucker kvelled about the program's "dynamic team."  Of course, every morning show crew that has ever existed has been labeled a dynamic team, even Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends on the Fox News Channel (a/k/a  The Cartoon Network), but Zucker was executive producer of the highly successful Today Show on NBC for 16 years, so "TUOL"'s morning radio-listening staff will cut him some slack.

CNN has not divulged the name of its exciting new morning show, but based on the ratings of its other non-newscast programming, it might consider Poison or Morning Sickness.

That Time of the Monthly: Literary Mags Lag in Hiring Female Writers

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The Huffington Post today reported on an annual survey by the four-year-old VIDA (Women in Literary Arts) Web site that found bylines by women writers in literary journals last year scarce compared to their male counterparts.

VIDA, whose self-described mission is "to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities," found lofty publications, including the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker, by a wide margin, published more articles featuring male bylines than female bylines. Harper's, for example, published 17 pieces by women, compared to 76 articles by men, while The New Yorker breakdown in 2012 was 160 female to 445 male.

VIDA  said the latest survey results showing gender disparity in literary magazines were consistent with previous years' findings. "TUOL" is leery of very unscientific statistics. The survey, for example, doesn't offer numbers on the gender make-up of the editorial staff of the various publications surveyed, a breakdown of their readership by sex, the number of total article submissions by each gender to the magazines versus the percentage published, among other salient facts. For that matter, there is nothing about the methodology that reveals how much background research went into determining the gender of published authors (e.g., "Leslie" a guy or a gal, "Sam" short for Samantha?, etc.).

Diversity--gender, racial, ethnic, age-- on the masthead and among the stable of writers is a good thing, but "TUOL" suspects the literary journals, like all periodicals nowadays, are more concerned about declining circulation among male and female readers, alike.

Malaysia to Bloggers: If We Want Your Opinion, We'll Pay You for It

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In an appalling smear-for-hire campaign, 10 online media columnists were paid by the Malaysian government to trash opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on various U.S. media Web sites, according to a BuzzFeed story reported by paidContent.org.

Allegedly, former Guardian opinion columnist Joshua Trevino, whom the daily jettisoned last year over conflict of interest concerns, served as the Malaysian government's conduit, facilitating payments ranging from $2,000 to $36,000 to the 10 columnists, who, in turn, wrote about Malaysia. Trevino, himself, garnered more than $389,000 from Malaysia, according to the paidContent account of the BuzzFeed scoop. Ibrahim is enmeshed in a sodomy trial that human rights advocates have decried as politically motivated.

Among the beneficiaries of the Southeast Asian nation's largesse were conservative columnists for The National Review, Huffington Post and Red State. HuffPo pulled the offending posts after the BuzzFeed story broke, citing a conflict of interest breach, but "TUOL"'s Facetiousnes Editor suspects HuffPo just objects to its contributors being paid for their efforts, however ignoble.

The paidContent article blames online journalism sites' voracious need for content for making it so easy for Malaysia to manipulate the media for its own purposes. Strange times, indeed, when BuzzFeed, best-known for publishing cat photos ad nauseum, does solid investigative reporting at the same time Watergate legend, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, arrogantly displays his increasing irrelevance, imploding on the Sunday talk-show circuit as a darling of the right-wing lambasting his treatment by Obama Administration officials.

2012 Hazardous Year for Journos

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The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released its annual Attacks on the Press report this week, which recorded the highest number of journalists jailed last year since CPJ began tracking such data in 1990.

As reported by the Huffington Post, the CPJ survey revealed 232 journalists incarcerated last year. Another 70 journalists were killed in the line of duty, a 43 percent increase over 2011 figures. Twenty-eight journalists, alone, were killed in Syria last year.

 The CPJ also compiled a 10-nation "Risk List" that cited countries in which reporters were at risk of losing their lives or their freedom. Somalia, Pakistan, Ecuador, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Iran and Syria made the list.

Will Rare Be Well Done?

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Atlanta-based media conglomerate Cox Enterprises, Inc., whose holdings include 14 tv stations, numerous radio outlets and the flagship Atlanta Journal Constitution among its two dozen newspapers, is preparing to launch within the next few months a conservative counterpart to Internet news aggregator, the Huffington Post.

According to an online article by Creative Loafing Atlanta (www.clatl.com), Cox is searching for an editor to helm Rare, whose purported tagline is "Red is the center," as in the middle ground. Creative Loafing claims that Cox already has registered the domain name rare.us.

If Rare plans to mirror the successful HuffPo except for its place on the political spectrum, besides providing another non-paying outlet for freelance journalists to be published,  its editors are going to have to overcome any reservations about limiting the use of the words blasts, slams, shocking and smacks down in headlines.

The red-blooded "TUOL" staff can't wait for Rare to publish side-boob and wardrobe malfunction photos of Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and Elizabeth Hasselbeck.

Al Gore Sells to Al-Jazeera

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The financially-strapped, viewer-deprived Current TV cable network founded by former Vice President Al Gore this week announced it will be purchased by Al-Jazeera.

According to articles by NPR.org and The Huffington Post, the Qatari government-funded network plans to operate Al-Jazeera America from New York-based headquarters. The Arab-language news operation, based in Qatar, already offers Al-Jazeera English, which is available in Washington, D.C. and New York City, but scarcely accessible in the U.S.

Buoyed by its acquisition of Current TV, which reaches approximately 60 million homes through cable or satellite service, Al-Jazeera America plans to bolster its staff to 300 and open bureaus nationwide to join its current operations in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, according to the NPR report.

Although Al-Jazeera English will provide some programming, more than half of the network's shows will be produced in the U.S. The transition, however, may not be as smooth as the Qatari news operation may have hoped. The Huffington Post reported today that Time Warner Cable ("TWC"), which has carried the ratings-starved Current TV to roughly 12 million homes, will not make Al-Jazeera America available to its subscribers. The TWC decision was condemned as politically motivated and an act of cowardice by the founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.

However, according to a tweet by a New York Times reporter, Al-Jazeera America is likely to benefit from Current TV's arrangement with other carriers, including Comcast, DirecTV, Verizon, A T&T and Dish.

UPDATE: 2nd Circ. to HuffPo Freelancers: Joy of Writing Your Just (& Only) Reward

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The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit yesterday in Tasini, et al. v. AOL, Inc. et al (Case No. 12-cv-1428) upheld a trial court ruling in March that dismissed a putative class action brought by unpaid contributors to The Huffington Post seeking a share of the bounty received by the news aggregating site when it was purchased by AOL in 2011 (see "TUOL" post 2/7/11).

The appellate court affirmed the trial judge allowance of the motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim [Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6)] brought by defendants AOL, Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and The Huffington Post against plaintiffs Jonathan Tasini, Molly Secours, Billy Altman, Richard Laermer and Tara Tublin. The plaintiffs, whose blog posts appeared in HuffPo, sought on behalf of themselves and other uncompensated HuffPo writers, a $105 million slice of the $315 million AOL purchase price.

United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge John Koetl in a March 30, 2012, decision rejected the plaintiffs claims that the defendants were unjustly enriched by publishing the plaintiffs' work gratis, and acted deceptively, allegedly in violation of N.Y. General Business Law section 349 (see "TUOL" post 4/2/12), holding that the writers were not entitled to payment after the fact and could simply write elsewhere if they didn't like HuffPo.

According to accounts by Reuters and the THR, Esq. blog, the Second Circuit opinion noted that the plaintiffs knew from the get-go that HuffPo was a for-profit enterprise that could someday be attractive to a buyer as it gained traction among news sites and generated a significant advertising revenue stream. More to the point, the court opinion stated: "[A]t all times prior to the merger when they submitted their work to The Huffington Post, plaintiffs understood that they would receive compensation only in the form of exposure and promotion."

The unpaid bloggers are going to have to be content with the sheer joy of  just being published and perhaps, as insiders, the chance to see "side-boob" photos of celebrities before they are posted on the HuffPo site.

Gray Lady's Quote Approval Memo a Positive Step

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The devoted, journalism-as-watchdog lovin' staff of  "TUOL" hales the recent Public Editor's Journal column by New York Times ombudsperson Margaret Sullivan that cites a Times internal memorandum that almost drives a stake in the alarming, spreading practice of journalists granting sources pre-publication quote approval.

As reported by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers ("WANNP") Web site (http://www.editorsweblog.org), the internal Times memo acknowledges: "[D]emands for after-the-fact 'quote approval' by sources and their press aides have gone too far...[so] reporters should say no if a source demands, as a condition of an interview, that quotes be submitted afterward to the source or a press aide to review, approve or edit."

Credit must be given to the recently hired Sullivan, who called for a Times policy on the subject in an earlier column, and to Times media critic David Carr, who condemned the practice of quote approval as "puppetry" in a column that "TUOL" gleefully retweeted.

Quote approval has gained a foothold with admissions by media outlets such as The Huffington Post and Vanity Fair (Michael Lewis's profile of President Barack Obama), Bloomberg News, The Washington Post and Reuters that they had ceded the right to sources on occasion.  Some publications, including The National Journal and The Harvard Crimson, do not permit sources to review quotations.

Unfortunately, the Times' memo, according to  the WANNP post, concludes with a "never say never" escape hatch, admonishing reporters that potential exceptions to the no quote approval rule should be addressed to department heads or masthead editors.

Apparently, every watchdog has an inner lapdog fighting to get out for a good scratch behind the ears.

ABC News Retracts Cancer Claim in Director's Suicide

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)When 68-year-old British-born film and television director/producer Tony Scott committed suicide last Sunday by jumping off a bridge in San Pedro, California, the public wondered what possessed such a Hollywood success story to do so.  ABC News rushed in to provide a possible explanation by attributing to an unnamed source that Scott was battling an inoperable brain tumor.

Vanity Fair, People and the Huffington Post, among other media outlets,  ran with the ABC News scoop. Only it turned out, just as it previously erroneously reported that the Aurora, Colo., movie theater gunman who went on a shooting spree was a member of the Colorado Tea Party, ABC News got it wrong again.

The network has conceded that it was unable to confirm the report that Scott, the director of films such as Top Gun (1986), Crimson Tide (1995), Enemy of the State (1998) and Unstoppable (2010) and of tv hits The Good Wife and Numb3rs, suffered from cancer. Credit Deadline Hollywood for upending the ABC News miscue by reporting that Scott's widow had told police he did not have brain cancer. Scott's brother, Ridley Scott, is also a prominent Hollywood figure who directed Alien and frequently collaborated with his sibling on tv projects.

ABC News has updated its report. The network continues to overlook the third component of the old journalism adage: "Get it first, get it fast, get it right."

Caught Making Up Quotes, Author Quits New Yorker

Jonah Lehrer  (Photo credit: poptech) Thirty-one-year-old wunderkind Jonah Lehrer, a Columbia grad and author of three best-selling books, this week resigned as staff writer for The New Yorker after admitting to a magazine writer that he fabricated quotes in his latest book.

Michael Moynihan, a writer for Tablet Magazine, which writes about Jewish life, confronted Lehrer regarding quotes Moynihan was unable to verify that Lehrer attributed to legendary folk singer Bob Dylan in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works (2012). Lehrer admitted fabricating the quotes, according to an account in The Huffington Post. "The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes," Lehrer confessed.

Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007) and How We Decide (2009), recently apologized to New Yorker readers for re-using his own previous work without attributing it. Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has pulled the e-version of Imagine and stopped shipment of the hardcover.

Things are not going well for Lehrer, as even fabricator extraordinaire Jayson Blair, who wrote fiction for The New York Times, unbeknownst to the paper, weighed in with an article in The Daily Beast on what may have prompted Lehrer to torpedo his own career.  The staff of "TUOL" is unsure whether laziness or just a lack of journalistic sensibilities is to blame, and puzzled as to how Lehrer could have believed his putting words in Dylan's mouth wouldn't be discovered, particularly because the quotes made sense, which would make any Dylan fan suspicious.

Maltweeting Free Expression?

Image via CrunchBaseSan Francisco-based microblogger monolith Twitter will selectively block tweets in specific countries as it continues to grow its social platform worldwide, Reuters reports.

In a business move that will enable the microblogging network to broaden its global user base, Twitter will adapt to governments internationally whose notions of freedom of expression do not mirror those in the U.S. Twitter will post a censorship notice whenever it removes a tweet at the behest of a government and will use the chillingeffects.org Web site to house removal requests it receives from governments, companies and individuals, according to the Huffington Post.

Twitter offered  the legal restriction on "pro-Nazi content" imposed by the countries of Germany and France as an example of a restriction to which it might accede. The announcement marks a policy shift by the six-year-old social media company, which in January 2011, coinciding with the so-called "Arab Spring" uprisings throughout the Middle East, posted The Tweets Must Flow stating that it would not remove Tweets based on their content.

Twitter boasts roughly 100 million users, according to the Huffington Post report.