AP, juveniles and privacy

AP has come out with a new style directive tonight:

Privacy: Do not identify juveniles (under 18) who are accused of crimes or are witnesses, or persons who say they have been sexually assaulted, even if other news media do so or police release names. Exceptions may occur when the public needs to be alerted, or if an adult victim of a sex assault publicly identifies himself or herself. When identification questions arise in any AP service, consult with the Standards Center.

It's worth reminding that the AP stylebook, while widely used by publishing operations nationwide, is first and foremost AP's internal stylebook, and some of the directives are designed for it and it alone. (I say that because invariably there is a stylebook pedant somewhere who points to something like this and says "the stylebook says it!" not to mention some of my students who struggle with balancing its guidance against reality.)

If the AP wants to do this, fine. You are under no obligation to do so. And my prediction? This will last oh, a week or so, before the wire starts leaking like a sieve. That line "even if other news media do so or police release names" is noble but in practicality untenable - or, as will likely happen, AP will be accused of hiding something or will find its members subbing the information in -- or it will just become irrelevant to large numbers of its members and consumers in such cases.

It's going to be especially difficult in states like South Carolina where we have a penchant for charging teenagers as young as 14 as adults for anything much above littering. Start making the exceptions to this "style" there and before long the wall is punched full of holes.

So, noble thoughts and effort, AP. Let's see how long it really lasts.

PR spin extraordinare

I love this one from the PR annals, one that might be called "Well we're knee-deep in elephant dung, but I swear to you we don't own an elephant."

Tuomey Healthcare System is in the small city of Sumter, a little less than an hour's drive east of Columbia. It was sued, first by a whistle-blower and then by the federal government, alleging Medicare fraud and that it had an improper financial relationship with some of its doctors.

The verdict came in yesterday. Here's what the hosptial system put on its Web site.

Tuomey Wins

March 30, 2010

In a case where the Federal Government sought close to $300 million in damages, the jury unanimously decided that Tuomey Healthcare System did not submit any false claims and awarded the government nothing. Relator Dr. Michael Drakeford will also receive no financial award.

Although the jury did find that Tuomey violated the Stark Law, there were no false claims. Therefore, there was no Medicare fraud. The government has until April 15 to respond to Tuomey’s motion to dismiss the government’s remaining claims.

“Tuomey is extremely pleased with the jury’s decision,” said Tuomey President & CEO Jay Cox. “It was always our intention to provide the best healthcare services to the Sumter community. ”

Wow, read that and you'd think Tuomey got off with a slap on the wrist.

Except .... according to newspaper reports that little matter of the Stark Law violations could cost the hospital $45 million. That's an awful lot of elephant dung - the same kind of dung that PR spin like this produces. Tuomey didn't win; it got a split decision - and it's still going to cost.

Sports journalism - more

The other day I noted how robotic writing programs being developed for sports were going to potentially change sports reporters' game, putting a premium on finding new stories and less on the game and handout/news conference (even if impromptu on a practice field) driven stuff we see now.

But I also noted how hard that will be because, if sports reporters are honest with themselves, they'll acknowledge they are in the middle of one of the absolute spin and control zones of the world.

After Florida coach Urban Meyer's outburst the other day, sports columnist Paul Finebaum makes my case for me.

With the newspaper industry under siege and cutbacks literally being made at every corner, a reporter covering Meyer or anyone else really can ill afford to spend time in the doghouse. Otherwise, he or she will be left out in the cold when the pack goes on the next scavenger hunt for whatever scraps are still fed to those on the daily beat.

I spoke recently to an official at a major BCS school and he openly scoffed at the beat reporters covering his team. The person told me his school could completely cut off access to the reporters and still get practically the same message out to the public by delivering it themselves.

Journalists note: Appeal vs. legal costs

John McIntyre has an interesting post on his blog today worth saving not only by copy editors but also by all journalists -- the difference between court costs and legal costs.

The story is one of a Marine's father who sued over anti-gay protesters from Westboro Baptist Church who picketed his son's burial. The father, Albert Snyder, lost on appeal, though the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

According to the AP story in the New York Times, he was ordered to pay "legal costs" to the leader of the Westboro group. As the lawyer who wrote to McIntyre noted, however, "legal costs" and "court costs" are not interchangeable. The court costs total about $16,500 and are primarily for copying and document sharing. They are standard in appeals.

Legal costs, on the other hand, implies paying the other side's attorney's fees, a far greater proposition, as the lawyer questioning the AP article, W. Charles Bailey Jr., points out.

It's a distinction worth noting for the future.

Worth reading - CSM's Yemma on what works

Worth taking your time to read is this thoughtful and enlightening piece on Paid Content from John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, "Memo to News Sites: There is No Future in Digital Razzle Dazzle."

Yemma's take on much of multimedia:

Yes, people want multimedia. They want games, maps, 30 Rock on Hulu, bootlegged first-run movies from Pirate Bay, and whacked-out amateur videos on YouTube and a dozen other sites. But there’s no evidence that they want, for instance, a thoughtful interactive map/video/database mashup on Afghanistan or global warming on which they can comment. There’s no evidence that users love these things so much that they flock to them, stay around, and convert to a news site’s brand because of cool multimedia.

Yemma argues that paywalls won't work - he likens them to piling sandbags against a flood, but the digital waters never recede.

The answer he proposes is "relevant" content, but he goes on to acknowledge that's a lot harder than Google trends. It's content, he says, aimed at "influencers" who "live in narrow channels and respond to articles that make it clear why things matter and how problems are being solved."

The CSM, of course, has always been aimed at influencers, even when it was primarily print, and is quite a different organization from the South Succotash Gazette. Still, the everyman editors of the "Gazette" might consider relevance in terms of their local audience, too. The question is, can anything but a national or international publication truly make a business out of catering to that narrow wedge of "influencers"?

Yemma also has a good take on the challenges of all this:

What we’re learning is that the key to building and keeping traffic is far more prosaic than multimedia and sharing buttons. It rests on overcoming a huge cultural barrier: evolving a serious, experienced, thoughtful newsroom into an audience-first organization. I use the term “evolving” because this is all about the present tense. Trying to understand our current and future audience is a work in progress that will continue for as long as we publish on the web.

Journalists and numbers

One of the best quotes of the week is from Gary Langer, ABC's polling director, interviewed on "On the Media."

The topic: How reporters too often dropped the ball with all the health care polls.

The quote: The news media have long indulged themselves in the lazy luxury of being both data hungry and math phobic.

Time to stop living the lie, folks.

Wither J-school?

I find most of the stories, posts and debates about the future of journalism school tiresome, but sometimes there's one that catches my eye.

Thus, I recommend that you read Chris Lynch's post "What the reader elite means for journalism schools."

First, he approaches the subject from a fresh angle - the potential creation of a "reader elite" as information goes behind paywalls and (we think) stays there. (No guarantee of that, of course.) Lynch's take is that this elite is going to be better educated and more in tune with expertise journalism than with the disinterested observer model. Not sure I totally buy it; I think there will be a mix. But I definitely think young journalists are going to have to develop some kind of informational (not technology) specialty.

Second, the long thread of comments afterward has not degenerated into the usual flame-fest but has many well-reasoned (and just as passionate) opinions that make this truly a multidimensional post worth reading.

Boehne's take on paywalls

Rich Boehne, E.W. Scrripps' president and CE, has an interesting take on TV station Web sites and newspaper site pay walls in an interview with TVNewsCheck (italics mine):

There's a reasonable amount of potential and it's the same for the TV stations. TV stations have every bit the opportunity that the newspapers have and some would argue they have a better opportunity. Thus far, they have not taken advantage of that and in many markets they're well behind the newspapers. But they're catching up.

As strange as it sounds, we are focusing more and more on print and online as separate businesses and not the same. There's a place for print. Maybe it's not seven days a week, but there are a lot of people who want this information in a print format and we should serve that market and do an outstanding job. At the same time, we should build a separate online business. So the online piece is growing, but it's still nowhere near the size of the print piece.

On paywalls:

I don't think we've seen anything so far that works forlocal newspapers. Part of the issue is scale. You need quality content, but you also need enough scale to sell it to enough people to make a business. That's not easy to do in a small or midsize or even a decent-size newspaper market. The same is true for a TV station.

Newspapers terribly underestimate the ability of TV stations to produce content outside of their core audience. If newspapers attempt to take a lot of their local content and put it behind pay walls, I have no doubt that TV stations will rush in and fill the void. Now, I know we would certainly do that in all of our TV markets. So that just changed the equation a lot and the newspaper industry just for some reason overlooks the ability and determination that a lot of TV stations have.

Read the rest.

Game changer for sports journalists?

I have a lot of young folks in my classes who want to be sports reporters -- only I think too many of them define sports reporting as covering games and news conferences.

They -- and everyone who is covering sports or expects to -- should read this about software coming to market that will automatically write sports stories (some of that already exists, but I think the point here is that it is becoming tremendously more versatile and efficient):

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/robot_sports_reporters.php

And if you are a budding broadcast sports reporter, don't necessarily get too smug - there's a reference in here to programs being developed that can automate the video coverage, too. How long do you think it will be before they can meld the two?

StatSheet founder Robbie Allen, who is developing the program, puts it this way:

Human reporters know a team and a season, but Allen says they also "have their scripts written." "They already think they know what to look at as the most interesting things that have happened," he says. "I'm talking about codifying that knowledge, to build a wider corpus of interesting facts to draw from."

Allen says he isn't trying to replace sports reporters, but augment them. Yeah, and we know how that translates once it gets into the executive suite.

The digital age is clearly showing us that journalism is much different from the function of putting out a newspaper or newscast. Journalism is a process that will flow, like water, wherever there is an appropriate vessel. Putting out a paper or a newscast is an industrial process that, like all such processes, will seek to lower and control costs -- and automate -- as much as it can. Any kind of "process," be it routine sports coverage or routine copy editing, or putting together the police blotter, is open to automation.

As an AP reporter and editor, I covered college and pro sports, so while I was not a full-time sports reporter I speak from some experience. And as I continue looking at sports coverage, it occurs to me this is a tough nut for most sports reporters to crack. Sports, even some high-school level stuff, is so controlled by leagues, owners, etc. (see, e.g., the battle last fall over SEC credentials) that getting past the "routine" is not going to be easy for our budding crop of sports journalists. (For another example, borrow a copy of the excellent documentary "The Paper" and see how the Penn State sports reporter was punished by the athletics department, and almost brought to tears, by using initiative to cover what actually was a positive story about players and their apartments.)

But if they don't get past the routine, some software developer is waiting in the wings to do their job for them.

Marching to the drumbeat - Dow Jones News Fund

The American Society of News Editors (the old American Society of Newspaper Editors) did it.

The Radio Television Digital News Association (the old Radio-Television News Directors Association) did it.

The Society for News Design did it. So did the Online News Association (which only a few may dimly remember started as the Online Newspaper Association).

And now the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund -- that longtime home of the Dow Jones copy editing and reporting internships -- has done it. Henceforth, it shall be known as the Dow Jones News Fund, according to the missive that came to my e-mail inbox this week. And it has a new online address, newsfund.org instead of newspaperfund.org. As the release put it:

The new name reflects outreach to news services, websites and digital media in the past few years and a projection that there is more to come as the industry evolves.

Boy, now there's some kind of understatement, huh: "and a projection that there is more to come as the industry evolves." But then, again, the Dow has always been conservative.

You'll get no hrumphing or hand-wringing from me. These are changes that probably need to be made if for no other reason than to reinforce the idea of broadening perspective and thought.

Still, you might want to get out of the way of the stampede.

(One group, the Newspaper Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, seems inextricably bound to that name. Two years of rather robust discussion have failed to come up with alternatives, partly out of institutional constraints. Converting to "News" division would potentially step on a lot of other divisions' and interest groups' toes.)