Presidential Staff and the Media

Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng report at The Daily Beast:

Newly minted White House chief of staff John Kelly has sought to put a dent in the influence of one of President Donald Trump’s most famous advisers: Omarosa Manigault.

The former Apprentice co-star—who currently serves as the communications director for the Office of Public Liaison—has seen her direct access to the president limited since Kelly took the top White House job in late July, sources tell The Daily Beast. In particular, Kelly has taken steps to prevent her and other senior staffers from getting unvetted news articles on the president’s Resolute desk—a key method for influencing the president’s thinking, and one that Manigualt used to rile up Trump about internal White House drama.

Glenn Thrush & Maggie Haberman report at The New York Times:

Mr. Kelly cannot stop Mr. Trump from binge-watching Fox News, which aides describe as the president’s primary source of information gathering. But Mr. Trump does not have a web browser on his phone, and does not use a laptop, so he was dependent on aides like Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist, to hand-deliver printouts of articles from conservative media outlets.

Now Mr. Kelly has thinned out his package of printouts so much that Mr. Trump plaintively asked a friend recently where The Daily Caller and Breitbart were.

Stewart and Colbert

Not all interviewees prove to be easy target. John Yoo, January 11, 2010:

The Daily Show - John Yoo Pt. 1
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The Daily Show - John Yoo Pt. 2
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The Daily Show - Intro - John Yoo Interview Reflections
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What happened? Constitutional interpretation does not lend itself to The Daily Show treatment.

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism studied The Daily Show in 2008. Among its findings:

The program’s clearest focus is politics, especially in Washington. U.S. foreign affairs, largely dominated by the Bush Administration’s policies in Iraq, Washington politics and government accounted for nearly half (47%) of the time spent on the program. Overall, The Daily Show news agenda is quite close to those of cable news talk shows.

The press itself is another significant focus on The Daily Show. In all, 8% of the time was made up of segments about the press and news media. That is more than double the amount of coverage of media in the mainstream press overall during the same period.

A good deal of the news, however, is also absent from The Daily Show. In 2007, for example, major events such as the tragic Minneapolis bridge collapse were never discussed. And the shootings at Virginia Tech, the most covered story within a given week in 2007 by the overall press, received only a cursory mention.

Republicans in 2007 tended to bear the brunt of ridicule from Stewart and his crew. From July 1 through November 1, Stewart’s humor targeted Republicans more than three times as often as Democrats. The Bush Administration alone was the focus of almost a quarter (22%) of the segments in this time period.

The lineup of on-air guests was more evenly balanced by political party. But our subjective sense from viewing the segments is that Republicans faced harsher criticism during the interviews with Stewart. Whether this is because the show is simply liberal or because the Republicans control the White House is harder to pin down.

A 2007 study from the The Pew Resarch Center for the People and the Press:

A 2010 study from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press:

• Most of those who regularly watch O’Reilly (63%) and Hannity (65%) are 50 or older; 44% of the public is 50 or older. By contrast, the Daily Show and Colbert Report have the youngest audiences of any outlet included in the survey. Large majorities of those who say they regularly watch the Colbert Report (80%) and the Daily Show (74%) are younger than 50; 55% of public is 18 to 49.
• Entertainment is by far the biggest reason why regular viewers of the Colbert Report and the Daily Show tune into those programs; 53% of the regular Colbert audience and 43% of the Daily Show audience say they mostly watch those programs for entertainment. Yet entertainment also is a factor for many regular viewers of morning news shows (18%), readers of USA Today (16%) and other audiences.

Stephen Colbert

Lyn Westmoreland's Appearance on "Better Know a District" -- Or, "Don't Do This."

ColbertPAC (h/t Caroline Nyce):

The Daily Show

Nixon on Laugh-In:

Stewart did not invent comedic use of news video:

Interrogating Multiple Witnesses: Stewart v. CNBC, March 4, 2009

The Daily Show - CNBC Financial Advice
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Cross-examination: Rove, September 3, 2008

The Daily Show - Sarah Palin Gender Card
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Summarizing the evidence: Iraq, August 25, 2005

The Daily Show - Mess O'Potamia - Talking Points
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Closing Statements: August 25, 2005

The Daily Show - MC Dubya
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N

Hoax!

James Rainey writes at The Los Angeles Times:

Several big news organizations fell for a stunning, albeit fake, piece of business news this week — that General Electric would voluntarily pay the government a $3.2-billion tax "refund."

Some news-types responded to the hoax with indignation, others bemusement. Both those groups must have been outnumbered, though, by the resolute. This couldn't, wouldn't … shouldn't happen again.

But, take notice, newshounds: The tricksters and political pranksters have numbers. They have big plans. They embrace a lawless tradition and an outlaw code. They will be back. And they are fairly certain you can be had.

In many cases, they will be right. Fake news may not be inevitable. But it will always find a pathway, particularly in the frantic chase that is journalism in the Digital Age. All harried journalists can do is take a moment, breathe deeply and make that extra confirmation phone call, because the next $10,000 Donald Trump restaurant tip, campaign to blockade oil spills with human hair or School for Panhandlers (all fakes swallowed, whole, by some of the media) is just beyond the next deadline.

The responsible group was US Uncut.

The group that staged the fake GE tax-return stunt came together only in the last couple of months, inspired by an article in the Nation magazine that urged activists to build progressive equivalents to the conservative "tea party" movement. "We don't just have a spending problem in America, we have a revenue problem," said US Uncut spokesman Ryan Clayton. "It's not the teacher and cop and their salaries that are the problem. It's the corporations that aren't paying taxes that are the problem."

With a bit of advice from the Yes Men, US Uncut put together its fake press release and dummy GE website (only one letter different than the corporation's actual URL) in about 10 days.

Media organizations that fell for the fakery — including Associated Press and its many clients, who at least briefly picked up the story (including, for just a few minutes, the business page of latimes.com) — didn't do enough to verify the veracity of the emailed press release.

The fake looked and sounded like the real thing, said Tom Kent, standards editor for AP. He declined to give specific details about who failed to verify the news. "If we had followed our procedures this would not have happened," Kent said.

The double-time pace of the news industry has only kicked up a notch in recent years, with reporters rushing to tweet, blog and write the news before the competition. Being first can mean the extra clicks, and ad dollars, that might keep an outlet alive.

The Power of Mockery

"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon," wrote Saul Alinsky. Salzman makes a similar point in his discussion of media events. And now Nicholas Kristof writes at The New York Times:

The juiciest story behind the Middle East uprisings doesn’t concern Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurse or C.I.A. bags of cash. Rather, it’s the tale of how a nonviolent revolutionary strategy crafted by Serbian students and an octogenarian American scholar came to challenge dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and many other countries.

This “uprising in a bottle” blueprint was developed by the Serbian youth movement, Otpor, to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. One of Otpor’s insights was that the most effective weapon against dictators isn’t bombs or fiery speeches. It’s mockery. Otpor activists once put Milosevic’s picture on a barrel that they rolled down the street, inviting people to hit it with a bat.

Otpor’s strategy mirrors one promoted by a rumpled Boston academic named Gene Sharp, who is little known in America but inspires tremors among dictators abroad. Sharp’s guide to toppling despots has been translated into 34 languages so far and was widely circulated in Egypt last year in Arabic.

After Otpor toppled Milosevic, it began to hold seminars for pro-democracy activists from other parts of the world, including many from the Middle East.

...

Toppling dictators is only one application of this kind of grass-roots movement. One of the most exciting trends in the struggle against poverty and social pathologies such as crime is the use of similar youth-owned movements to change cultural norms from the bottom up.

Tina Rosenberg, a longtime writer and journalist who contributes to the Opinion section of nytimes.com, offers a brilliant look at bottom-up initiatives to achieve social change in her new book, “Join the Club.” My favorite example has to do with teenage smoking.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, nothing seemed to work to dissuade teenagers from smoking. Television commercials warned that smoking kills you or turns your teeth yellow, but teenagers felt invulnerable. And with adults united in disapproval of teenage smoking, what better way for adolescents to rebel than to cough their way through a cigarette?

Then in the late-1990s, some frustrated anti-smoking campaigners showed teenagers how cigarette companies were manipulating them into addiction. Starting in Florida, the teenagers then designed a series of funny and withering commercials, many based on prank phone calls.

One depicted a couple of teenagers telephoning an ad agency that promoted cigarettes. The kids tried to give the agency a prize for killing teenagers in large numbers, flummoxing the staff.

Oppo!

Politico reports:

Tired of being on the receiving end of damaging stories developed by liberal groups such as Media Matters and the Center for American Progress, conservatives are looking to launch their own opposition research army to dig up dirt on the left.

In the last year, a mix of big-money Republican-allied independent groups, tea party non-profits, guerilla videographers, and some scrappy bloggers and talk show hosts has created a raft of fledgling investigative research and reporting efforts to uncover and publicize alleged corruption, flip-flops and plain-old gaffes by Democrats and their allies headed into the 2012 elections.

The effort attracted notice last month when one of the deepest-pocketed conservative groups, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies – or Crossroads GPS – launched an initiative called Wikicountability to crowd-source investigations of President Barack Obama’s administration by collecting government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. As a start, Crossroads GPS pushed three relatively low-impact findings based on FOIAs – including that $3.66 million in taxpayer money was used to pay for an ad promoting last year’s Democratic healthcare overhaul.

“The left is still beating the right at the game of doing investigative reporting, but I think the right has finally realized both the need and the problem,” said Erick Erickson, editor of Red State, an influential conservative blog that occasionally features or aggregates researched reporting by conservatives critical of the left. “After a couple of years of thinking the right was dropping the ball, I finally think the train is moving and building up momentum.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/52428.html#ixzz1ISqubQYB

Bad Staff Work Yields Embarrassing Story

At The Washington Post, Ed O'Keefe reports that President Obama accepted a transparency award -- at a meeting closed to the press.

“It’s almost a theater of the absurd to have an award on transparency that isn’t transparent,” said Gary Bass, founder of OMB Watch, and one of five transparency advocates who met with Obama on Monday. “The irony is that everything the president said was spot-on. I wish people had heard what he had to say.”

Bass was joined at the meeting by Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org and Lucy A. Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Bass, Brian and Dalglish later blogged about the meeting.

All five groups have criticized the Obama White House and previous administrations for withholding government information or failing to disclose it in a timely manner. (Dalglish’s attendance at the private meeting may seem most questionable to the White House press corps, considering her group serves as a legal advocacy group for reporters and includes several prominent journalists on its steering committee.)

Bass insists the group didn’t realize the White House failed to disclose the meeting to reporters. “I think this is a particularly bad situation and I’m not going to try to defend the president on that,” he said.

Brian called it “crazy stupid” for the White House to keep mum about the meeting. “He even made a joke when we walked in the room about how he wanted to make sure we would be listed on the White House visitors logs,” she said in an e-mail. “Someone on the White House staff should get their butt kicked for this one.”

The Facebook Majority

Edison Research reports:

According to the upcoming report from Arbitron, Inc. and Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2011: Navigating Digital Platforms, more than half of all Americans ages 12 and older are on Facebook. The study, fielded in January of 2011, indicates that 51% of all adults 12+ have profiles on this dominant site.

We have been tracking the growth of Facebook since 2008, and have watched it go from 8% usage just three years ago, to 51% today. In our presentation on April 5th you will also see the remarkable year-over-year growth of Facebook users especially among people over age 35, trends on frequency of usage, and the uptake of social networking on mobile phones.

These findings come from a national survey of 2,020 persons age 12 and older. This is the 19th in a series of studies Arbitron and Edison have conducted since 1998 on topics relating to digital media. The complete study will be presented in a webinar on April 5th at 2PM Eastern, and interested parties can register here.

The Media and the Disaster in Japan

Scott Gold and Hector Becerra write at The Los Angeles Times:

After the quake, it took 45 minutes for the tsunami to reach the coast of Japan — 45 minutes of knowing, of waiting, of bracing.

When it came, they were all glued to their televisions — a Jesuit priest in New York, an engineering professor in rural Oregon, a geophysicist in San Diego. What unfolded had never been broadcast live before: a 13-foot wall of mud that belittled human achievement, folding houses inside out, propelling yachts across miles of rice fields, rupturing oil refineries, sweeping trains from their tracks and killing hundreds.

By now, we're versed in bearing witness to the aftermath of disaster: limbs jutting out from collapsed buildings in Haiti, survivors using laundry to spell out "HELP US" on their rooftops after Hurricane Katrina. This was different — a disaster unfolding in visceral, wrenching real time, for viewers who were alternately spellbound and tortured by their inability to do anything about it.

Japan's plight came on a sunny Friday afternoon; the magnitude 8.9 earthquake, the largest to strike the area in more than a millennium, hit at 2:46 p.m. local time. Japan is not only an advanced economy but one of the most wired nations on earth; at one point Friday, there were 20 tweets a second coming out of Tokyo.

Videos here.

The Staffer We Discussed

At Politico, Jake Sherman and Marin Cogan report:

Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the powerful Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has launched an inquiry into whether spokesman Kurt Bardella improperly shared e-mails from other reporters with a New York Times reporter writing a book on Washington’s political culture, POLITICO has learned.

Bardella has been cooperating extensively with the Times’s Mark Leibovich on the book, and Issa told POLITICO Monday that he would “get to the bottom” of exactly what Bardella shared with Leibovich.

On Tuesday morning, Issa fired Bardella as a result of his investigation.

...

Bardella has been of particular interest to reporters and Capitol Hill aides in recent months, after a New Yorker piece quoted him taking credit for his boss’s increased prominence in national politics and making somewhat impolitic remarks about reporters and women.

In his comments to POLITICO, Issa said that Bardella had been "about one nanosecond from not working on Capitol Hill anymore" after the New Yorker piece. Issa said Bardella "would have been fired" if he was not otherwise an exceptional young person.

Bardella also recently had an episode with former Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, now a contributor at The Daily Beast, in which Kurtz published an interview thinking he had been speaking to Issa when he had really been speaking to Bardella.

Kurtz, who later ran a correction for the mix-up, told POLITICO that he remains puzzled as to why Bardella did not correct him when he was addressing him as “Congressman” or when he sent an e-mail after the interview saying “thanks for getting me the congressman so quickly.”

At The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza recalls a key passage from his earlier article:

This long back and forth was the lead-in to a Bardella quote I used in the piece:

[R]eporters e-mail me saying, “Hey, I’m writing this story on this thing. Do you think you guys might want to investigate it? If so, if you get some documents, can you give them to me?” I’m, like, “You guys are going to write that we’re the ones wanting to do all the investigating, but you guys are literally the ones trying to egg us on to do that!”

To me that last quote was one of the most important things Bardella told me. The rest of it—that offices clash over how to leak info and that bookers and reporters are competitive—is interesting but relatively well known, and not very relevant to a piece about Darrell Issa. But that Bardella accused reporters of offering to collaborate with Issa as he launches what will inevitably be partisan investigations of the Obama Administration seemed jaw-dropping. This is exactly the dysfunctional investigator/reporter dynamic that in the nineteen-nineties fed frenzies over every minor Clinton scandal. In his short-lived career, Bardella was witness to the fact that it was all starting over in 2011, now that there was again a Republican House and a Democratic President. From what I know of what Bardella shared, the beat reporters who cover Issa and engaged in this kind of game with Bardella will be the ones most embarrassed by the e-mails that Leibovich possesses.

Pushback

In the world of press politics, "pushback" refers to the effort by political figures to change media frames that they dislike. An example from today's Politico "Playbook" by Mike Allen:

WHITE HOUSE PUSHES BACK ON WISCONSIN REPORTS:

--Feb. 18, WP, top of A1, “Obama joins Wisconsin budget battle,” by Brady Dennis and Peter Wallsten: “The president's political machine worked in close coordination Thursday with state and national union officials to get thousands of protesters to gather in Madison and to plan similar demonstrations in other state capitals. … By the end of the day, Democratic Party officials were organizing additional demonstrations in Ohio and Indiana.”

--Feb. 19, @OFA_WI (official Twitter account of the DNC’s Organizing for America Wisconsin): “What’s going on in WI is a grassroots story, not a Washington one. Workers are fighting for their rights and we support their effort.”

--Feb. 21, NYT A11, “Wisconsin Battle Puts President Between Competing Political Desires,” by Jackie Calmes: “‘This is a Wisconsin story, not a Washington one,’ said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. ‘False claims of White House involvement are attempts to distract from the organic grass-roots opposition that is happening in Wisconsin.’”

WEST WING MINDMELD: The Washington Post way oversold the story, Drudge picked it up and it was quickly being used as a GOP talking point to distort the situation.

Why Reporters Take Risks

At The Huffington Post, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon writes about Lara Logan, the CBS reporter who suffered a brutal sexual assault while covering protests in Egypt:

I do not speak for Ms. Logan or any other reporter who has worked in conflict zones or amid scenes of great upheaval. But I will take the liberty of answering the basic question of why Logan was there in the first place.

Because it is her job. Because she is good at it. And because it is what she does.

War reporters are often seen as a wild bunch of thrill-seekers who wade into danger zones simply for the sake of the adrenalin high the settings inevitably provide. But this one-dimensional explanation leaves out the core of the story, which is that reporters go to these places because they feel the tug of responsibility. The responsibility to tell stories in parts of the world that most of their readers will never see or know, despite the fact that their countries play a leading role in the imaginations of the men and women in countries like Egypt, and Afghanistan and Iraq.

...

It is possible I take the media attacks on Logan personally because, though we have never met, we share friends and colleagues in Afghanistan, where, since 2005, I have reported on the women whose strength and ingenuity saved their families during the Taliban years and the businesswomen who are boldy rebuilding their country today. In December I traveled to Afghanistan while nearly seven months pregnant to report on efforts to fight the scourge of maternal mortality in the country, one of the deadliest places in the world to be an expectant mother. My family and I told few people of the trip because we knew they would inevitably question the decision to go, despite the fact that I had done all possible to limit the risks. For me, it was about giving voice to those who would not otherwise have one and about telling stories I believe matter deeply. And it was about the sense of service and responsibility that calls you to journalism in the first place.

Elections: A First Cut

Strategic Grid

A Designated Market Area (DMA) is a media market, a group of counties that account for the major viewing audience for television stations located in a metropolitan area.

California's DMAs (left) v. US House districts (right)

HuffPo Compensation

If you publish at The Huffington Post, great, but do not expect ... actual money.

At GOOD, Alex Goldmark writes:

AOL's $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post may be great news for Arianna Huffington, but will it be any help to the legions of writers that currently give her content for free?

If she scales her freelancer payment habits—continuing to offer exposure in lieu of actual money—it could be terrible for journalists, further driving down the pay rates for online reporting.

So naturally the response from freelancers to Arianna's windfall is to, once again, call on her to pay a living wage for journalists. The California Freelancers Workers Guild is taking the opportunity to point out Arianna's passionate defense of the middle class in her recent book, Third World America, where Huffington wrote "It's no longer an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species."

(h/t Helena)

A Scandal Opens and Closes in Internet Time

You may have wondered why I included Gawker on my Mass Media links page. An answer came this week, when a Gawker story led to the resignation of a GOP House member. It is a classic case of cyberscandal, starting with Craigslist, continuing through emails, and exploding on a celebrity site.

Politico reports:

Top House Republicans insist they did not force out Rep. Christopher Lee, whose sudden resignation on Wednesday night after an extraordinarily brief Internet sex scandal set off a scramble among potential candidates who want to take over his western New York seat.

Lee announced his immediate departure from Congress just hours after the website Gawker posted a story saying he had e-mailed a topless photo of himself to a woman he contacted through Craigslist. Lee is married with one child.

Lee was apparently attending a House GOP policy retreat in Baltimore when he sent the late-night photo, according to e-mail records released by Gawker.

The stunning fall from grace for the junior New York Republican was a lesson in the power of the Internet scandal. A controversy can turn into a frenzy in minutes or hours, and some pols — such as Lee and former Republican Reps. Mark Souder of Indiana and Mark Foley of Florida — choose to bail out immediately rather than stand and fight.

There is a puzzle here. Lee's actions were embarrassing to his party and hurtful to his family -- but they were not illegal. There are more than a few sitting lawmakers who have done worse things in their private lives. So why did he quit so fast? The recipient of his emails has a reasonable speculation:

I wouldn't have thought he'd resign, over a few pictures and a few emails. I think maybe there's a bigger story behind his resignation. I'm sure there are other women out there he's met. My theory is, you don't get caught your first time out.

Politico Pro

Keach Hagey writes at Politico:

Over the last four years, POLITICO has navigated some of journalism’s most difficult days by showing that money could be made from a free website with a niche – albeit one with a print sidekick that did a lot of the heavy ad-sales lifting.

Now, as Washington seems to be waking up to the renewed promise of subscription models, POLITICO is setting out to show that people who really need to know what’s going on in the corridors of policy-making power will pay for the privilege.

POLITICO Pro, the tech, energy and health care policy subscription service that POLITICO is launching Wednesday, is entering a competitive playing field now populated by longstanding trade publications, veteran subscription players like CQ and National Journal and well-funded newcomers like Bloomberg Government.

And it’s betting that it can do to them what POLITICO did to political journalism when it entered the scene four years ago.

“We’re faster,” said Tim Grieve, POLITICO Pro’s editor-in-chief. “We focus more on the inside game. I think our writing is sharper. I think we do not feel obligated to be the paper of record. We choose stories that we think are interesting and we tell those stories. POLITICO Pro is different from the other policy products out there in the same way that POLITICO is different from the other political publications out there.”

The Washingtonian reports:

This week, [John] Harris and his Politico cofounder, former Post reporter Jim VandeHei, are launching their nichiest venture yet. It’s called Politico Pro. And while the name awkwardly suggests that the original product was some kind of amateur operation, it fits. “Pro” is a fateful step in Politico’s evolution, from a scrappy start-up initially dismissed as folly by the established Beltway media players into the most ambitious and arguably most important political news organization in Washington. Politico Pro is actually a collection of three news organizations, each devoted to covering the “politics behind policymaking,” as Harris and VandeHei put it, on health care, energy, and technology. Politico’s founders are betting that their rapid-fire, buzzy approach to news reporting can rev up the metabolism of the historically studious game of trade reporting and make in-depth looks at key policy fields an essential read. It’s a gamble, but one they’re willing to take in order to grow their brainchild and make the Politico enterprise more competitive beyond its traditional base of politics-and-campaigns coverage.

The Planned Parenthood Sting

Graber (p. 153) discusses the ethics of "sting" operations. One broadcast news code of ethics frowns on them, but does not absolutely rule them out. A recent story involves not only the issue of sting operations but also the use of video from third parties.

CBS reports:

Planned Parenthood has long been criticized by abortion rights opponents. The organization has 800 clinics across the United States. Recently a handful of them were targeted by a video sting.

CBS News chief legal correspondent reports the FBI is investigating. The videos are troubling with actors portraying a pimp and a prostitute seeking abortions for young sex workers. The target: Planned Parenthood, the nation's leading provider of reproductive services, counseling, contraception and abortion.

Pimp in video: "We're involved in sex work."

Planned Parenthood Supervisor: "Mm hmm."

Pimp: "We have some girls that are kind of young like, 14, 15, that they might need an abortion."

Planned Parenthood Supervisor: "Mm hmm."

Pimp: "And, how is the best way should they could go about it?"

Planned Parenthood Supervisor: "They just show up."

In the past week anti-abortion group Live Action has released undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood staffers all too eager to help purported teenage sex workers get abortions and contraception.

Planned Parenthood Supervisor: "Here's the thing. If they're minors, just tell them to put down that they're students."

Pimp: "Students."

Planned Parenthood Supervisor: "Yeah, just kind of play along that they're students. We want to make it look as legit as possible."

Video here (not embeddable)

Media Consolidation

Having the media controlled by roughly 20 or so megacorporations has clearly had a deleterious effect -- lessening competition, squelching dissent, choking off debate, and elevating profit over the public good.

Arianna Huffington, in The American Prospect, June 17, 2004

By combining HuffPost with AOL's network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we'll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform.

Arianna Huffington, in The Huffington Post, February 7, 2011, announcing its acquisition by AOL.

A Story Pitch

As I have mentioned before, Politico "Playbook" has become a must-read for the political community. Today's "Playbook" gives a nice example of how political figures pitch stories. Mike Allen writes:

BEHIND THE CURTAIN -- CONSERVATIVES PLAN TO USE EGYPT TO ATTACK OBAMA NEXT WEEK - E-mail with subject line "Developing story idea for you," from Joe Brettell of CRC Public Relations, which represents many conservative policy groups: "Dear Mr. Allen, Given the confluence of stories in the last couple weeks regarding Egypt and the Middle East, rising oil prices and challenging economic numbers, I wanted to suggest a story that looks at the parallels between the challenges faced by President's Carter and Obama. Obviously, there have been whispers about the similarities, but not a lot of actual stories that have taken it on objectively; it's a brewing angle and I think you should be the one to write it.... You can expect a big push on this from conservatives in the next week or so." (Joe and I know each other, so the 'Dear Mr. Allen' was the tip-off it was a mass pitch, not a personal e-mail. Let's see who bites!)

Reporting

Typical newspaper organization chart

Broadcast Titles

• Anchor One in the television studio who ties together the newscast by reading the news and providing transitions from one story to the next.
  
• Executive Producer The television executive with overall responsibility for the look of the television newscast.
  
• Field Producer Behind-the-scenes television reporter who often does much of the field work for a network's on-camera correspondents.
  
• Network Correspondent A television reporter who delivers the news on camera. Network correspondents may or may not do the actual news-gathering for their stories.
  
• Show Producer Television news specialists who produce individual newscasts and report to the executive producer.

The story of the cheese.

The story of the interview.

Interviews and attribution.