Rick Sanchez Reenacts Howard Beale

I meant to post this a few days ago when we watched the movie clip of Howard Beale in class, but here's a modern day reenactment by former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez with Lou Dobbs:

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.

Egyptians Protestors Against American Media Coverage?

CNN's Anderson Cooper and Crew Attacked in Cairo by Pro-Mubarak Supporters

The Daily Beast Reports "We thought Mubarak’s crowd was supposed to be pro-American? Anderson Cooper was attacked by a pro-Mubarak mob in Egypt, according to CNN’s Steve Brusk. 'Anderson said he was punched 10 times in the head as pro-Mubarak mob surrounded him and his crew trying to cover demonstration.' Cooper was okay, as he soon returned to the air to report on the incident."

Watch Anderson explain how his crew was attacked in Tahrir Square.

Politico Responds to New York Times article

This morning, Politico announced in an op-ed that it would forgo coverage of the 2012 election, focusing on the 2016 election instead.

“The 2016 presidential race begins today,” POLITICO Executive Editor Jim VandeHei said in a webcast press conference from the company’s headquarters at a secret address — 1100 Wilson Blvd. in Arlington, Va. Asked whether the lack of candidates would be a problem, VandeHei insisted that “candidates play a less and less significant role in American politics, especially at the presidential level. By the time we have finished covering the political consultants and advisers, then throw in a poll or two, there is really no need to talk to the candidates themselves. Our best scientific evidence is that, while the candidates may still have some vestigial role in 2012, by 2016 they will largely have disappeared, except for purely symbolic activities like posing for pictures [while] coming out of church with their families.” By 2020, VandeHei said, even those will be fabricated.

More on Social Media and Egypt

Despite the internet continuing to remain down in Egypt, messages are being communicated from Egypt to the rest of the world over the phone to Twitter and Google is translating the tweets. This shows that even government efforts might not be enough to keep information inside the country in today's global age. It also shows how social media may be able to play a more crucial role that the mainstream media in times of crisis.


According to Wired.com:

As the Hosni Mubarak regime continues its internet and mobile-phone blackout, telephonic tweets from inside Egypt are trickling out and being translated, thanks to Google, Twitter and some heavy-duty crowdsourcing.

Egyptians, or anybody with phone access across the globe, can dial one of several phone numbers and leave a voice message. The messages are hosted by the site SayNow, which Google acquired last week. A link to the message is automatically tweeted on the Twitter feed @speak2tweet.

Google announced the service Monday, and on Tuesday the tweets started being accompanied with a hashtag that displays the call’s country of origin. Landline service appears to be working in Egypt, and voice tweets, many in Arabic, are coming in around one a minute or so. The voice messages can also be heard by dialing the same numbers.

Engineers from Google and Twitter came up with the idea over the weekend. “We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time,” Google said in a blog post.

The service is just one of a myriad of workarounds being offered to Egyptians, following the bulk of their communication services going dark Friday.

The voice messages are also being translated by about 50 people from across the globe, with the text posted at a new site called Egypt.alive.in.

“I need to be a free man, and better life for my kids. Please help us,” read one of the voice tweets from Egypt.

Ed Bice, the founder of Meedan.net, said the call was put out Monday night urging people to volunteer their time to translate those tweets into English and other languages.

“It’s one of the most powerful real-time, crowdsourced translation efforts I’ve ever seen,” Bice said in a telephone interview from San Francisco.

Bice founded Meedan.net more than four year ago. The site, with servers in Portland, Oregon, offers machine-translated news in Arabic and English. Stories are then edited by humans and posted.

Meanwhile, at about noon PST, there were 883 tweets on @speak2tweet and more than 8,600 followers.

Given Egypt’s communication blackout, Brice said “not a ton of people in Egypt know about it.”

“Getting the word out,” he said, “it’s hard.”

Radio Commentary

Go to http://tinyurl.com/4l35232 and skip ahead to 35:55.

Just checking to see if you're paying attention. ;-)

How the National Enquirer Caught John Edwards

It is not the most edifying story of all time, but it is fascinating to read how the National Enquirer used psychological profiling and modern technology to catch John Edwards.

See the account by the Enquirer's former editor at The Huffington Post:

The profiler's assessment secretly became my bible for the Enquirer's renewed coverage. During the next few months we developed solid information on visits Edwards had with Hunter but I chose not to publish, knowing that we needed to catch him in the act.

It took months to gather advance intelligence about when and where he would meet Hunter. Technology afforded the Enquirer modern tools we never had before. Satellite photos gave us a detailed picture of where Rielle was and where they would meet. In my Boca Raton, Florida office we had constructed a board of the North Carolina neighborhood where she was stashed, and the location where we ultimately photographed her. Reporters on the ground sent updated photos and video. We could see every street, every house close up, with scores of photographs tacked to a bulletin board in a mini-recreation that helped us plan multiple options for how to deploy reporters and photographers.

The Enquirer caught him visiting Rielle Hunter at the Beverly Hilton, then played with his head.

I immediately posted the story of the late night encounter on the paper's website. It was important to immediately put the pressure on John, to let him know the Enquirer had been at the hotel the entire time he visited Hunter and their child, and that the early-morning run in with our reporter was the culmination of a planned operation.

There was silence from Edwards' camp. No denial, no statement. It fit the profiler's opinion; he was assessing what he could get away with.

We told the press that there were photographs and video from that night. Other journalists asked us to release the images but I refused. Edwards needed to imagine the worst-case scenario becoming public. The Enquirer would give him no clues about what it did and did not have.

...

He cracked. Not knowing what else the Enquirer possessed and faced with his world crumbling, Edwards, as the profiler predicted, came forward to partially confess. He knew no one could prove paternity so he admitted the affair but denied being the father of Hunter's baby, once again taking control of the situation.

Our sources told us Edwards thought he could survive the affair admission personally and politically. At the time, it was good enough for everyone at the Enquirer. The articles, the investigation, the nearly two years of work, had been vindicated and instead of an expensive yawn-inducing tale no one believed, we had a great political scoop.