Category: Media

BY TRIPP FROHLICHSTEIN// St. Louisans who went to see the movie “Gone Girl” starring Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne may have noticed several shots of the media vans parked in front of Dunne’s house. Prominent among them was the Fox2/KPLR 11 van (all of the vans represented real local stations).

So how did that happen? According to Channel 2 spokesperson Suzi Mahe, a member of director David Fincher’s crew called the stations vice president of news Audrey Prywitch to ask permission to use the station logos in the film, set mostly in the Cape Girardeau area. As they talked, Prywitch, who loved the book, asked if they could do more. The crew member told her a live truck would be great. After checking with station general manager Spencer Koch and the engineering department, she discovered they had a disabled microwave truck being taken out of service. The film’s transportation division got the van to the Cape Girardeau area. “No money changed hands—-it was just good promotion.” said Mahe. Indeed it was.

BY TRIPP FROHLICHSTEIN// No wonder people get frustrated with the media. On a CBS network report, reporter Omar Villafranca reported that Clayton “bordered” Ferguson. After being called to his attention, he later tweeted he made a mistake. He wasn’t alone. Reuters apparently described The Loop in University City as being “downtown.”

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KMOV Channel 4 provided a great example of a worthless live shot on November 17 at 6pm. The story had Robin Smith reporting live on the Ferguson situation. But was she in Ferguson? No, she was standing out in front of the television station. While they did acknowledge she was downtown, it would have been more appropriate to simply have her report from inside the studio. This is the kind of gimmick that causes people to lose faith in local news. It is called being “live for live’s sake.” There was absolutely no reason for her live appearance outside other than for the dramatic affect.

BY GEORGE SALAMON// “I think of The Times reader as very-well educated, worldly and likely affluent.” Dean Baquet, Executive Editor, The New York Times
The “affluent” part of Baquet’s quote seems to trouble some of the paper’s readers and was the subject of its public editor’s column on November 9: “Pricey Doughnuts, Pricier Homes, Priced-Out Readers,” (Sunday Review, p.12). Has our national “paper of record” become a voice primarily to the rich? Has it always been so, or has the ravaging rise of income inequality priced The Times out of middle-and-working class readership? And has The Times made attempts to keep readers from those segments of our population? (Did it ever have much of a readership in them is a question that should have been but was not asked.)

BY TERRY GANEY// Since Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown on Saturday, Aug. 9, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has published more than 625 stories, editorials and opinion pieces about the incident and its aftermath.

Perhaps no other local event in the region’s history has required such sustained, intense effort by the news organization. And since the results of two government investigations into the incident—one by a St. Louis County grand jury and another by the U.S. Justice Department–have yet to be released, the “Michael Brown case” will be the focus of the newspaper for weeks, months and maybe years to come.

BY BEN LYONS// When technological optimists began talking about the Web’s democratizing potential in the 1990s (and earlier), they were excited about not only bringing more diverse information to wider audiences at lower costs, but crucially, the Web as a “writeable,” many-to-many medium.
Although there is a certain amount of myth to that out- look, the comments sections of news sites have become a pillar of the wide-open communication space that emerged over the past 15 years. Allowing a space for readers’ comments below news articles served both a democratic narrative and economic logic: it would keep audiences on the page longer, a valuable metric in leveraging ad revenue.