Details lacking in TV coverage of bridge opening

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A bridge! A bridge! Abridged? The recent opening of a new bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis got grand coverage from the city’s television news stations. Footage of the sparkling span dominated morning reports by Fox News Channel 2, KMOV Channel 4 and KSDK Channel 5 on the Friday before the official opening on Feb. 9. Cheerleading, in fact, was in top form as anchors and reporters gave testimony to an engineering achievement accomplished with admirable efficiency. It was a good story about civic progress. But the journalists’ day job – reporting – was noticeably, ah, abridged.

Ombudsmen in decline: An ominous trend for American press

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One year ago, Rem Rieder in USA TODAY wrote about ombudsmen, the individuals (often called “readers’ representatives” or “public editors”) employed by newspapers to keep a vigilant eye on the paper’s journalism and report the findings to readers. Rieder painted a discouraging picture, noting that just half as many ombudsmen were working in U.S. news organizations as was the case a decade ago – and that more than a dozen media organizations axed the position following the 2008 recession. This, Rieder reported, even though a handful of new ombudsmen positions were being created in newsrooms in other nations.

As TIME goes by: On the passing of an American institution

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When Wolcott Gibbs parodied TIME magazine’s famous style (“TIMEstyle” or “TIMEspeak”) in the New Yorker in 1936, he penned the now-famous line: “Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind.” But TIME was much more than a collection of inverted sentences, cheeky puns (“Esther Williams’ pictures are so much water over the dame”) and double-jointed adjectives. TIME was America’s first and best news weekly, read by more than 20 million worldwide, and it may well have “invented mass media.”

Civil war at the New York Times: Newsroom attacks editorial page!

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It promised to be a lulu of a story: “The Tyranny and Lethargy of the Times Editorial Page,” in the New York Observer on Feb. 4 by the paper’s editor, Ken Kurson. The subhead hinted at the juiciness of it all: “Reporters in ‘semi-open revolt’ against Andrew Rosenthal.” Rosenthal, the New York Times’ editorial page editor, gets skewered by more than two dozen current and former Times staffers, as do his assistants who write the paper’s editorials, the columnists on the op-ed page, and the “Sunday Review” he’s in charge of. The attack, from all but two named sources among the Times staffers interviewed, proceeded on four fronts.

Reporters get ethics, law wrong in vacated murder sentence

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When Ryan Ferguson was released from prison Nov. 12 where he had been serving time for the murder of a newspaper sports editor, television journalists from across the country swooped down on Columbia, Mo., home of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. The big story provided a teaching moment for one professor, concerned about accuracy, media ethics and the appearance of objectivity. A lesson was to be learned, too, about convergence, and how an event can be transformed or amplified by the various forms of media buzzing around it.