These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- Political Blog Visitors Skew Older and Wealthier Than Average Americans | comscore — “Looking at the demographic profiles for the top three sites, HuffingtonPost.com, Politico.com and DrudgeReport.com, one can conclude that visitors to these sites tend to be older, wealthier, and more likely to be male than the average U.S. Internet user.
Of the three sites, Politico.com skewed the oldest with 23 percent of its visitors age 55 and older, while DrudgeReport.com skewed wealthiest, with 40 percent of its visitors earning at least $100k a year, and had the highest concentration of males at 57 percent. HuffingtonPost.com, the site with the largest audience, was the most similar of the three when compared to the overall U.S. Internet audience.” - Chinese press controls and food safety | Eating their words | The Economist — “Chinese journalists knew about the [contaminated milk] problem, if not the full extent of it, weeks before it became public in September. But officials and dairy executives, apparently worried about spoiling the mood at the games (not to mention their reputations), did not want news to spread.”
- The Real McCann Scandal | New Statesman — “Error on this scale, involving hundreds of “completely untrue” news reports, published on front pages month after month in the teeth of desperate denials, can only be systemic. Judging by what appeared in print, it involved a reckless neglect of ethical standards, a persistent failure to apply even the most basic journalistic rigour, and plenty of plain cruelty.
No explanation has emerged besides the obvious one: that this was all done to sell newspapers. Seeing the scale of public interest, it looks as though editors were ready to publish stories, and reporters were ready to write them, even when they had no merit whatsoever.” - I was the first black British TV news presenter | The Guardian — “I made headlines in British newspapers when I was appointed one of three on-camera reporter/interviewers on Thames-TV’s daily evening show, Today with Eamonn Andrews.
It was the first time a black person had appeared on British TV in a non-entertainment role and, as I had been a journalist all my professional life, I enjoyed the job which involved interviewing everyone: Prime Minister Harold Wilson, movie star Michael Caine and round-the-world yachtsmen, as well as ordinary people in newsworthy situations.
After nine months, though, my contract was terminated and I was told that the producers were under pressure from viewers who called in daily to say, ‘Get that n****r off our screens.’”
- Bloomberg health foray | FT.com — “Bloomberg will on Thursday join forces with an online network for doctors to launch a service allowing investors in pharmaceutical companies to monitor and solicit physicians’ opinions on new drugs, medical devices and therapies.
The data and news group has partnered with Sermo, which has assembled a community of 90,000 working doctors in just over two years and is adding 7,000 members a month.”
- Murdoch takes issue with new biography | International Herald Tribune — “Wolff and executives at Doubleday said Murdoch received an advance copy of the manuscript through his son-in-law, the high-profile London public relations executive Matthew Freud, who is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, Murdoch’s 40-year-old daughter. Wolff said he believed that Freud obtained it through an acquaintance at a London newspaper that had received a draft under a nondisclosure agreement for the purpose of negotiating serial rights.”
