Unrequired Reading {9.10.08}

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:

• The Melt­down (Part III) | Robert Reich — “[C]onsumers in the real eco­nomy are com­ing to the end of their capa­cit­ies to keep spend­ing. They can’t take on any more debt. And with the costs of energy, food, and health insur­ance all soar­ing, they’re doing the only thing they can. They’re pulling in their belts. They’re leav­ing the malls. They’re not buy­ing a new car or TV or any­thing else they can do without.

  For years, regard­less of the busi­ness cycle, Amer­ican con­sumers were the Ener­gizer Bun­nies of the world eco­nomy. Their spend­ing kept it going. But now the Ener­gizer Bun­nies have turned into scared rab­bits, and they’re going back into their holes.”

• Dows­ing for Journ­al­ists | Neur­o­Lo­gica Blog — “Sci­ence stor­ies are not fluff pieces simply because there is bad sci­ence involved … any such story, even if the topic itself is not con­sequen­tial, is an oppor­tun­ity to either edu­cate the pub­lic about sci­ence and crit­ical think­ing or to con­fuse them. It doesn’t really mat­ter what the topic is if the reader walks away less crit­ical and more con­fused about sci­ence in general.”
• Magazines Are Solu­tion to Web’s “Cess­pool of Dis­in­form­a­tion” Says Google’s Eric Schmidt | HuffPo — “Nar­rat­ive sus­tains the [media] busi­ness,” said Schmidt, “…but the future of high qual­ity journ­al­ism is a huge prob­lem. A reas­on­able pre­dic­tion is that there will be fewer voices. More money is needed to fund high qual­ity work.” Schmidt rhet­or­ic­ally asked if “young audi­ences will want a more inter­act­ive exper­i­ence in print.” Print, he sug­ges­ted, “will be a smal­ler com­pon­ent of a much lar­ger online busi­ness, serving an audi­ence that con­sumes in a dif­fer­ent way…

  There is a danger, Schmidt exclaimed, of the Inter­net “becom­ing a cess­pool,” adding it is in need of high qual­ity con­tent of the type provided by magazines. “In a world of dis­in­form­a­tion, which is the future,” he said, “brands are the solu­tion. Brand affin­ity is hard wired and fun­da­mental to the human con­di­tion – who you trust and who you don’t. People want real value, real inform­a­tion, real lead­er­ship and mes­sages of hope.”

• Nick Robin­son: ‘I got too close to gov­ern­ment in report­ing Iraq’ | Hack­a­demic — “The biggest self-criticism I have was [that] I got too close to gov­ern­ment in the report­ing of the Iraq war. I didn’t do enough to go away and say ‘well hold on, what about the other side?’ It is the one moment in my recent career where I have thought I didn’t push hard enough, I didn’t ques­tion enough and I should have been more careful.”
• The Bradley-Wilder-Dinkins Effect | Depth Report­ing — “By ana­lyz­ing Sen­ate and Gubernat­orial elec­tions between 1989 and 2006, this paper has provided the first large sample test of the Wilder effect. In the early 1990s, there was a pro­nounced gap between polling and per­form­ance for black can­did­ates of about 2.3 per­cent­age points. But in the mid-1990s, that upward bias in tele­phone sur­veys disappeared.”
• What Hap­pens to News­pa­pers? | New Media Know­ledge — Tim Gop­sill, Neil McIn­tosh, Mar­tin Stabe, Justin Wil­li­ams and Mike Row­ley are the men with the answers at NMK’s panel on Tues­day 28÷10÷08.