“Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising” is a new single-serving Tumblr that makes me laugh because I work in media and I see these attitudes on display all. the. time.

Like the one above.

A study by the Norman Lear Center took a look, studying 11,000 stories on eight local television stations in L.A. over two whole weeks. They found that most of each 30-minute newscast was “frittered away,” in the words of one commenter. Strip out the ads, the weather, the sports and there’s not much left. Local government issues, for example, get a mere 22 seconds per half hour.

Here’s one video that takes an overview of the study:

The FCC Commissioner, commenting on the study, said that he was “flat out alarmed.”

Read more about it on the Norman Lear Center’s page — including the study itself and several more videos. As you can imagine, it’s gotten plenty of coverage in the non-television media, but I found about it on the L.A. Times, where columnist James Rainey was biting in his assessment that “local news is neither very local nor very newsy”:

You’re sure to learn about the Guitar Hero championships. (Slammin’ video. No analysis required.) But don’t expect to find out much about who’s running for Assembly or just how much library hours will be reduced by the latest city budget cuts. …

Try to recall an evening newscast that didn’t include an animal in a predicament or at least one story gift-wrapped in yellow police tape. A regular diet of this stuff might reasonably have you cowering in your house. Never mind that statistics (so meddlesome, those numbers that provide context) show crime in fairly sharp decline in recent years. …

The sports guy gets ever more jocular. And the weather gal never wants for time to show the latest cutoff low on the map in her latest low-cut top. …

As USC released the study last week, former KCBS reporter Bob Jimenez derided the way local news operations wallow in a culture of “kicks, guts and orgasms at 11.”

Rainey also dug into the files that local TV stations are required to submit to the FCC, files that are supposed to show how they are acting in the public interest, by covering important stories. Well, the stories that the stations deem as locally important and in the public interest are laughable. Or would be, if it weren’t so sad.

In it, Ebert examines the bully-style tactics of Bill O’Reilly and how he, and other “news” figures like him are changing the way people not only receive their information, but the information itself.

I am not interested in discussing O’Reilly’s politics here. That would open a hornet’s nest. I am more concerned about the danger he and others like him represent to a civil and peaceful society. He sets a harmful example of acceptable public behavior. He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels. A majority of cable news viewers now get their news slanted one way or the other by angry men. O’Reilly is not the worst offender. That would be Glenn Beck. Keith Olbermann is gaining ground. Rachel Maddow provides an admirable example for the boys of firm, passionate outrage, and is more effective for nogt shouting.

Ebert goes on to decry the way radio and television have changed — which struck me as a comment on “the good ol’ days” that I have no sympathy for — but his analysis of O’Reilly, and others like him, is spot on. The bottom line, in Ebert’s mind, is that the polarization in the media has to stop. I would have to agree.

Newseum:  Today’s Front Pages

Truly, a news junkie’s playground.

BREAKING: Computers may affect the future of the news business. MORE TO COME. (This photo, and the others in this post, are from the Winnipeg Tribune archives held at the University of Manitoba. Original caption, from 1977: "Winnipeg has entered the era of small, affordable computers which have turned sci-fi into kitchen counter reality and raised the possibility of a computer in every home.")

A lot of other people are linking to this Jeff Jarvis rant, so when I got an email directing me to read it — stat! — I delved in.

Jarvis argues that the newspaper industry has had decades to see, recognize and react to the changes that were coming — from Craigslist to Google — and that since they failed to change, they deserve to fail.

My (lengthy) analysis, after the jump:

It’s hard to argue with Jarvis’ indictment of “angry, old white men” and their “hail Mary” desperate moves, but the part I found most interesting was this:

You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news. You blew it. You had a generation to reinvent the business but you did too little.

…

The best thing some of you can do is get out of the way and make room for the next generation of net natives who understand this new economy and society and care about news and will reinvent it, building what comes after you from the ground up. There’s huge opportunity there, for them.

And rather than playing the blame game, that’s what everyone should be talking about. The “future of newspapers” will not likely come from some newspaper stumbling onto a business model that “works” any more than the recording industry will suddenly go back to vinyl 45s.

The only thing that could make this picture more relevant to this post is if we took out the record player and put in a newspaper. It's just about as obsolete! Burn!

The future of the recording industry springs from MySpace: from band-run websites that offer free music samples and links to an online store. And when I know that the money’s going straight to the band, and not to the suits — well, I might add a T-shirt or a bumper sticker, too. (At one point I might have suggested Oink as the future of the music industry — I would have gladly paid a subscription fee — but I no longer think so. There are too many competing rightsholders to make it worthwhile.)

Similarly, the future of newspapers — of online journalism — is likely to spring from microsources like Twitter, or blogs, or even Craigslist. No, it’s not obvious yet. But too many people are too invested in “creating” news, or filtering it (locals: see eBrandon, for all its faults. Imagine what will happen if that site crosses an advertising threshold and is suddenly able to hire a full-time fact-checker and rumour-squasher).

I see this as a three-stage process. First is content creation. We’re already there. Businesses and governments post news releases online. This isn’t investigative reporting, but it’s a start. People also post every bit of what happened to them online. There’s too much of this information — far too much — so stage two is aggregation and/or filtration. Blogs already do some of this, some of the time. Newspapers excel at this part of the game, as well as at stage three: monetization.

But because newspapers have lost their lead in content creation, people are flocking to other places for their information. That leads, eventually, to a breakdown in monetization. Translation: newspapers are losing money because people don’t get their information there anymore.

Sooner or later, someone, somewhere, will come up with a really great system to synthesize all the various information sources online — and that will make traditional newspapers nearly obsolete.

Sure, some people will still love them (old folk) and some larger news sources are, literally, too big to fail. I’m talking about huge news sources like CNN, the New York Times, etc — places that drive much of the chatter online. But smaller, community newspapers just don’t swing that sort of influence anymore.

What’s the best bet for these smaller news sources, then? Well, if I knew the answer to that, I’d be getting rich already. But my bet is that newspaper will have to harness the “me first” power of their readers. People want their own opinion flaunted online — and a community-based forum that lets them do that with the “authority” of the daily newspaper might be really attractive.

Of course, it would have to be separate from the “hard news” of the rest of the website — just take a look at the comments section of any newspaperperson’s blog. Chances are, you’ll find tons of “and you call this a news article?” blather, when clearly it’s not.

But imagine a newspaper that puts its reporters to work on actual investigative reporting — instead of chasing accidents or checking up on community rumours and gossip to generate stories.

Those hard news stories would be things that ordinary discussion forums just can’t touch. And over in the newspaper’s discussion forums, moderators can find the most popular rumours, make a quick phone call to city hall, say, and either verify them or squelch them. Tagged with an authoritative “yea” or “nay” label, the discussion can move forward much more productively.

Let community groups and school sports teams make their own posts, instead of pathetically hoping that their meagre press releases get picked up on a day when the newspaper has more room than normal.

Car accidents and other “breaking news” can almost be outsourced to people who happen to be on-scene with a camera phone. Look at CNN’s iReports for an early version of what some people will do for the fame of being on TV.

But it doesn’t have to be just fame. Let post creators share in ad revenues with the newspaper, like YouTube does. If you’re a consistently interesting post-maker, with consistently interesting points of view, or breaking news, you could make a bit of coin on the side.

Heck, imagine a columnist at the paper these days — let’s say a quilting columnist. They may make a few dollars for every column, but chances are that if the current editor doesn’t happen to like quilting, the column will be dropped — in the absence of market research. But put that column online, let the columnist do his or her own promotion, and if it proves popular, let them make some money based on that popularity. Or, if they want to do it for sheer personal love of quilting — fine! There’s infinite space on the Internet.

These days are over! Today's newspaper subscribers actually have computers in their homes -- and in their phones! -- that make delivery faster, easier and cheaper. Yes, even cheaper than child labour.

Look, I’m just riffing away here, I haven’t really thought this through. But I’d be curious to hear what other people think.

I can hear some of the objections — oh, it will take time and money to develop this website, and people will have to be hired to run it, and be moderators, etc. Well, yeah. But guess what? It also takes plenty of time and effort to personally deliver a printed copy of your product to every subscriber’s house every single day! Which method of distribution do you think is more efficient in the long run?

There are almost too many good ones in that list to pick out here — I encourage you to read through the list and maybe post your favourite in the comments. I confess to having a soft spot for the many, many, many that were pulled as pranks by media institutions. I wish newspapers these days had half the sense of humour we used to.

Actually, back when I was at the Brandon Shopper & News, I helped pull a prank on our crosstown rivals, the Wheat City Journal. With the help of a departing staffer (whom I was replacing), we crafted a story about a Korean outfit who had come to Brandon in search of used compact discs. Partnering with a local charity, they were able to “resurface” old, scratched-up CDs that no longer played. Like retreaded tires, these newly-resurfaced CDs could be sold more cheaply than brand-new CDs, yet still at a profit.

Best of all, if Westman residents could chip in and donate their unused CDs to these Koreans, the local charity would get a cut of the profits — and it would all go towards the benefit of the Western Canadian Jaundice.

Hmmm …. Western Canadian Jaundice? WCJ? Wheat City Journal?

That’s right — we asked out readers to drop off used CDs at the address of our competitors’ offices. For the skeptical, we even had a website promoting the initiative.

Apparently, they got boatloads of CDs dropped off by well-meaning people. We had, of course, put “Happy April Fool’s Day” at the end of the article, but apparently people were in too much of a hurry to be charitable to bother finishing the story.

By the end of the day, after being yelled at by several layers of my bosses, we promised never to do it again. Sigh.

In that spirit of worker rebellion, I think one of my favourites in the list above is No. 96, the Boston Globe Price Cut:

Readers of the Boston Morning Globe in 1915 could have purchased their papers for half the cost on April Fool’s Day, if they had been alert. The price listed on the front page had been lowered from “Two Cents Per Copy” to “One Cent.” But almost 60,000 copies of the paper were sold before anyone noticed the unannounced price change. When the management of the Globe found out about the change, they were just as surprised as everyone else. The new price turned out to be the responsibility of a mischievous production worker who had surreptitiously inserted the lower value at the last minute as the paper went to print.

The future marches on for Detroit journalism.

Oh, man — talk about bad timing and the face-palm of missed opportunities. Just check out the devastating start to a story in the New York Times called “Detroit’s Daily Papers Are Now Not So Daily“:

Maybe once a year, a city has a news day as heavy as the one that just hit Detroit: The White House forced out the chairman of General Motors, word leaked that the administration wanted Chrysler to hitch its fortunes to Fiat, and Michigan State University’s men’s basketball team reached the Final Four, which will be held in Detroit.

All of this news would have landed on hundreds of thousands of Motor City doorsteps and driveways on Monday morning, in the form of The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News.

Would have, that is, except that Monday — of all days — was the long-planned first day of the newspapers’ new strategy for surviving the economic crisis by ending home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Instead, on those days, they are directing readers to their Web sites and offering a truncated print version at stores, newsstands and street boxes.

Read the story. There are people who will really miss the loss of a physical newspaper. But the Times does a good job of finding several different constituencies: there’s a woman who doesn’t have time to stop at the store for the new “abbreviated version,” as well as a retired woman who says she wants the physical product no matter what. And they also find a retired man who is ready to move online to find his news.

The papers’ servers crashed Monday, too, unable to keep up with huge demand for their “e-editions.” Maybe that bodes well?

The old business model’s broken, and it’s not coming back. Somehow or other, I believe there will be newspapers, and there will be journalists. But we have to figure out a new way to pay for it, and we haven’t figured that out–who’s going to pay what it takes to do excellent reporting and careful writing, and who’s going to buy it in what form when it’s done …. There’s a lot of innovation that’s going to go on. I just don’t think it’s going to be done by the management of papers as we now know them. I don’t think they have the imagination. I shouldn’t make a sweeping statement, but so far, what I see is just cutting and cutting and hoping some kind of miracle happens. I don’t mean that that’s the character of this company more than it is the character of any other. I just think that, for the most part, most newspaper management is in a state of shock. They’re not really going to be the ones to do it.

One of the commenters takes it even further, laying it on the Baby Boomers directly. Really rips into them, too:

Baby Boomer managers, and journalists … over the last 30 some years have had ALL the TIME in the world to innovate, and protect newspapers that are now about to go out of existance throughout this country (and others as well.)

Frankly, many aging boomers falsely believed that they were going to live forever, and did the best they could to keep their jobs over three decades, while at the same time, continuing to force younger reporters to skip from paper to paper, town to town, who’ve had to face the same “unimaginative” baby boomer executives, publishers, managing editors, and city editors, as well as having to deal with unresponsive boomer journalists who sought more to protect their careerist positions, rather than to innovate before it was too late.

Now, it is too late, and not only for baby boomers, who are lucky enough to even be offered “buyouts” rather than being laid off.

You can’t say that for the younger Generation X editors, reporters, etc., who now have NO newspaper to go to since the Baby Boomers, in their own greed and shortsightedness, have destroyed newspapers that lasted over 100 years.

Unimaginative? You bet.

It’s downright gruesome and sad to see one generation take down the entire newspaper industry and expect all of us to cry about the “good run” they had.

Great ride. But it’s the last ride for any other generation since younger generations cannot follow to even clean up the mess the Baby Boomer generations has left behind.

As for the newspapers ~ there won’t be any “mess” to clean up since papers are falling left and right ~ destroyed by the generation that once said never trust anyone over 30.

Great Job baby boomers.

Whether its fair to blame so-called “baby boomers” or not, I do think there’s a real fear in the upper echelons of the industry these days — and too many managers are afraid to take any chances. They just want to hold on until their pensions kick in. You can almost hear them chanting “Five more years, just five more years” with retirement so close they can smell it.

But, despite the anger that newspaper execs were asleep at the switch, I think there’s a burgeoning creativity online that bodes well. Newspaper inspire loyalty and love from people, and people really want to re-create their (former) success online. I have hope.

When newspapers lost their idiosyncratic design -- including the Chicago Tribune's daily front-page cartoons, above, or the San Francisco Chronicle's distinctive sports section on green newsprint -- newspapers also lost some of their vibrancy and urgency and individuality, said former editor John Walter.

Wow. I stumbled across a very interesting column on Poynter earlier today. Poignantly, it was written by a former newspaper editor and discovered on his computer after he died. His wife gave permission to Poynter to publish it.

John Walter writes that big-city newspapers are dead. But, with a love of specificity and drilling down that characterizes a good journalist, he doesn’t lay the blame at the feet of vague terms like “industry shifts” “changing reading habits” or an “advertising slowdown.” Instead, he singles out three specific individuals who made influential changes at their newspapers, with long-term ramifications that have caused newspapers to die.

Now, you can (and I do) argue with some of his contentions. The changes that he cites may have been introduced by these three individuals, but there’s no doubt that if they hadn’t done it, someone else probably would have. They just happened to be first.

Still, the column is a fascinating read. To briefly sum it up, he blames the loss of newspaper competition on A.J. Liebling. He blames the loss of idiosyncratic newspaper design on Ed Arnold. And he blames the loss of a journalism-first ethic on Al Neuharth.

But although it’s not central to his thesis, he starts off the column with a lengthy reflection on why he — a former editor! — no longer even subscribes. It’s a low-key but searing indictment of the state of the industry. I mean, just read:

I canceled my subscription. This was because I discovered that I foolishly had been paying full price for a home-delivered subscription and didn’t know that if you started a new subscription, you actually got 50 percent off for 12 weeks. So, we canceled our subscription and then started it up again, and had 12 good weeks at 50 percent off.

Then I called to cancel my subscription at the end of the 12 weeks, and they said they really didn’t want to lose me as a customer, so I could have another 12 weeks at 75 percent off, and I realized what a fool I had been to take the paper for 50 percent off.

So I signed up for 12 weeks at 75 percent off, and when those 12 weeks ended, I called up to cancel, and they said, sorry, they weren’t offering the 75 percent off subscription anymore, but I could have the Wednesday through Sunday papers for the same price that I had been paying for the full week at 75 percent off, so I took that for another 12 weeks.

Then, just the other week, when they said I now had to pay full price again for whatever subscription I wanted — Sundays only, or five weekdays, or Thursday and Monday, whatever — I said the hell with it.

I sympathize with him. I’ll bet that if you offered free subscriptions — free home delivery, anywhere in the city, no cost ever! — circulation managers would be depressed at the low rate of subscriptions. There just isn’t as much interest in day-old news anymore.

Anyway, the column is a good read — a perceptive diagnosis, if not yet a cure.

The recent Winnipeg Free Press layoffs caused a ripple of soul-searching in the Manitoba corner of the blogosphere. Progressive Winnipeg kicked it off with a “State of the Blog Address” that took a look back at where he got his material:

Myself and most bloggers rely on news sources for our commentary. [My last] post is an example of that. In fact, I have gone through all my posts thus far in 2009 and have, out of 31 posts, 16 that were not based on a newspaper article (or, roughly half). I based two from the CBC and one from the BBC, two from other bloggers.

10 of my 31 posts (or, roughly a third) are commentary on a specific article from a newspaper or are follow ups.

Following this lead, Endless Spin gave it a whirl:

Doing my own test, I found that of the 24 posts I’ve written since the beginning of February, 15 out of 24 were directly based on something I read produced by a mainstream media outlet, while one other one was based on blogger reaction to a news item. Only two of my posts contained any modicum of “original” reporting .

He even does some extra research, citing studies that show 40 to 70 per cent of blog posts in the States reference something originally produced by the mainstream media.

Well, I am not going to put on this hair shirt. I think the “original reporting vs ripping off the mainstream media” dichotomy is a false one.

There is very little original reporting going on in the blogosphere — that much is true. But there’s a heck of a lot of original thinking. That’s because blogging is not the same as reporting; it’s got much more in common with writing an opinion column. I think the reasons for this are plain: writing an opinion is both easier than original reporting, and also, historically, more glamorous in the media.

But also, the very nature of the Internet makes original reporting, paradoxically, less important. Sixty years ago, there needed to be a reporter for each newspaper at the Legislature, or at the White House. Each paper needed its own source for the stories — it was a rare story that relied on the pool reporter. You wanted your readers to get all their information through your company? You needed an independent source for that information.

Not so anymore. Flush with information on today’s web, news consumers no longer follow the one-paper-for-all-my-news model. They pick and choose. And, as they gravitate to the most-popular two or three sources for, say, their national political news, the smaller players drop off the scene. Net negative? Maybe, but it’s what the Internet facilitates — clicking around from news source to news source.

So what does this mean for bloggers? It means as long as there is at least one source for original news, they’re free to link to it, and riff on what it means all they like.

Bloggers should not be confused with reporters. We’re much more like columnists.

That said, it doesn’t address the core issue, which is that news coverage, as it dwindles, leaves less and less to feed the blogosphere’s chatter. Or does it?

Consider the metric that Progressive Winnipeg and Endless Spin used to measure their own reliance on the mainstream media — how many of their posts linked back to or relied on something in the MSM.

Now let’s apply that thinking a little higher on the food chain: How many so-called “original stories” in the newspaper do you think relied on a press release?

After all, make a couple of phone calls to a known critic, take out the PR-flack’s most odious puffery, and you’ve got a bona fide news story from any press release.

I would bet that well over three-quarters of the news in any newspaper is generated in a similar manner. Maybe it’s not as obvious as a press release, but it could be phoned-in a tip, or a court schedule, or a meeting agenda. It’s generated from somewhere outside the newsroom.

Underneath the umbrella of “mainstream journalism” there is a wide range of stories — from rewrites, to chronicling, to reporting, to investigations, to opinions. So far, bloggers have mostly replicated just the opinion stuff. Like I said, it’s both the easiest and the most glamourous. But it also relies on some other people doing the grunt work of generating original stories.

Or does it?

If even three in 10 news stories in any paper are the result of some reporter pounding the pavement, working sources, and digging through things that aren’t merely handed over, I’ll buy a hat just to eat it.

If tomorrow, poof, every newspaper in North America vanished, what do you think would happen to those press releases, those meeting agendas, and those phoned-in tips? I’ll bet before the month was out, every blogger in the world would be getting deluged with them.

Because for every negative story that gets printed about city hall, there’s probably five that are either positive or neutral — and those are stories that city hall still wants to get out.

And bloggers, bet your bottom dollar, wouldn’t miss a beat. They’d go to the city’s website, link to the press release, and write a post about it — same as they do now with a news story.

Is this as good as a “professional journalist” doing his due diligence?

Well, I’ll say “not yet.” But I’m optimistic for the future.

Because if you go back a couple of centuries, before the dawn of what we might recognize as newspapers, what you’ll find is kind of like a low-tech blogging society.

Pamphleteers — often solo and self-financed, or financed by patrons (sometimes political parties) – would publish screeds on the doings of the day. Without any news organizations to reference, they would assume that their audience had at least a partial understanding of the news of the time. If they didn’t, the audience would have to make do by reading between the lines of the pamphleteer’s latest jeremiad.

Gradually, these one-person opinions evolved into early newspapers, and from there into the newspapers that everyone knows, loves, and is getting ready to mourn, even as we link to them.

So I have to think that these early days of blogging will — and I don’t know how — give birth someday to a real new kind of journalism. Maybe it’ll be corporate, maybe there will be ultra-rich “blog barons” who keep a stable of low-paid opinion peons, maybe it’ll be financed by grassroots donors, maybe by non-profit endowments. I don’t know.

But I do know that there’s a hunger for information out there that won’t go away even if newspapers as we know them don’t survive.

And I can see the broad outlines of what blogging may become. The blogosphere is decentralized in a way that the mainstream media is not. They’re collegeal and courteous, by and large, to fellow bloggers. There is an emerging “blog culture” that encourages crediting and building upon the work of others.

There’s still a rush to be first — to get the classic “scoop” — but when you’re talking about minutes or seconds instead of a day, being first is much less important than bringing something valuable to the table.

I like that philosophy. Linking to and building upon the work of others recalls to me the words of Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further than others, it has been because I stood upon the shoulders of giants.”

Bloggers may currently stand on the shoulders of the mainstream media, but I don’t think we’re parasites. I think we’re just trying to peer a little further.

Weird, I thought. That’s not what the other stories I read had mentioned at all. I thought it had gone, I dunno, okay?

Not according to the folks in Cleveland, who wrote, among other things:

Brown clearly took care in choosing his gift for President Obama, presenting him with a pen holder crafted from the timbers of the 19th century British warship HMS President. The HMS President’s sister ship, the HMS Resolute had previously provided the wood for the Oval Office’s desk. Therefore the PM’s gift was clearly not a last minute thought.

Obama, however, did not take the same amount of care in choosing the British leader’s gift – 25 DVDs of American classic movies. In fact, some believe he put absolutely no thought in to it at all for several reasons: Brown could get these movies anywhere himself, and US DVDs are typically incompatible with UK DVD players. Oh, and Brown is blind in one eye.

Yikes! The paper also quotes a British counterpart, the Daily Telegraph, as saying, “President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain. His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling.”

Luckily, a Daily Telegraph story about the Obama-Brown meet’n'greet was right next to the Cleveland one on Google News’ little feed. So I clicked over to the Daily Telegraph.

I’m sure the folks in Cleveland accurately quoted whatever story they read, but I didn’t read that story. Instead, what I got was a spec piece entitled, “Has Gordon Brown’s Meeting With Barack Obama Restored His Fortunes?”

Apparently, if a gift of movies is a slight, all has been forgiven. Now the Telegraph asks whether Brown has watched “Raging Bull,” one of the 25 movies that he brought back from America, drawing comparisons between the pummelled pugilist made famous by Robert DeNiro and the occupant of Number 10 Downing.

But the punches they’re talking about don’t come from Obama’s snubs, rather from the public and the press back at home. In fact, read what the Telegraph has to say now about it:

The machinations about his press conference which was perceived by some – albeit no one in the Prime Minister’s travelling party – as a snub are unlikely to matter long term. It is clear that the White House belatedly realised that they had not thought out some of the arrangements before Mr Brown arrived, fuelling the theory that they did not really care about their guest. The phone call from the President to Mr Brown’s departing plane helped soothe some of the hurt.

It’s interesting to think that, even in an age of immediate global information, we still have these regional differences in our persepctives. It’s still that which is local that matters most to us — as well it probably should.

Similarly, I read recently about a breakthrough in stem cell production. If there’s anything more global than science, I don’t know what it is. Building on Japanese research, teams of Canadian and British researchers managed to find a way to turn adult skin cells into stem cells — without also risking the creation of cancer cells.

It’s a breakthrough — something for the scientists to be proud of, sure! But here’s how it was portrayed in the press:

From the Globe and Mail: “Canadians Make Stem Cell Breakthrough”

From the Scotsman: “Scottish scientists create ‘ethical’ stem cells”

From Agence France-Presse, under the headline “Stem Cell Breakthrough Now Goes One Step Further,” the lede was “Pioneering work by Japanese stem-cell researchers two years ago has taken a major step forward.”

All of those are accurate – all those researchers “coulda bin a contender“ for the lede of the story – but this is just something to think about the next time you read a story that panders to your national/provincial/local pride.

Turns out that Crown Royal (distilled not that far from me, really) has just launched its first American TV campaign in five years.

So, why now, in the teeth of a recession? “Ad Report Card,” one of my favourite columns over at Slate, has a theory:

I’m also fairly certain Crown Royal recognized a zeitgeist opportunity. This is a moment where the brand’s established image—down to earth, unflashy—meshed rather smoothly with external events. In uncertain times, vignettes about people sticking together and helping each other out become suddenly relevant. This is a campaign that seems well timed and conceived to take advantage of a shifting national mood.

Seth Stevenson, who writes “Ad Report Card,” draws some astute distinctions between a “brown” liquor like Crown Royal and a “white” liquor like Grey Goose:

If Grey Goose’s promise is that you’ll get laid on a yacht, Crown Royal’s promise is that your life will brim with purpose and community.

Which approach would you rather bet on these days? Grey Goose sold oceans of vodka in the boom years and became a signature drink of cosmopolitan excess. But the boom is over, and times have changed. America seems poised to transition into a brown spirits state of mind.

It’s not a very frequent column, but I always like to read a new “Ad Report Card.”

Here’s a collection of “Calling all Girls” magazines from decades past. Each of them features a delightfully cute dachshund, making for quite the little gender studies project, if one wished.

There’s also wonderful headlines like “How to lose weight and enjoy it!” and “How do you rate as a spectator?”

Ah, feminism. Where were you then?

(via Draplin)

Closed. The Rocky Mountain News finds itself in the same position as the homeowners it recently reported on.

It was a long and winding road for Colorado’s oldest newspaper, the 150-years-young Rocky Mountain News. But in the end, they just couldn’t go on any longer.

The paper’s owner, Scripps, has announced that, unable to find a buyer, the doors on the Rocky will be closed for good Friday.

It’s tough times for the industry, sure, but I had kind of high hopes for the Rocky. According to their own story on the closure:

In the past decade, the Rocky has won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than all but a handful of American papers. Its sports section was named one of the 10 best in the nation this week. Its business section was cited by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers as one of the best in the country last year. And its photo staff is regularly listed among the best in the nation when the top 10 photo newspapers are judged.

The paper was one of the first to shrink to a tabloid size, in 1942, and it slimmed down dramatically in 2007, as well, moving to an almost magazine-like size, with lots of bold colour and photography.

The content was strong, and the presentation was impeccable. Just leaf through some of their front pages here.

Unfortunately, Denver’s a two-newspaper town, and that town just ain’t big enough for the both of them anymore. Don’t think that the Denver Post is going to be happy to see them go, though: in a bid to save money, the two newspapers have been sharing business services — from advertising to a printing press — for eight years.

The Post, by the way, recently wrangled wage and benefit concessions of nearly 12% from its unions, to try and save that business.

I remain confident that, when the dust settles, there will still be professional journalism, but we’re really witnessing a shakeup in the industry, and a lot of babies are being thrown out with the bathwater.

Cyril Jacquet

Who vets reality TV contestants? Because a simple Internet search might have saved the producers of the Spanish-language version of The Amazing Race from a bit of embarrassment: seems one of their stars is a convicted murderer. When he was 15, he shot his mother to death, then waited at home for a few hours until he could empty the clip into his dad. As a juvenile, he served 3 years, and has a clean record.

The New York Times has a pretty good roundup of this developing gossip-scandal:

In an interview with the show’s host, Mr. Jacquet blamed “the media” for his troubles, and refused to elaborate on the murders, since, he said, that would only help the press in their “lynching” of him. He told the Spanish public that he is now happy with his life, and “my past is buried.”

Pretty poor word choices, methinks.