Barack Obama’s decision to release Bush administration memos that argue for the justification of torture techniques has been all over the news. Something else has raised a bit of ruckus in journalism academia circles, and that is Mike Allen’s account for Politico on how the decision was made.

Allen wrote a fairly short piece that led with the news that Obama consulted a wide range of sources before making his decision. In the fifth paragraph of this eight-paragraph story, Allen chose to “balance” the piece with anonymous quotes from a former Bush staffer who railed against the decision. The staffer accused the administration of putting America in danger, a fairly weighty claim. Read more

I’ve blogged a lot over the past few years, either here or via the Cyberbrains, about different pieces of the puzzle that the news industry can use to pull out of the current economic challenge it faces. My recent posts about Google and the AP got me thinking about maybe pulling some of those ideas together, and then one of my bright students who follows me on Twitter (@) gave me a bit of a nudge on this.

Obviously it’s really easy to point out misguided ideas, but putting yourself out there and talking about what you think will work is a little bit harder. I’ve been here at MU for almost five full years and had access to knowledge, resources, great minds, and some really cool future-looking projects. A lot of different ideas are swirling in my head as a result as I’m winding down my time here.

In reference to AP and newspapers/online sites in general, I’ve cobbled toether some ideas that I’ve read about or witnessed in action firsthand that offer a glimpse of a better future. Three caveats I offer: Read more

In case you missed Jon Stewart’s brilliant interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer yesterday, I’ve embedded part of the clip above. But I would go to DailyShow.com to see the and even to watch the full unedited interview, because it is a fascinating peek at what journalism sometimes is missing in financial coverage.

In case you’ve missed the news coverage this has gotten (CNN / NYT / WaPost), Stewart took Cramer to task for the fact that he and his network essentially cheered on a bubble built on working class dollars while hedge fund managers and Wall Street insiders cashed in.

If the pundits only focus on how entertaining this was (and it was entertaining), this is a missed opportunity. Stewart’s interview not only exposed the culture of CNBC’s reporting habits, which are filled with conflicts of interest, but also showed how it’s done in an era where expert pundits often are fresh off the payroll of the industry they’re covering. Read more

New York Times media writer David Carr penned an interesting piece that has gotten some play in media circles today. Summing up the feelings of a lot of my fellow journalists, he modestly proposes that newspapers get together and end the free ride on the Web for both readers and aggregators.

In other words, charge.

Carr notes that for this to work it’s going to take some collusion among newspaper companies, which is probably illegal and would require antitrust law changes to make it happen. A lot of what he’s saying is a rehash of what others have suggested, but it’s a pretty solid summary of the camp that wants to charge now and often. Read more

It’s a sad day for those of us who care about journalism and public service. The Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper that existed and served Denver even before Colorado became a state, folded this week and published its final issue this morning.

Much has been said how we got to this point. noted that it’s remarkable the RMN lasted this long, because two-newspaper towns (The Denver Post being the competitor in this case) were a dying breed even 15 years ago. Others have lit up the boards at Poynter, blaming everything and everyone from management to out-of-touch journalists.

In some ways, this is a rehash of what we’ve been talking about for 10 years now. Read more

I had an interesting exchange with a student a couple weeks ago about advertising and journalism. After I made the point that advertisers need to be concerned about journalism losing eyeballs, the student remarked that journalism might go away but advertising can survive because it can directly market to people and because people will “always need advertising.”

Granted, the student had something of a point in that the age of self-publishing has allowed advertisers to reach audiences directly, but let’s put aside for a second the fact that this pretty much is the opposite of what most ad execs are worrying about.

The main issue is advertisers need platforms to reach people and that those platforms demand non-advertising content, such as movies or TV shows or news.

The larger point I’ve taken away and been pondering is whether this younger generation conceives of ad content differently than mine. I have grown up with it being cordoned off into “ad sections” either on TV, in print, or online. More to the point, I’ve seen it progress so much that I’m pretty conscious when something is being sold to me if it crosses that barrier. Read more

The Online News listserv had an interesting post about a site called Breaking Tweets, the brainchild of Craig Kanal, that culls interesting Tweets from Twitter feeds on particular topics and puts a “human face” on things going on in the news.

A good example is the coverage on the site of the Australian brushfires.

Thinkers rightly note that, as with any media that is an aggregate of socially produced content, this ultimately means more noise in the stream of media conversation. Journalists often use this as evidence that this “noise” doesn’t matter and makes it inferior to professional jounalism. Read more