Natasha Lennard, a freelancer reporter for the New York Times, was taken off the Occupy Wall Street story after she appeared on a panel supporting the group. She now says she is leaving mainstream media.

This is what she wrote on salon.com after being told she would no longer cover the Occupy movement for the Old Gray Lady:

“As the Times publicly noted, they found no problem with any of the reporting I had done for them on OWS. Indeed, a court hearing upheld that I had been on the Brooklyn Bridge as a professional journalist and as such, deserved to have the disorderly conduct charge against me dismissed. The only reason I was on the Brooklyn Bridge that day was as a reporter, gathering and relaying information on what I saw, and nothing else.”

She wrote a remarkably detailed and even-handed tale of her arrest. You can find it here.

Detailed report

In her Salon column, she wrote that she was done with mainstream media and its standard of objectivity and rejection of truth-telling. Is it possible to claim journalist privilege and then claim a specific truth?

   Interestingly (or foolishly), two publishers best known for launching publications during newspaper strikes have announced plans to offer a third newspaper in Detroit. They have hired several Motor City journalists laid off by the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News. The two papers are in a joint operating agreement and have agreed to carve up the week, with each offering home delivery only on certain days. The new daily, which will sell for half the price, will be offered seven days a week.

     In Miami, professional journalists are being tapped to help launch The Herald’s Community News Network, a series of micro-Websites aimed at individual suburbs around the city. Once launched, The Herald intends to have little to do with them, intending for the communities to support their sites with content and conversation. This is similar to (with a more hands-off) to the Washington Post’s attempt to launch mini-sites in suburbs around the city.

     Is it just me or does anyone else find it interesting that when these  longtime brands want to start something new they turn to the folks they once had in their midst?

Journalism students under attack at Northwestern

    David Protess founded the journalism school’s Innocence Project in 1999. Since then, information his students have uncovered have led to overturning 11 convictions, including the case of a man on death row who was 48 hours from execution.

     Their work largely was responsible for the former Illinois governor (not the guy accused of selling President Obama’s U.S. Senate seat) declaring a moratorium on inmate executions. Cook County Prosecutor Anita Alvarez, apparently sensing that Prentiss and his students were about to free a 12th inmate, has demanded student grades, expense accounts and e-mails.

     She has two theories:

     1) The students are not journalists and therefore are not covered by shield laws or case law that would afford some protection against overzealous prosecutors.

       2) The students may have been coerced into finding information leading to innocence because they would get better grades.

      This is both a tremendous reminder of the power of the journalist, and a chilling example of the power of the state. 

      Despite apparently sincere efforts, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor could not articulate how students’ grades or whether they received pizza money while working on the project had anything to do with the veracity of the information they uncovered.

      I have never heard of a judge reading the morning newspaper, becoming overwhelmed with an investigative report on the potential innocence of an inmate, sweeping aside his (or her, of course) oatmeal and calling the prison to release the wrongly accused.

      Journalists point out evidence that was overlooked, twisted or otherwise mangled. The judicial system is then supposed to investigate on its own. The fact Alvarez is pressuring a professor and students - and that she is arguing the students are not journalists – is outrageous.

     As for the key issue – who is a journalist? – the best response, I would argue, is the same given by the U.S. Supreme Court when asked to define pornography: I know it when I see it. In other words, I know journalists when I meet them.

     Though I visited the New York Times website the morning after the shooting, I noticed only how they did their usual thorough job of covering all angles. The fact is, the Times – without getting much credit or seeking any (which is a mistake) – has been a leader in the news biz for trying to use new technology for improving its storytelling.

     An excellent example is their use of interactive timelines to give context. For instance, this Sunday they posted a relatively sedate but highly information timeline of the healthcare debate. I’m not sure how “interactive” it is, but it does allow the user to skip back and forth, including the eery time when Hillary Clinton was leading the healthcare charge. Click on the image to check it out.

New York Times interactive timeline on healthcare reform

      My point is that the Times, while often rightly criticized for fawning over their establishment sources and too frequently hewing to the party line, the editors and reporters who work there know who they are, what their mission is and are desperately trying to figure out their path in the New World Information Order.

     That’s a good thing. If the Times can figure it out, as the Ochs family did during the first, second and third crash of the newspaper industry, then others will follow. And that’s good news for reporters.

  The two, of course, are tightly linked.  In order for reporters to be reporters, to spend their time and energies shining light in dark corners, somebody has to pay them. There has to be an infrastructure behind them and in front of them. In other words, reporters rely on others to keep their computers functioning, to write their pay checks, to do all the administrative tasks that go along with being a working journalists.

   They also rely on others to create and maintain the channel by which they transmit their journalism. Whether its over the Internet or by way of the daily printed page, somebody has to keep the servers running and the trucks on the road.

    I’m not saying that critiquing the industry is a bad thing. The industry needs all the critiquing it can get. But, Big Media is undergoing a relentless onslaught of both outside criticism and self-reflection.

    My main point: Journalism as done by full-time, professional reporters is important. To me. To you. To anybody interested in the idea of representative democracy.

   So, stay tuned for further posts that, I promise, will do more than ramble on about corporate nonsense.

   It’s not as crazy as it sounds. For the last eight decades or so, the basic business model of a daily newspaper has been to basically  give away the print edition and slam advertisers for the majority of both operating revenue and profit. The traditional split has been 80 percent advertising to 20 percent circulation.

The Dallas Morning News has shed 22 percent of its circulation.

   As advertisers have fled in the last year, many newspaper executives are re-examining this model. Their conclusion: Since it costs more to print the paper than subscribers are paying, let’s raise prices and get down to our core, core readers – those who care enough about the paper to pay what it actually costs to produce it.

    For the Dallas Morning News, one of the best and most venerable papers in the country, this has mean a 22 percent (that’s not a typo) decline in circulation.  Heh… that has always seemed a wacky idea to me. I can think of no other industry that responds to declining sales with a price increase. My prediction: When advertising starts to come back (and it will, though not at the levels it once was), there will be new pushes for circulation.

     By then, however, it will be too late, and these newspapers will have seriously damaged their relationships with their longterm customers.

     What this means for reporters, however, is that the major metros will be pulling in from their traditional coverage territory. As they shed circulation in the outlying geography, the bean counters will be suggesting more newsroom cuts. I am hopeful, though not optimistic, that these slashes in traditional beats will mean more resources for digital operations.

The Breeze, the twice-weekly college newspaper at James Madison University.

    Two reporters for The Breeze, the twice weekly student newspaper at James Madison University in Virginia, have been charged with trespassing.
    They were conducting interviews in at a campus dormitory about an alleged peeping tom incident when they were confronted by the dorm supervisor.  It is sad, though hopefully educational, that these young reporters have to face so early on the challenges – and potential dangers – of confronting authority.

     This is a case where professional reporters in the region would do well to come to their aid by reporting on what’s going on.  One suggestion: Put in an open records request for all trespassing charges filed in the last two years on campus. I suspect this case would stand out as being usually sedate.

   It might also be helpful to point that Madison, the main architect of the U.S. Constitution once said, that “popular government without popular information is a prelude to a farce…” Something to ponder.