Corrections, smartphones, paywalls: Read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Another good weekend for reading:

"The Wrong Stuff" (Media Bugs): MediaBugs, a 2009 grant winner in the Knight News Challenge, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, just expanded to the national stage as a place where errors can be brought to the attention of the media in the hopes of having them corrected. As founder Scott Rosenberg once explained, news operations are horrible at admitting they got something wrong, oftentimes leaving readers, listeners or viewers apoplectic. So with the Knight grant he created a website in the San Francisco Bay area where those mistakes could be reported and tracked, ratcheting up the public pressure to make things right. (Think SeeClickFix, but not for potholes.) Now Rosenberg is attempting to do the same on a national scale -- and none too soon, judging from the survey MediaBugs did of the corrections practices of some 40 national newspaper and cable TV operations.

"Mary Meeker: Smartphones Will Surpass PC Shipments in Two Years" (TechCrunch): Morgan Stanley is back with more data on smartphone adoption, indicating their sales will move past laptop and desktop computers combined by 2012 and skyrocket from there. And newspaper publishers are beginning to pay attention (pdf), with near-unanimous agreement by respondents in a just-released Audit Bureau of Circulations survey that the public will be relying more and more on mobile devices -- not only smartphones but tablets and e-readers too.

Rap interlude: Take a listen to this catchy rap ode to NPR's shows and personalities.

"The Content Project: Building an 'EZ Pass' for Paid Content" (eMedia Vitals): This online newsletter, which describes itself as serving print media executives wanting to move their businesses online, offers a look at one idea for generating new news revenue: a system of à la carte options for paid content that might include things like day passes, annual subscriptions and metered access. Registration creates a credit card-backed electronic payment account that will buy access to the content on any website that participates in the project. Say organizers, "The key to making this work is making it as simple as possible for users" -- like the EZ Pass many motorists use to pay road tolls.

"Seven Reasons Newspapers Are Not Rebounding Financially" (Poynter Online): Rick Edmonds, who follows the business end of the news business, writes about the challenges still facing newspapers, despite the deep cost-cutting of staffs and news hole during the recession. But as he takes stock through three quarters of 2010, the scary point No. 6 on his list says alot: "The 'death spiral' cycle continues."

"Jim VandeHei Talks Politico Pro" (Columbia Journalism Review): Despite the above, Politico, the website and newspaper covering Capitol Hill in D.C., has big plans for a pricey news service that will deliver deeper looks at policy and politics to subscribers. It's among a handful of such plans by media companies -- including behemoth Bloomberg -- to offer everything under the sun to those who crave (and can pay for ) it.

Geeky interlude: The New York Times on Nov. 14 put online a companion graphic to a print story that allowed readers to "fix" the U.S. budget deficit. The blog 10,000 Words takes a look under the hood in the graphic's creation.

Put some worry lines on that 'I need a freakin job' face

By now you've heard about the "I need a freakin job" billboard in Buffalo, featured in news reports this week as President Obama visited western New York to talk up the economy.

From WIVB Channel 4 in Buffalo (after the commercial):



Both the TV station and the Buffalo News say the billboard wasn't aimed at Obama's trip; that was serendipitous. Rather, the highway sign is part of a campaign organized by two brothers to bring attention to continuing high unemployment.

"See, here's the thing. Nothing matters if people and families aren't working. We need to make some noise. The government is absolutely broken," they say on the website aptly dubbed INAFJ, for I Need a Freakin Job. They also posted a video on YouTube a month ago.

To be sure, with the jobless rate stuck around 10 percent, their message resonates. But if I could offer one suggestion, it would be this: Make your campaign appealing, too, to unemployed and underemployed professionals.

Give me a LinkedIn chapter of your movement to complement the Facebook generation on the billboard and YouTube.

The website and video are edgy, but the pictured crew is pure Gen Y. Sure, they have reason to be worried: Experts say people entering the job market in a recession usually land lower-level jobs at lower-level pay than new employees in more robust times.

But those of us pushed out of the jobs we've held for years also are concerned about our futures.

Take Cynthia Norton, featured Wednesday in the New York Times' "New Poor" series, where tales of the recession's impact on once solid middle-class lives are detailed.

Norton, 52, a former administrative assistant, lost her job at an insurance company two years ago. She had worked in the field all her life -- even ran her own secretarial services business at one point -- but office-support jobs are disappearing as technology takes greater hold.

So Norton tried to retrain -- and now is stuck with student loan payments. She sold off assets. She took a part-time cashier's job. She even joked about breaking the law, since jail would take care of room and board.

The recession stole her career, as it did the livelihoods of others in job categories made obsolete by the creative destruction that is said to accompany every leap forward in capitalism.

That ought to give the INAFJ brothers many, many generations of faces to use on future billboards. I'd certainly like to see Norton's there.

Women short-changed as newsrooms shrink

A headline today on an online op-ed, "Still Missing: Women in the Media," spurred me to crunch some of the census numbers released this week by the American Society of News Editors.

By my estimates, women have lost ground in the country's newsrooms over the past decade, accounting this year for 36.6 percent of the overall work force at newspapers and their Web sites, vs. 37.1 percent in 2000. In real numbers, that's 15,180 women working today as supervisors, reporters, photographers, videographers, page designers, online producers and copy editors, vs. 20,876 in 2000.

What's more, that decade-ago total for women is still less than the number of white men alone -- 23,249 -- currently working in newsrooms. (The ASNE numbers are here.) Men today comprise 63 percent of the work force in U.S. newsrooms, with the vast majority of them white.

The census has been conducted annually by ASNE since the late 1970s in an effort to track newsroom diversity. And the numbers released this week showed that minorities lost ground as layoffs and buyouts continued at newspapers battered by the recession. That prompted UNITY: Journalists of Color Inc., the umbrella group for Asian American, Hispanic, black and Native American journalists' associations, to ask ASNE to help "rebuild our newsrooms with diversity as a key strategic value."

I couldn't find any similar call from women's press clubs, which have lobbied on behalf of female journalists for decades. (Note that it was only in 1998 that ASNE voted to include a count of women in the annual minority survey of newsrooms.)

But the "Still Missing" op-ed proffered other grievances: that fewer women are interviewed for news stories; that they aren't as sought after for commentary; that they own very few of the country's radio and TV outlets; that they're underrepresented on the boards of media companies jockeying for dominance.

Yet the author's overarching worry that women are being marginalized could easily have enveloped the newsroom census, too: "Sure, we’ve made great strides -- we’ve got Rachel Maddow and Katie Couric and Oprah. But our work for gender equality in the media is far from over. It’s as important as ever to tie the media reform movement to the advancement of women."

Job-hunting is tough work

I’ve read about people sending out 60 or 100 cover letters and resumes in their job search.

I’ve heard the advice on setting aside at least 35 hours a week to focus on finding a new job.

I’ve seen the accounts of people laid off in the Great Recession who are still jobless after a year or more.

It’s all so unnerving. Then there’s this statistic to give pause: six applicants per available U.S. job.

That’s courtesy of Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, who monthly crunches numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to see how the unemployed are faring.

Earlier this month, she looked at the BLS’s JOLTS report for July to calculate the latest candidates-per-job ratio. (The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey is released after the government’s monthly report on employment, but whereas the latter covers the previous month, the JOLTS data are two months old.)

What did she find in JOLTS?

Pinch me so I feel the recovery

The other day, the local newspaper carried an editorial cartoon by Marshall Ramsey of The Clarion-Ledger, a daily in Mississippi, that was a takeoff on the whole Rep. Joe Wilson flap.

It shows Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke at a podium, as President Obama had been in his Sept. 9 address to Congress on health care. As Ramsey's Bernanke tells the audience "The recession's over," the Joe Wilson line "You lie!" is delivered by a man in the audience with "UNEMPLOYED" emblazoned on his chest.

Yes, those of us who became unemployed in the Great Recession don't yet feel the economy improving.

Of course, Bernanke didn't exactly proclaim the recession over -- the dating of business cycles lies with the National Bureau of Economic Research. But the Fed chairman, speaking to the Brookings Institution, did say that "from a technical perspective, the recession is very likely over at this point."