It’s always bugged me to read stories in the press about the financial problems the press is having. Journalists, it turns out, aren’t too clear-eyed (and often aren’t too intellectually honest) when it comes to analyzing the collapse of their own profession.

My argument for what’s really going on, or at least the beginning of a series of them, is currently up at Splice Today.

The result is a long—too-long probably—detailing of the five central issues that I contend are at the heart of the collapse of daily journalism. To me it’s incredible that they are almost never detailed in mainstream accounts on the troubles of the industry—because there’s no way to fix the problems if it’s not acknowledged what they are.

Part I is up now. Part II will be up later today. I’d welcome, of course, comments, criticisms and other thoughts on the industry.

The Journal’s crushing scoop on Steve Jobs the other day—which said Jobs had had a liver transplant in Tennessee a couple of months ago—left competitors flat.

Generally when news like that breaks, the reporters who got scooped are sent off on one of the most humiliating jobs in journalism—calling sources and asking, rather pathetically, if they could possibly confirm the story for you so that you can report it to your own readers as straight news, crediting the competitor who got the scoop originally as far own in your own story as possible.

(Howard Kurtz has this down to a fine art.)

Anyway, the odd thing about the WSJ story is that it cited no sources in its flat lede, and backed up the lede’s assertions nowhere else in the story:

Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple Inc. since January to treat an undisclosed medical condition, received a liver transplant in Tennessee about two months ago. The chief executive has been recovering well and is expected to return to work on schedule later this month, though he may work part-time initially.

A hint to who did leak can be found in this key graph, similarly delivered with no sourcing:

At least some Apple directors were aware of the CEO’s surgery. As part of an agreement with Mr. Jobs in place before he went on leave, some board members have been briefed weekly on the CEO’s condition by his physician.

I don’t buy a lot of the complaints about anonymous sources, myself; much of the problem is just a subset of the game-playing papers get into with governmental officials, trading anonymity for incremental disclosures on an ongoing political agenda that have no real value for readers.

In other words, a big part of the vacuous use of anonymous sources are part of stories that are shitty in the first place. But it is fun to watch the papers enforce rules about it, producing some nice semantic juggling as they try to both still use the anonymous sources and simultaneously explain why the sources are unnamed

I suspect that this was a one-source story. The usual formulation would be to make the attribution as vague as possible: “… sources familiar with the matter said.” (The use of the plural in that phrase is one of the biggest lies in journalism.)

So it could be that the Journal decided rather than broadcast how flimsy their sourcing was they’d just go with a pronouncement from on high. More charitably, you can read it as a little bravura flourish. It intimidated the NYT so much, for example, that the paper’s follow-up could not only do nothing but report the fact that the Journal had reported the operation, but also didn’t even bother to state something that would cry out to be mentioned (and would, for example, be exhibit A if the story were later found to be inaccurate): That the WSJ, with an unusual disregard for big-time journalism’s first law, cited no sources for its information.

Say you’re a big-time media critic, like Howard Kurtz. It’s time to do a little media analysis on that newfangled Twitter. Your angle:

[T]he site is less important than the way its users are changing the media culture. They are exchanging more than just 140-character bursts of blather about their daily lives: They are guiding their friends and followers to the latest news, information, gossip, snark and a pulsating, real-time debate.

If only you had an up-to-the-minute example of how that phenomenon you’ve identified manifests itself!

Kurtz, who works for the Washington Post, started to work the phones. He got one:

When I mentioned on my Twitter page that I would be talking on the air about Conan O’Brien taking over “The Tonight Show,” I got a flood of messages.

Well, ok, that didn’t require any phone work, or even looking past one’s belly button. Still, every reporter knows that one anecdote does not make a story. Kurtz went deeper, all the way down to … the celebrity angle:

[T]he boldfaced names may provide carefully calibrated glimpses, but some actively engage with their fan base.

I became friendly with Mariel Hemingway when the actress began following me on Twitter. When I began checking out her page, I was struck by how often she shared the details of her life, from her hiking to her bedtime. Without any handlers or publicists, we agreed to meet for a CNN interview when I was in Los Angeles.

Turns out Hemingway was promoting a cookbook! How surprising she would agree to meet with … a journalist.

And how fortunate that she is about the most glamorous cookbook author one can think of. One suspects that if Kurtz had noticed Dick Van Patten was following him on Twitter that they might not have “become friendly,” which I bet is a euphemism for “I sent the attractive actress a private Twitter message.”

Anyway, the point of all this that, while Kurtz was flirting with Mariel Hemingway and marveling that normal people would tweet about someone in the news, there was a very real example of how Twitter users are interacting with the media.

Here’s a story in todays’ NYT, about how CNN unaccountably blew off strong coverage of the chaotic aftermath of Iran’s election:

Untold thousands used the label “CNNfail” on Twitter to vent their frustrations. Steve LaBate, an Atlanta resident, said on Twitter, “Why aren’t you covering this with everything you’ve got?” About the same time, CNN was showing a repeat of Larry King’s interview of the stars of the “American Chopper” show. For a time, new criticisms were being added on Twitter at least once a second.

In other words, while the Post’s media critic was writing a dizzily focused, celebrity-dripping recitation of the obvious, the Times was doing an actual story  with a real-world impact stemming from the same subject.

The difference? Kurtz, of course, works for CNN.

In his Washingtonpost.com chat this morning, with typical intellectual dishonesty he addresses a question on the issue from a visitor:

Howard Kurtz: The role of bloggers and tweeters in covering the unfolding Iran saga has been invaluable. And with Ahmadinejad’s regime starting to crack down on the likes of the BBC, it’s been a difficult story to cover.
I know Twitter folks have been all over CNN for not providing more coverage on Saturday. I’m sure CNN could have done more, rather than run some taped programming, perhaps by taking the CNN International feed in the U.S. But it seemed to me that CNN did more than the other cable networks, with regular reports by Christiane Amanpour from Tehran, and especially on Sunday, when it ran many hours of live coverage.

Note how he tries to position himself as being in the know .. and then spins for the network that employs him … without revealing the confllict of interest.

A lot of people don’t like Kurtz; what bugs me about him, and to my mind makes him unfit to hold the positions he holds, is that intellectual dishonesty.

To me, an honest media critic would a) first have bent over backward to include the issues in his piece, and b) in any case bent over backward to address the issue later. (”I wish I’d been alert enough to have noticed the Twitter complaints about CNN while I was doing my in-retrospect-pretty-superficial Twitter piece in this morning’s paper. I don’t agree with most of what was said about CNN—which, remember, writes me a paycheck every week—but it was a trenchant example of the thesis of my piece.”)

And later in the chat Kurtz spins for CNN again:

But when there’s an extraordinary event, such as what is happening in Iran, they need to step it up. As I said, CNN had a lot of coverage on Sunday but not as much as people were demanding, which is why they turn to blogs and Twitter, where some folks are always posting, around the clock.

Link via kausfiles. By the way, Hitsville is on Twitter, too.

Jimmie Fallon is comedically spineless, and has the moral ethos of a timid paramecium. So the news that he’ll be shilling on his new show for Bing, Microsoft’s umpteenth attempt to get into the search game, won’t besmirch his persona.

From the NYT:

[T]he segments on “Late Show” will present Mr. Fallon as a quiz master, asking contestants to use bing.com to search for answers to questions in categories like travel, health and shopping.

“ ‘Bing’ sounds like a Jimmy Fallon word,” Mr. Silverman said, laughing. “The alignment is great.”

In this way, Bing is the new Garden Weasel.

What will be interesting to watch from here on in is how NBC (and Fallon’s creator and puppetmaster, Lorne Michaels) will handle a name host whom they have essentially formed out of clay, and who will obviously do whatever he is told.

These days, 10 or 20 years in the life of a modern media franchise is unimaginable. But in theory, when Conan O’Brien* finishes his time on the Tonight Show there will be an even more pliable shell waiting in the wings—one who makes the pliable Jay Leno** seem difficult.

Since Bing is owned by Microsoft, Fallon probably won’t suffer the same fate as Whoopi Goldberg, a star with similarly high standards in her commercial affiliations, who jumped into bed a while back with another one of those newfangled internets companies and brought home a little problem. (If you’ll recall, she was suddenly the ubitquitous spokesperson for a misbegotten outfit called Flooz.com, which ended up screwing a lot of its customers out of their money when it shut down abruptly.)

As for Bing—Microsoft’s last search gambit, you will recall, involved paying people to use it. (This was the euphoniously named, oddly unsuccessful “Live Search Cashback.”)

The only problem with that was that M’soft couldn’t get advertisers on the thing. After chatting with Steve Ballmer on the subject, one reporter in all seriousness speculated that he was considering paying advertisers to support the idea as well.

At the time, Hitsville contended that the only way to improve on this innovative business model would be if Microsoft also just bought the companies’ products and gave them to consumers, thereby guaranteeing the ads’ success.

————

* Has O’Brien been funny yet in his new show? After presidential-transition-level coverge in the Times, it was hard not to be at least curious. But I’ve seen only tepid laughs, flop sweat, and O’Brien’s inability to stop hitting the desk top, the thumps from which echo uncomfortably into his mike.

Sample line: Joan Rivers is trying to sell her NYC apartment for $25 million. “It sounds high, but knowing Joan Rivers, it’s probably had a lot of work done.” The audience laughed tepidly, but O’Brien didn’t blink: He followed that up with a Larry King joke.

** Speaking of hacks, Neil Strauss does a blowjob interview with Jay Leno in the newest Rolling Stone. (There’s a short excerpt here; RS doesn’t generally put whole features online.) The departure of Leno from late night would be a nice moment to reflect on a guy who after 17 years on the job will leave no footprints—a colorless gladhander, a host simulacrum. Carson held him in contempt, as does, patently, David Letterman. But Strauss, no doubt looking for a new ghostwriting gig, doesn’t ask Leno anything remotely challenging.

The WSJ’s L. Gordon Crovitz plods on. Connoisseurs of his sober assertions of eminently incontrovertible fact will find much to savor today:

[Google] so dominates search on the Web that “google” has become a verb meaning “to look for information.”

…

[Search is] the first place we look for information on the Web, and the Web has become the first and often last place we look for answers.

These scintillating observations come not in a 10th-grade book report but an regular op-ed column in the WSJ. These tidbits come in the context of a column in which he tells us that Microsoft’s new “Bing” search engine had “the most buzz” of any product launch at the Journal’s All Things Digital conference. He was there and I wasn’t, but it’s hard to believe that was the case, unless it was the only product launch.

The prospect of Bing lets him ruminate on the nature of Google:

One of the most impressive achievements of Google is how well it’s done without much effective competition. About two-thirds of searches in the U.S. are now through Google, one-fifth through Yahoo and less than one in 10 through Microsoft.

Does that sentence make sense? There used to be a lot of competitors, but Google outsmarted them, right? Yahoo and AOL had huge user bases, but they lost much of them to a better product.

Crovitz is so wooly-headed that it’s hard to figure out what he’s trying to get at. If Google didn’t have “effective competition” its success wouldn’t be that impressive, right?

I think it’s more true to say, “The most impressive achievement of Google is how well it’s done in such a once-crowded field, even with very big operations (Yahoo, M’Soft, Amazon) always trying to steal its crown.”

Waxing profound, Crovitz continues:

After all, search has changed how we gather information and, when it works, find knowledge. It’s been a little more than a decade since people first began to go online to look for information rather than in print directories, encyclopedias and indexes. It’s impossible to overstate how reliant we have become on the Web and its search engines to find information.

As I’ve noted before (“The Master of the Obvious”), Crovitz’s column is a classic put-out-to-pasture consolation prize to a former editor, in this case a former publisher. One gets the feeling the Journal editors and copy editors view Crovitz’s fatuous submissions as a big ol’ waste of space, and courteously decline to make suggestions to improve it.

A year ago, David “McNutty” Simon was being widely lionized for the concluding season of “The Wire”; only in certain remote outposts were criticisms of his rather unnuanced understanding of modern journalism heard.

But it doesn’t seem as if his reputation has aged well. Back then, Simon’s crayola scrawlings about his former profession were taken seriously; today, well, here’s a Gawker poster, Ryan Tate, tearing apart Simon’s heavily romanticized testimony on the state of the newspaper industry:

The Wire creator, David Simon, was a cops reporter a the Baltimore Sun for 12 years, ending in 1995. He then made a lucrative second career in fiction and Hollywood before detouring into a sideline as a cranky, reactionary media pundit this past year.

Simon told the Senate Commerce Committee today bloggers don’t go to city council meetings, or know what the hell is going on if they do — a clichéd, out of touch refrain common among newspapermen who can’t be bothered to do any reporting on the assertion.

On Nikki Finke’s blog, history changes as fast as she can rewrite it.

When we last checked in with Finke (“Crazy Nikki vs. the journalist”), she was haranguing LAT columnist Patrick Goldstein and Summit Entertainment production capo Eric Feig for saying, correctly, that Juan Antonio Bayona, the Spanish director, had not been hired to direct the third installment of the Twilight franchise.

Finke began the discussion, by reporting, incorrectly, that Boyona had been selected by Summit to direct the movie.

Variety picked up the story and so did a lot of other blogs. Goldstein, a wet blanket if ever there was one, actually interviewed Feig about it. The exec said it wasn’t true.

Goldstein did a lot more reporting to make sure it wasn’t, and did a post-mortem on how the story had gotten out, focusing on Finke.

In response, Finke went characteristically ballistic in characteristically imaginative fashion. First she said that she hadn’t actually reported that Bayona was the pick; she quoted herself saying, “I can confirm that Summit Entertainment is telling Hollywood privately that Juan Antonio Bayona will direct Eclipse.”

That’s not much of a defense, of course. She wasn’t saying that they liked Bayona; she was saying that he “would direct” the movie.

And then there was the hedline for the post, which was “Summit Picks Bayona To Direct Twilight Threequel ‘Eclipse’.”

Feig told the LAT that Finke hadn’t called the studio for comment; his exact words were, “Nikki never called Summit or any of the producers.”

Finke turned that into this curiosity, emphasis added:

Summit Entertainment’s president of worldwide production and acquisitions Erik Feig is accusing Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein of misquoting him today about the accuracy of my reporting. And the movie executive has apologized to me. Feig also confirms that there’s no policy at his studio demanding that journalists must contact him, and only him, whenever they write about Summit films.

After that ringing lede, Finke

….. didn’t explain what Feig had said Goldstein misquoted him on;

…. didn’t explain what Feig had apologized to her for; and

…. never cited a source for Feig’s (nonexistent) him-and-only-him dictat.

Fast forward to today, when Finke just posted this item:

TOLDJA! David Slade To Direct ‘Eclipse’

“Toldja!” !?

In the copy Finke now says that Feig “offered” the film to Bayona, a bit of information she hadn’t shared with readers before. Finke has lots of (sometimes) good sources; a few days ago she’s promised some new bit of Twilight info, and this may have been it.

Her problem is that she’s incapable of admitting she’s wrong, and it drives her to extreme behaviors.

Her item on Slade doesn’t mention her earlier, inaccurate posts, and when I read it, I was confused; I had remembered her saying Bayona had gotten the job already. I went back to the original post, to read this:

I can confirm that Summit Entertainment is telling Hollywood privately that Juan Antonio Bayona will direct Eclipse. I’m not saying he’s been offered the job or hired, which in Hollywood involves deal memos, signed contracts, and the like. Just that the studio execs Wednesday night passed the word he’s their guy. It’s a very out-of-the-box choice for the 3rd movie in the “Twilight Saga” series of Stephenie Meyer vampire novels being hurried to the big screen by the start-up studio.

Now I was even more confused.

I didn’t remember that second sentence:  “I’m not saying he’s been offered the job or hired, which in Hollywood involves deal memos, signed contracts, and the like.”

If Finke had written the item like that originally, why would Goldstein have pointed to it as being incorrect? It didn’t take me long to find a few people who had quoted Finke’s original posting, which ran as follows:

I can confirm that Summit Entertainment is telling Hollywood privately that Juan Antonio Bayona will direct Eclipse. It’s a very out-of-the-box choice for the 3rd movie in the “Twilight Saga” series of Stephenie Meyer vampire novels being hurried to the big screen by the start-up studio. (I guess it doesn’t matter that other sources tell me Bayona hasn’t yet met Stephenie, huh?)

The rest of it hadn’t changed.

In other words, Finke got a big item wrong; went postal on another journalist who called her on it; made up a lot of wacky stuff; went back to change her original item to make herself look better without telling readers …

… and then, just to complete the pentathlon of bad journalistc practices she was engaged in, patted herself on the back for a scoop on a bit of information she got wrong originally.

There’s been a lot of writing about Nikki Finke lately, but none of it has captured her biggest weakness and the one that may, some day, wreck her career: Crazy shit like this.

Pixar is one of those companies for whom even bad news gets spun a little nice.

Consider the NY Times’ look at the company today. The Times is, as always, a serious paper with serious reporters, and Brooks Barnes should be given credit for taking on the subject, which is that some higher-ups at Disney are finally beginning to take a look at Pixar’s ever-declining box office figures.

(See Hitsville’s earlier “Is the Pixar Brand failing?”)

And the story goes deeper than I had imagined, noting that, Cars excepted, the company has been really lagging on the toy merchandising front.

(Cars, incredibly, produced $3 billion in toy sales. Ratatouille and Wall-E? Not so much.)

But the cumulative effects are now showing themselves:

Some industry watchers, a few of them still griping about the hefty $7.4 billion that Disney paid for Pixar in 2006, are fretting about the [forthcoming Up’s] commercial potential, particularly when it comes to benefiting other Disney businesses.

Richard Greenfield of Pali Research downgraded Disney shares to sell last month, citing a poor outlook for “Up” as a reason.

That’s all fine, but check out how Pixar’s box office gets described:

Adjusted for inflation, Pixar’s films have generated a combined $2.65 billion at North American theaters, a spectacular showing. “Finding Nemo” in 2003 was the high point, selling $405.6 million in tickets.

Pixar’s last two films, “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille,” have been the studio’s two worst performers, delivering sales of $224 million and $216 million respectively, according to Box Office Mojo, a tracking service. Attendance for Pixar films has also dropped sharply over the years, suggesting that ticket price inflation helped prop up overall sales for “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille.”

Emphasis added. In the second paragraph, he’s talking about a single metric, the popularity of a Pixar film, as if it has two separate parts. The figures he’s citing are corrected for inflation, so they by definition contain the evidence of the falling attendance, right?

(Inside a studio, there are two metrics; how much money the film made, and how much profit the company made on it. But that’s not the distinction here.*)

I don’t understand why the NY Times and other papers don’t have a single consistent standard for talking about box office figures. There’s a simple one available: Attendance, which can be simply calculated from box office and average ticket prices, with a little tweaking for kids films, which of course average a little bit less.

Absent that, what gets made opaque is the real bad news for Pixar. Here’s how I calculated it a few months ago, emphasis added:

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I haven’t seen any discussion of how Pixar’s formidable box office muscles have been weakening. I’m not buying into the money-equals-quality equation, here; the excellence of the films is a different matter. While no one was looking Pixar became a massively successful company seemingly run entirely by artists. And the company’s probably never going to lose money on a movie.

Still: Wall-E is the fourth film in a row that has brought Pixar’s per-film average down.

For Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc., Pixar averaged a $350 million North American gross, adjusted for inflation. The company’ last four films have averaged $250 million; its last three films $235 million, and last two films $217 million.

Pixar makes a lot of money overseas and from toys; and there hasn’t been a Shrek-sized animated hit in a while from any studio.

But Wall-E’s tepid box office ($223 million, just above Ratatouille’s $212 million) is pretty portentous as it moves forward under the Disney aegis.

The $3 billion in Cars toy sales answers the question of why there will be a Cars sequel, which nobody in the world is clamoring for. That and Toy Story 3, another concession to the bottom line, probably represent the company’s short-term battle plan.

If it doesn’t have a long-term one, sooner or later Disney is going to put the screws to Pixar. When that happens I predict we’ll see a recycling of the same stories we saw about the Weinstein and Disney, or New Line and Time Warner … heavy on sympathies to the victimized artistes, light on the reality that the artists gave up their autonomy when they sold themselves to the big bad wolf for $7.4 billion.

* In the story, Barnes writes:

The budget for “Up” is about $175 million excluding marketing, on par with other Pixar titles.

Box Office Mojo, however, says that Finding Nemo, by contrast, cost $94 million just six years ago. The disparity in budgets and appeal overseas means that, in strict dollar terms, Pixar made about one tenth as much profit on Wall-E as it did on Nemo.

Hitsville titled the previous post about Time magazine’s blowjobby piece on digital 3-D “Spinning 3-D,” using the word “spinning” in its metaphorical sense.

I mean, that’s essentially what writer Josh Quittner was doing: Presenting a unquestioning, upbeat and not-too-skeptical account of a new technology that will need a lot of friendly news coverage to gain some traction in the marketplace.

Turns out … it wasn’t metaphorical. Time Inc. has apparently cut a deal to provide friendly coverage of the technology in five of its magazines. Commenter “DW” passes along this post from a blogger who follows Canadian publishing:

Five Time Inc. magazines — Time, Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly– are running simultaneous, corporate-ordered editorial on 3-D technology and, in return, are getting a big advertising payday from Macdonald’s [sic], according to a story in AdAge.

The “Canadian Magazines” blog seems … evanescent, but the story* The story the blog refers to is apparently real. I can’t get the full version yet, but here’s the abstract from the AdAge site:

 MediaWorks

Time Inc. Helps Out Future of 3-D

Five Titles Coordinate Coverage After Dreamworks CEO Katzenberg Calls Huey

By Nat Ives

Published: March 13, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Synergy couldn’t deliver on the grand dreams of AOL Time Warner, but it still has life at the Time Inc. magazine division. Later this month readers of five fairly dissimilar sibling titles — Time, Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly — will find each magazine giving big editorial coverage to the subject of new-wave 3-D. …

The blogger continues:

The campaign came about because Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG, called John Huey, the editor in chief of Time Inc. to pitch the subject, Mr. Huey said. “I said, ‘What magazine are you pitching for anyway?’ He said ‘All of them.’”

What would have happened if Fortune, for example, came back with an article arguing that 3-D was a doomed fad, not the future of cinema at all? That problem didn’t arise, said John Huey, editor in chief of Time Inc. “It isn’t something I had to deal with.”

What a surprise.

* I misread the blog originally and didn’t apprehend it was as substantive as it was, which is why I said it seemed evanescent.

Have no fear about the fate of the San Francisco Chronicle.

As Psmith would say, “The cry goes round—the SF Bay Guardian has been heard from!”

The Chron, for reasons I have detailed here, has a reputation as the least-distinguished daily at a major U.S. city.; as you might know, its owner, the Hearst Corp., has said that it’s losing $1 million a week and says it will sell it—or shut it down—if it doesn’t slow the losses.

Outsiders may not know that the Guardian, one of the two local weeklies, one-ups the Chron by being  probably the worst alternative paper in the U.S.*: It’s a ponderous and lunk-headed institution that combines a still-tenuous grasp of journalistic niceties (like not letting lines of text drop off from the bottoms of stories) with a reality-denying brand of political thinking that gives leftism a bad name.

Evidence? Consider its editorial on preserving the Chron, which Guardian watchers will savor for its deft handing of the facts of the case and its sophisticated rasp of corporate economics.

For example:

Hearst is complaining that the Chronicle is losing about $50 million a year. Of course, Hearst, a private corporation, won’t show anyone, even its own unions, its books.

Actually, in 2005, an auditor for the paper’s unions found that the paper lost “at least $62 million” in 2004. Given the climate facing newspapers in the years since (and particularly within the last few months) there’s little reason to think that the paper hasn’t been continuing to lose money at that rate or something close to it.** (Alan Mutter, in a blog post here, using actual facts, argues that it’s higher.)

But the Guardian doesn’t care about facts. The editorial continues:

We realize the newspaper business is rough right now, but we’re not convinced that running a daily paper in San Francisco is a doomed proposition. This is one of the wealthiest, best-educated markets in the world

The Guardian, you will note, having eliminated the $1 million a week losses from the discussion, doesn’t have to come up with a plan to deal with them. Part of the reason the Bay Area is so wealthy, of course, is the digital industry, which sprang up under the corporate noses of the Guardian and the Chronicle.

When the New York company [i.e., Hearst; the Guardian is playing the out-of-towners card here, though Hearst’s involvement in SF journalism via the SF Examiner goes back more than a century] bought out the deYoung Thieriot family in 2001, it sought to create a true monopoly by shutting down the Ex entirely. A local outcry, a lawsuit by Clint Reilly, and threats by federal regulators forced Hearst to sell the bones of the Ex to the Fang family, which essentially got the paper free and was given a $66 million subsidy to run it.

After darkly questioning the idea of losses, the Guardian even more darklier suggests the Chronicle was a would-be monopolist. You don’t have to feel sorry for a powerful company like Hearst to note the $66 million payment to the comically inept Fang family was wasted.

(For a time it was fun to look at the front of the Examiner in newspaper boxes and see how many typos you could spot in headlines and photo captions, just on the top half of the front page.)

The Examiner was traditionally a better paper than the Chron, but its value—its more competent, less lassitudinous staff—came over to the Chron at the time of the merger, and it is now barely a presence in the city.

The Guardian continues:

Now, after all this, Hearst is threatening to close shop and walk away, destroying hundreds of union jobs and wiping out a newspaper that is, by its nature, something of a public utility.

A more correct recitation of this might be,”After being forced to throw that $66 million away, being saddled with two newspaper staffs to put out one paper, dealing with the end of the dot-com bubble, and, now, a major recession, Hearst has lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the paper, and, given the spiraling nature of the industry, no one seems to have a good idea of how to make money with it. Since the paper wasn’t that good anyway, San Franciscans won’t notice too much of a difference when MediaNews, which owns all the other daily publication in the Bay Area, takes it over, as seems likely.”

Instead, using its own internal logic, the Guardian has a solution:

The Chron unions have talked of an interest in buying the paper. Financier Warren Hellman confirmed to us that he supports creating a nonprofit entity to take over Chronicle operations. Hearst Corp., which has almost certainly already written off its $600 million purchase as a tax loss, should be forced to work with potential buyers — and give them a deal no worse than what the Fangs got in 2001.

If I read this correctly, the Guardian is saying that, since Hearst has lost $600 million (the Guardian is still not conceding any losses, which could bring the total to $1 billion) anyway, the company should give the paper to someone, along with at least $66 million more.

Finely argued debates on complex financial and social matters like this are what give San Francisco journalism its special flair.

* I worked at a competitor for the Guardian, the SF Weekly, in the 1990s, so readers are welcome to take my perspective on the paper with a grain of salt.

** One local SF union guy has made a convoluted argument on one of the Guardian’s blogs that Hearst wasn’t telling the truth in 2005 and that this is all a pot to bust the pressmen’s union; but the overall tenor of his complaints are a little … excitable, and I don’t believe him, at least on the point about the reality of the losses. Neither he nor, typically, the Guardian’s blogger asks the question of why the union didn’t challenge the figures back then.

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Previously in Hitsville

Why the SF Chronicle will not be mourned
Not mourning the Chronicle: The comments
Chronicle Watch

I’m a journalist and don’t sign petitions as a matter of course, but I’m making an exception here, for three reasons:

1. It’s not a political act per se, but voicing a concern about one’s profession; and
2. The profession should occasionally take steps to fix itself; and, most tantalizingly…
3. It sure seems like NBC is feeling a bit vulnerable on this one! If nothing else, the network behaved very badly last week. It sure seems like it decreed a blackout on talk of the Stewart-Cramer showdown on the Daily Show.

———

Previously in Hitsville

Is NBC whitewashing the news?
Is NBC twisting its coverage to protect Jim Cramer?

On March 10 and 11th, CNBC’s Jim Cramer appeared on TV almost hourly—on the Today show, on his own CNBC show, even on Martha Stewart.

Why? Because on Monday, Jon Stewart had gone after CNBC on the Daily Show. It wasn’t really about Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, but on Tuesday the former hedge fund manager inserted himself into the debate.

Stewart responded by showing a series of clips that showed Cramer enthusiastically talking up Bear Sterns stock, just before the stock dropped to 2.

Cramer, his reputation on the verge of being permanently tarnished, spent the next two days bouncing merrily from one NBC-owned show to another to vamp and try not to look like  a bad guy.

Finally, in a last-ditch attempt to limit the damage, Cramer appeared on The Daily Show, meeting face to face with a guy who’d been dogging him for several days. So anticipated was the showdown that it made the front page of USA Today.

As those who saw it know, the confrontation did not disappoint; the face off was a sensational bit of media criticism as Stewart hammered home his point: That Cramer in particular and CNBC is general were complicit in the financial crisis enveloping the country, by helping cheerlead a stock run-up that any conscientious person could have seen was untenable.

Anyway, here’s what happened on MSNBC on Friday:

Chris Matthews didn’t mention it. Matthews has a little segment called Sideshow, which addresses a few little amusing tidbits in the news that day.

He mentioned a Michelle Obama interview about her kids in the White House; Joe Biden talking up Amtrak; and a Democratic Party web site that twits Republicans.

No room for Cramer vs. Stewart.

Keith Olbermann didn’t mention it, either. Olbermann has a shtick similar to Matthews’ Sideshow, which he calls Oddball. He riffed on a couple who bought a second-hand couch … which turned out to have a cat living inside it; a monkey that used dental floss; and a dim Florida state senator who suspected that the science of “animal husbandry” involved naughtiness with animals.

A monkey that uses dental floss! But nothing about Cramer vs. Stewart.

As for Rachel Maddow—she has one of those amusing segments, too, called Ms. Information. She dealt with Cramer vs. Stewart there, tucked away at the end, but in an odd way; she didn’t show a clip, and her take was to talk vaguely about problems in “the business journalism world” without mentioning, specifically, CNBC. She also ended with a bizarre bit, ominously noting that while everyone was watching Stewart, the Washington Post had “quietly, quietly announced sotto voce today that it was eliminating its business section in the  weekday paper.”

It was a pregnant point, except for the fact that it wasn’t true. The Post had merely folded its standalone biz section into its section A. And I’m not sure how exactly a company announces something “quietly, quietly … sotto voce,” but the paper sent out the news in a lengthy memo to its staff and it was duly noted on journalism blogs and on sites like Politico.

Finally, on Meet the Press, NBC’s premiere news show, David Gregory mentioned the event, but in vague terms—”a nerve was touched” … Stewart “raised some really tough questions for CNBC…”—but didn’t manage to mention Cramer, and he didn’t show a clip either. He then let CNBC’s unfortunately named Steve Liesman give a commercial for all the “investigative work” he and the network did.

Now, Keith Olbermann is fast turning into a pompous bore, and I don’t understand the outsized appeal of Maddow, but Matthew is a fast thinker, Gregory’s trying hard to fill Russert’s boots, and on the whole it’s hard to make the case that this group is intellectually dishonest.

But the Daily Show face-of between Stewart and Cramer was the most talked about political event of the week.

First Cramer starts popping up like a prairie dog on NBC show after NBC show.

Then he gets his ass handed to him on a plate by Jon Stewart …

…and a lineup of shows always previously at the ready to play a little bit of fun tape suddenly fall mum.

The idea that this was not dictated from on high at NBC strains credulity.

Joe Freeman, a senior VP of Ticketmaster, writes in to the WSJ today to say … well, basically to confirm everything Ethan Smith wrote in his pungent piece last week detailing how Ticketmaster is helping artists scalp their own tickets:

Ticketmaster’s Platinum ticket program isn’t used to mask scalping (”Concert Tickets Get Set Aside, Marked Up by Artists, Managers,” Marketplace, March 11). To the contrary, and as our Web site states, Platinum tickets are primary sales that enable “artists and other people involved in staging live events to price tickets closer to their true value and participate more fairly in the economic value of the experience they’re providing to fans.”

Note how right after he says the program doesn’t mask scalping he … masks scalping.

By the way, I left in the parenthetical reference to Smith’s original article to call attention to the fact that the Journal doesn’t link to the original stories when it posts letters to the editor on the web. As newspapers die it should at least be a footnote that many could not manage simple new concepts like web linkage, much less evolve their thinking on the macro level to meet technological change.

TV Newser says that a tipster tells it that

MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today. In fact, the only time it came up on MSNBC was during the White House briefing, when a member of the press corps asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs if Pres. Obama watched.

And over the last couple of days we’ve seen Cramer go on everything from the Today Show to Martha Stewart to try to clean up his and his network’s image after Jon Stewart has cleaned their clocks no less than three times this week.

Cramer’s appearance on the Daily Show last night, in which Stewart delivered a Singapore-style intellectual caning for 25 excruciating minutes, would ordinarily be fodder for the Matthews/Olbermann/Maddow trinity.

We’ll see; Chris Matthews has been on for 20 minutes with no mention of it yet …

The LAT’s Patrick Goldstein has a nice little analysis of how a bad piece of information gets ricocheted around Hollywood. It is written, in typically Patrick Goldstein fashion, soberly, carefully and with humility, including a nod to his own fallibility and a cite of his own organization’s role in helping the bad information get around.

(It was about Juan Antonio Bayona supposedly being tapped to direct the third Twilight installment. Not really earth-shattering, but that’s big news amongst the folks he’s writing about.)

Anyway, Crazy Nikki has a starring role, being the person who got it wrong first. Then Variety chimed in, as did other film news sites, including a blog at the LAT.

Goldstein, as I said, carefully goes back and re-constructs what happened, speaking to everyone involved, including the head of the studio.

So Nikki Finke, who is fond of using the hedline “TOLDJA!!” when she is right and forgetting when she is wrong, responds and … goes nuts. The funniest thing about her response is a long preliminary digression about the head of the studio laying down a rule that only he can talk to the press, when Goldstein wrote nothing about that at all.

The second funniest thing is how she tries to defend her original news tidbit by pointing out its weasely wording. This is a classic fallback of bad journalists: “Well, all I really said was that someone said something was true, and he did say that, so what I wrote was correct!”

The third funniest thing is that she pegs the whole thing to the head of the studio apologizing to her. Shouldn’t she be apologizing to her readers?

The issue here isn’t whether Bayona ultimately gets the job, which he might. Read the whole exchange carefully and you can see that Finke also didn’t have Goldstein’s detail that the director in question had met with Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series. (She said flatly that he hadn’t.) Finke would have had her scoop if she’d done a little more reporting, found out about the Meyer meeting, and simply said what might indeed be the truth—that Bayona was the current leading candidate inside the studio and that Meyer hadn’t vetoed him. But the humility gene is one Finke doesn’t have.

Catching up on SF Chronicle news, I noticed this attack from CJR on the way the Chronicle itself let its readers in on the news that its parent Hearst Corp. was threatening to close the paper if it couldn’t get the cost cuts it said it needed.

The writer, David Cay Johnston, calls the Chron’s coverage of itself a rewritten press release, and that’s about what it is, though parts don’t even seem rewritten. Johnston:

Not one word makes it into the paper from Chronicle unions, whose contracts Hearst CEO Frank Bennack wants to “quickly” rewrite with “significant” concessions under threat of closing the newspaper.

Not one word from others with an interest in whether the Chronicle dies after 144 years—say, interviews with the mayor, city supervisors, major advertisers, political scientists, or perhaps just a few scattered longtime readers.

Not one word from, say, an authoritative voice on Bay Area journalism like Alan D. Mutter, or from the Chronicle’s most severe critic, Bruce B. Brugmann, owner of the Bay Guardian.

The story he’s talking about is here. It’s a good example of the manifestations of the type of journalistic indolence permeating the Chronicle I wrote about earlier this week. Writing about one’s own publication isn’t particularly easy or welcome, but it’s part of the job sometimes. You take a step back and try to craft the piece the same way you would about any other publication.

The Chron didn’t do that; there’s no byline on the story, and no skepticism. As Johnston says, there’s no outside voices, either.

The paper’s circulation isn’t given; instead, we get the industry trope of “readers.”

And not only that, but “weekly” readers. And the paper not only has 1.6 million of them, it has “more than” 1.6 million of them!

All of which sounds so much better than, say, “a daily circulation of less than 330,000.”

The editor of the Chronicle is Ward Bushee, who was until recently the editor of the Arizona Republic. Here’s a sense of that august journal’s approach to journalism.

It doesn’t look like this is a guy who’s going to guide the paper through this mess with its head up. That’s how permeating that virus is amongst the paper’s editors: It doesn’t even look like the SF Chronicle is going to be able to go out with dignity.

Lots of interesting comments and emails, pro and con, on my post on the SF Chronicle; the last one is a minor epic by Bill Mandel, one of the more thoughtful journalistic voices in town in the 1980s and 90s from his columnar perch at the SF Examiner.

Mark:

Good points all. While I love newspapers and am tormented by what I see happening to the industry and the careers of many friends, I can’t help but feel that many newspaper managements are, in effect, merely reaping the ill effects of what they’ve sown for years.

Yet, as imperfect as many of these institutions are, is there anything else on the horizon that might pick up their functions, whether it’s mirroring and defining a community’s sense of identity, or keeping a wary eye on local government officials. I don’t think so.

HV: The loss of the watchdog function of newspapers, which we’re hearing a lot of, is real, and I wouldn’t denigrate it, except to note that the ratio of watchdogging to the financial throw-weight of an average big city newspaper, say, fifteen years ago was very lopsided. The papers themselves would claim limited resources, but that of course just proves the point that it wasn’t a priority. (And I don’t even mean investigative reporting, just a focus telling people things they don’t already know.)

PJ Connolly:

Hammer, meet nailhead.

HV: I don’t know whether that is an insult or not.

Betty Medsger:

On the basis of your judgment of two arts writers who, you claim, didn’t produce much, you are willing to defame decades of work done by the entire Chronicle staff. And, suggest that the paper did little of value until the Examiner and the Chronicle merged. That superficial critique does a great injustice to the dozens of reporters, photographers and editors at the paper who, during those decades, did some excellent daily reporting and complex investigative stories. And who will do that kind of journalism if the Chronicle dies? We can hope it will come from new websites, ones that are more careful about facts and analysis than you were.

HV: In my defense, I was careful to note at the outset that the place had a lot of serious people. I went into detail on the people I did to try to make that case that the paper nevertheless didn’t hold others to basic journalistic standards. I hate to sound picky, but just because some people at a paper do excellent journalism doesn’t excuse permeating tolerance of the substandard. I’m not sure I have this all straight in my mind yet, but I have to say the issue nags at me: Are journalists as a class responsible for their downfall? Should they (we) have raised a ruckus?

And I also want to underline the fact that, for me and some others who comment here, there is a feeling that the Chron as an institution lacked certain journalistic genes. What exactly is wrong with the Chron has been a professional parlor game in San Francisco for decades. As Mandell discusses below, there was an arrogance to the paper, but it was matched by a tenuous connection to basic competence and standards.  This created that feeling, mentioned in my original post, of lassitude and indolence emanating from the paper.

Nance:

Right. So you didn’t like two writers among a staff of hundreds, therefore the paper is somehow stained and isn’t worthy of mourning. And you spent 2,000 words, give or take, to tell us this?

This is like these condemnations of the U.S. auto industry that all seem to go back to some guy owning a Chevy Vega that burned oil.

HV: There were a lot more than two. I concentrated on them because the paper’s years and in Selvin’s case decades of tolerance suggested something systemic at work. And don’t sneer at length; there’s too much glibness on the internet. I tried to make my case substantively.

Frank Grimes:

Boring. You sound like a real whiner. Carrol made a mistake, you are milking it. Big deal. You sound real BITTER.

HV: Thanks for taking the time to post.

Bill Mandel:

There’s a lot to be said for generalizing from small mistakes, so what does it say about this post that Will and Patty Hearst are not siblings but first cousins? (Surprise — in the next graf I praise your post, but you still have to get the facts right, right?) Will’s dad was WRH Jr., and Patty’s dad was Randolph Hearst, former publisher of The Examiner. Will, by the way, was extremely ahead of his time understanding the potential of the Internet, and has in the past 15 years become one of the most successful venture capitalists with the Tier 1 Silicon Valley firm Kleiner Perkins.

Now, to get down to the heart of the matter: I was a daily columnist for the old Hearst Examiner from 1976 to 1994, leaving in 94 because I, like Will, saw that newspapers were doomed. I wanted to get into the Internet world, which I have. But I sure miss writing my column and heaving it read — and valued — by an assembled audience that had few places to turn for news and analysis. Selfish? Perhaps.

Anyway: Before Hearst bought The Chronicle in 2000, the Chron was by far the laziest, most self-satisfied organization imaginable. It exploited its right as a newsgathering monopoly, which meant it could get around to covering the news if and when it felt like it, or not at all. A lot of news happened that The Chron didn’t deign to cover. Ipso facto, it wasn’t news. The internal atmosphere was akin to a white shoe law firm. The newsroom had the atmosphere of a restricted men’s club. Feuds went on for decades. Certain writers didn’t talk to certain editors. Certain reporters were not obliged to come to work or even do any work. You complain about Selvin, but Joel is a writing machine compared to some old Chron retainers. (Liz Lufkin, by the way, went on to become an important editor at Yahoo News.)

The old Chron was brilliant in creating unique San Francisco flavor and atmospherics — Caen was magnificent, and then there were Stanton Delaplane, Art Hoppe, Charles McCabe, etc. It was the perfect thing to read over breakfast (or lunch, if you slept in), especially if you didn’t really care about the news. This was okay for folks who got their national and global news from The New York Times, but for folks who cared about San Francisco news — the real news, not just society goings-on & weird North Beach stuff — there was nowhere to go but The Examiner. The difference in circulation in the late 70s and during the 1980s was immense: The Chron was about 550,000, while The Ex was maybe 125,000. But the news coverage and good writing (save for The Chron’s star columnists) was in The Examiner, which we Examiner staffers always thought of as a cult newsletter for people who really needed to know, or cared to know, about what was happening in San Francisco.

Amazingly, whenever The Examiner uncovered a big story that The Chron didn’t have, The Chron simply ignored it. When a local magazine or weekly got a huge beat on a major story, The Chron ignored that, too. Examiner writers competed with The Chronicle, but The Chronicle never competed with The Examiner. And then there was that strange Sunday hermaphrodite, The Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, was was divided into news sections created by The Examiner and the fluffy stuff everybody read (Pink Section, Sunday Punch, etc.) created by The Chronicle. Examiner writers fought to get their best writing into the Sunday paper because all of a sudden we’d have 800,000 readers instead of 125,000.

The basic truth through all those years, up to the present, is that great writers stayed at The Examiner and then The Chronicle, whereas great editors moved on to New York or Los Angeles. Why? Because editors sit in offices, so they might as well sit in an office at The New York Times or L.A. Times. But writers go out into the communities they cover, and what better community to go out into than San Francisco and the Bay Area? So over the years, great writers and mediocre (and much worse than mediocre) editors stayed, and the result was what you wrote about.

I haven’t actually read The Chronicle for about a decade and don’t think I’ve missed anything. Even sfgate.com seems to be losing readability as staff cuts drain its news-gathering & editing capacity. It’s sad. There are numerous websites and blogs that now cover San Francisco in different & better ways, but it was a lot of fun for a lot of years to spread The Chronicle on the breakfast or lunch table or the bar and read it from front to back. It made one feel special about living in San Francisco. That I’ll miss.

HV: That’s an interesting theory, at the end there, about writers staying and editors leaving. It is a reductive but cherished Hitsville prejudice that editors should be held responsible for the content of any paper or magazine. It would make discussions about quality, accuracy and ethics a lot clearer.

Some Chronicle partisans might disagree, but I think that, a few gems like Caen and (I would say) Leah Garchik, for example, aside, the Ex people were better. You also have to give Will Hearst and then Phil Bronstein credit for creating the environment that brought in the paper’s pretty incredible late-80s/early ‘90s arts staff in, too, everyone from Michael Sragow to the impressive group of folks who started Salon: David Talbot, Gary Kamiya, Joyce Millman, Scott Rosenberg….

Joneg:

The criticisms of Carroll and Selvin and the Arts sections are fair but only the partial truth. Across the board, the Chronicle remains, even after a quarter century of steady improvement, one of the laziest major newspapers in America. This death threat may help Hearst finally clear the massive deadwood and bring in better journalists, but it’s doubtful, considering they installed an ex-Arizona hack as editor, Arizona’s papers being among the only papers worse than San Francisco’s. But the paper’s problem is largely the same as it is in every big city: fat lazy former monopolies that are too out-of-touch to compete in today’s marketplace.

HV: Hard to argue with any of that!

Here’s a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Debra Saunders, on the paper’s precarious financial position:

A couple of years ago, when speaking to a local group, I mentioned that The Chronicle was losing money. A couple in the back of the room rudely applauded. How thrilled those two must have felt when - if - they learned of Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega’s announcement Tuesday that the Hearst Corp. will implement “significant” workforce cuts. If the cuts don’t pay off, then the Hearst Corp. will “offer the newspaper for sale or close it altogether.”

She went on to murmur darkly about the implications of a newspaper’s shutting down and those who could wish for such a thing. Saunders is a right-winger, and one of those ranty types a paper hires, somewhat cynically, to placate the Fox News crowd. In her mind, it’s all political: Righties (justifiably) hate the paper because it’s too liberal, and liberals hate the paper because (if you can believe it) it’s not liberal enough.

My prism is slightly different. I have a lot of friends who work at the Chronicle, and I know better than most how many talented people work there. But it’s also true that a lot of bozos suck up a lot of the operation’s resources, and that its editing hierarchy hit a wall of dysfunctionality decades ago it has never been able to shake. No sensible person is going to applaud the demise of a newspaper; but many serious people will, in effect, refuse to mourn it. Here’s why I think that’s what’s going to happen in SF.

—–

Names attach to papers in the memories of our youth. Royko in Chicago, Breslin in NYC, even the late Herb Caen in SF. Caen, in fact, was the greatest columnist I ever read. But he died in 1997 and, for me, a different columnist was a much more portentous and representative figure for the Chronicle in the later years of that decade: Jerry Carroll, who, when he wrote a daily column and I, among other things, wrote press criticism for a local alternative weekly, made me glad to be alive and reading newspapers.

This isn’t the noted columnist Jon Carroll, by the way; this is Jerry Carroll, an arts staffer who was tasked around them with a column called “The Lively Arts,” and they certainly were.

One December morning in 1997, I read Carroll plugging an art show that featured works by the bassist of the Who, John Entwistle, in San Jose. Entwistle was in town along with the Who itself, who were performing Quadrophenia in its entirety, Carroll said.

This show, it turned out, had taken place the previous December.

A year earlier.

Carroll spent five or six sentences the next day blaming the mistake on a PR company. The item stayed with me because, as an arts journalist, I deal with more public relations folks than most people, and I had not yet run across one who promoted things a year old. Indeed, I had found publicists somewhat narrow minded in this way, positively shirking any opportunity to publicize an event that had already occurred.

A few months later, I was again happy perusing “The Lively Arts,” when I read about an upcoming appearance by Garrison Keillor at the city’s Masonic Auditorium. “They say Keillor is as abrasive in private as he is affable in public, but I find it hard to believe,” wrote Carroll, impishly.

I remember the item well, first because I thought that the slur against Keillor was a bit backhanded and also a bit… off, because Keillor’s art can actually be quite prickly. The second reason was because … well, because Keillor had brought Prairie Home Companion to the Masonic the previous weekend.

Keillor wasn’t taking about a return engagement; it was another mistake. The next day Carroll blamed a publicist for Minnesota Public Radio, who he said had “faxed [him] the bum info.”

Carroll, I could see, was a veritable journalistic flypaper for heroic-minded publicists who, not being able to get enough of bringing a fine and worthy event to the public’s attention, didn’t feel their work was over at the end of the day, or even after their mission had been accomplished, so to speak.

They continued to get the word out for future, if imaginary, iterations of the same event, just on general principles.

This time Carroll had actually named the culprit—the person who had faxed him the hot, breaking, and incorrect news that Garrison Keillor was appearing in San Francisco a week after the real event.

Intrigued, I called her, just to have the opportunity to speak with this rara avis.

She disappointed me, however, by telling me that she hadn’t faxed anyone any bum info.

The show, she pointed out, had been sold out for months, and I was additionally sad to learn that her press releases—like all the other press releases I had seen in my professional life, which surely numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and, I would warrant, all the other press releases released in a typical year (including, I am sure, the press release on the John Entwistle art shows)—contained an actual date.

The dates are of course provided so journalists are informed of the week, or, in the case of the Entwistle art show, the year they occur.

Now, it was a classic he said/she said situation, to be sure, but I believed the publicist, because I thought the odds were a lot higher that Carroll was a big ol’ fat fucking liar who was trying to point fingers at others for his own mistakes—and that the journalistic culture at the Chronicle was one that either permitted such shenanigans or ignored it.

Indeed, Carroll just kept going, getting things wrong and then wronger. I eventually would write entire columns recapping errors he had made. Blaming other folks for the mistakes became a motif in his work. Once he said that the head of the SF library didn’t have a library card, which, it turned out, wasn’t true. Instead of apologizing for the error and noting that he could have called to check it out, he sloughed it off on a “claim” made by a library employee—which of course Carroll had printed without calling the head of the library for comment.

I guess you could say that Carroll was an early blogger.

The editors of his section, or the higher-ups at the paper, never seemed to be bothered by Carroll, and there was little in the way of public accounting of such stuff. The Chronicle didn’t start running corrections until the 2000s.

And he wasn’t a solitary case, either. The paper’s pop critic, Joel Selvin, would say just about anything, and made mistakes enough for the “Selvin watch” to be a regular feature in our own weekly music column, which we called “Riff Raff.” As the editor of the thing, I tried to be aware that most journalists do make mistakes; our rule was that there had to be at least three actual errors in a single story for us even to consider writing about it—and “Selvin Watch” was still, as I said, a regular feature.

At a time when newspapers were obviously going to be facing challenges, particularly in terms of appeal to younger people, it seemed crazy to put arts coverage in the hands of that pair and their uncomplaining editors, but that was the Chron. Since Selvin, particularly, was so bad at his job, it seemed churlish to complain about how unprolific he was, but I also noticed that he barely got his byline in the paper once a week. Given his decades of employment at the paper, he was probably making a pretty penny, too.

I finally called his editor once to give her a chance to respond, and, well, here’s what happened:

Selvin Watch (The Special Edition) When Riff Raff talked to Chron Entertainment Editor Liz Lufkin recently, we were mostly curious about one thing: What does Joel Selvin do all day? Even in his ’80s heyday the pop-music critic didn’t produce much copy; now it seems that he’s hardly ever in the paper. Lufkin was happy to answer, saying an earlier Riff Raff slight regarding Selvin’s rate of production was “incorrect.” He writes a lot, she said. Fearing we’d wronged him, we did a search of the Chron’s on-line archives and discovered that … Joel Selvin doesn’t write very much. He averaged about an article a week over the past year, including news squibs and quickie record reviews. (Lufkin repeatedly urged Riff Raff to compare Selvin’s output with L.A. Times crit Robert Hilburn’s; we were reluctant—Selvin’s not in Hilburn’s league—but finally did, and discovered that … Hilburn writes three or four times as much as Selvin.)

Now, are these issues picayune? It’s not just getting little things wrong. To me they involve: Lassitude. Arrogance. Inaccuracy. Bad writing. Excuses. Intellectual dishonesty. And most importantly, inattention to, even a disdain for, facts or the truth in all manner of ways.

Now, the paper arguably got better in the 2000s, when it merged with the evening Examiner, which I think it’s fair to say had stronger reporters and higher standards. The editor who took over, Phil Bronstein, had a lot of detractors during his time there, but the paper did institute a corrections policy and he certainly cared more about building up a more muscular management, and I know from talking to him he was chagrined at some of the paper’s screwups.

And so every once in a while I would interview for a job there and end up dutifully writing an analysis of the arts section for them. For one, I remember, I was asked to read a week’s worth of issues of the arts section. In that stack I found exactly one story over seven days that featured reporting in any sense of the word. Everything else that wasn’t criticism was either a) based on a press release or b) a one-interview story blandly promoting the release of some cultural product. Such features are of course part of the mix in any big-city arts section, but the dogged refusal of the organization to be interested in things that hadn’t already been pre-approved and placed on a press release for the paper’s use was dispiriting.

The week culminated in a big story in the paper’s venerable Sunday “Pink Section,” its weekend arts insert, published on pink newsprint. The feature was about the SF Bluegrass festival, and it sure sounded like something you’d want to see. Unfortunately, nowhere in the story or in any of the surrounding editorial real estate did it ever vouchsafe to readers where or when the festival was actually taking place.

I went out on a limb in my critique and argued strongly that the paper include such information when writing about major cultural events.

- - - - - -

Right now it seems like the best thing that may happen to the Chron is that it will get taken over by Dean Singleton’s MediaNews chain. Singleton, over the years, has taken over just about every other surviving daily in the Bay Area, from waaay up in Marin to waaay down in Santa Cruz and Monterrey to waaay out in Pleasanton, an area that dwarfs, in terms of both geography and population, little San Francisco.

This would be a sad end for the Chron, because few have accused MediaNews of investing in strong journalism.

Or I suppose it could go out of business. One of the crazy aspects of the story is that Hearst, which is private, is not subject to the same pressures public companies are. (Indeed, given the restrictive terms governing the family heirs, notably Will Hearst III and his sister cousin Patty, the company’s board can basically do whatever it wants.) Why the company has tolerated the paper’s $1 million a week losses for so many years—or why, in this context, it arranged for the paper to be printed on massively expensive new presses during this period—is a mystery. You’d think that the directors have some sensible plan, but as time has gone on, it seems more likely they have just been inattentive or out of touch with the realities on the ground in SF.

Anyway, I just wanted to make one point. Jerry Carroll and Joel Selvin didn’t kill the Chron. The paper’s economic problems go back to languid management under the Thierot family; a JOA that meant it had to turn over half its income to the Examiner; and looking away as competing newspaper empires grew east and south of the city.

And then came the internet, and the vaporization of an industry’s business model, masterminded,  almost literally, in the shadow of the paper’s building south of Market in downtown San Francisco.

So Jerry Carroll and Joel Selvin didn’t kill the Chron. But people who have never lived in the city, as they watch this possibly calamitous event transpire, should be aware that the pair—and their editors—are part of the reason some people will not mourn it.

While checking out coverage of the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger hearing, I noticed a post on RollingStone.com on the proceedings.

You might think Rolling Stone, being a magazine that covers music, might take enough interest in the formation of the most powerful entity the music business has ever seen to tell one of its minions to actually watch the proceedings.

Instead, they just had a writer, Daniel Kreps, rewrite Jim DeRogatis’ coverage from the Chicago Sun-Times.

Now, every blogger links to the work of real reporters, and many quote from it, some too much. And Kreps attributed one fact to the ST high up in his post.

But he didn’t make clear that his entire post was based on someone else’s work. DeRogatis’ story totalled 480 words; the RS one was two-thirds that. The writer didn’t block-quote from the earlier story blogger-style. He just rewrote it, and it looked like it was a real Rolling Stone piece.  There was barely a phrase of the total not either directly taken from the Sun-Times’ piece or blandly rewritten:

DeRogatis:

Rapino cited the benefits of Live Nation shows to local economies, claiming that one two-day event last summer at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisc., pumped $5 million into the area. He did not name the artist.

RS:

Rapino and Ticketmaster’s Irving Azoff told the subcommittee that their concerts would help give an economic boost to cities, citing a two-day event Live Nation hosted in East Troy, Wisconsin that generated $5 million in revenues for the city.

DeRogatis:

All of the senators voiced strong skepticism about the merger — including traditional foes Orrin Hatch (R-Utah, and himself an amateur recording artist) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y., and a Bruce Springsteen fan outraged by Ticketmaster’s handling of the upcoming tour) […] The hearing ended with Chairman Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.) noting that the committee has urged the Justice Department “to examine [the merger] closely” before granting its approval.

RS:

The subcommittee, stacked with senators like Orrin Hatch and Chuck Schumer who were already against the merger, will tell the Department of Justice to “examine the merger closely” before deciding whether to approve it.

It’s not plagiarism; he cited the ST. It’s just lazy, cheap journalism from a place that doesn’t expend enough of its resources on reporting on the industry at the heart of its appeal.

p.s.: DeRogatis, of course, used to be one of the mag’s top music editors. Funny story–ask him to tell you about it.

___________

Previously in Hitsville:
Live-blogging the House hearings on the Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger
“Re”-selling tickets that don’t yet exist
Liveblogging the Senate’s Ticketmaster/Live Nation Merger hearings
Seal & Van Halen in Azoff’s corner!
Updated! 26 questions that should be asked at the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger hearings tomorrow Ticketmaster shareholders sue to stop merger
How Live Nation does business
Will the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger mean higher concert prices?
Another suit against Ticketmaster
Constantly updated: The Ticketmaster-Live-Nation unholy-matrimony news round-up!
Five arguments against the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger
Irving Azoff kicks it old school
The music industry’s Putin
Bad merger coverage
WWBD (What would Bono do?)
Billboard’s analysis of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger
Springsteen and Landau bash Ticketmaster and Live Nation!
P.S. on Ticketmaster: A case study, starring Bruce Springsteen
Why the potential Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger is a very bad idea
Is Ticketmaster trying to muddle the fees issue?
The Azoff-Ticketmaster deal: Bad news for concert-goers—and the music industry
Why you so seldom read about obscene Ticketmaster-style ticketing charges

A Superior Court judge in LA told Roman Polanski yesterday he could challenge his original sentencing judge’s behavior—if he surrendered first. Salon just published a piece of mine on the ruling here.