The American media is suffering from financial pressure, but more worrisome is that its quality has gone downhill.  The major news organizations are failing in their coverage of the big stories.  More people turn to sources like Wikipedia and blogs.

I’m not the only one who says so.  Ryan Chittum, writing on the Columbia Journalism Review‘s blog, pointed out that thin coverage and the back-paging of front page-worthy stories is a real problem for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal:

The Journal, which scored recently by bringing David Reilly back into the fold after a stint at Bloomberg, posts a Reilly news article looking at the culpability of Lehman auditor Ernst & Young. The paper dumps it on C7. The NYT has on the same angle—a very good one to examine closely—and slides it inside on B2.

Somehow the Times thought more people would care about Sorkin’s scoop on a $3 billion deal for Tommy Hilfiger or that it was more important than an auditor approving accounting fraud. They don’t and it’s not.

Look, I know that Lehman collapsed a year and a half ago, but this is a major story—one that finally gets awfully close to putting the crimes in the crisis. I’ll go ahead and say it: If you’ve wanted to know about the Valukas report and its implications, you’ve been better served by reading Zero Hedge and Naked Capitalism than you have The Wall Street Journal or New York Times. This on the biggest financial news story of the week—and one of the biggest of the year. These papers have hundreds of journalists at their disposal. The blogs have one non-professional writer and a handful of sometime non-pro-journalist contributors.

Chittum, from his perch at the CJR, points to several Lehman stories that blogs broke that should have been broken by the big outlets if they had just…read the Lehman report.

I’m not crowing about this: it’s terrible.  Blogs can never replace a professional journalism class; much of Wikipedia would never be written without top-shelf news organizations like the Times or the Journal.  Don’t forget the low standards at Huffington Post.

More evidence of the news organizations failing  jumped out at me in this Washington Post story about a persuasive healthcare speech President Obama gave today in Ohio.  Reportedly, some Republicans voters were swayed enough by the President to give it a try:

Still, not everyone has a firm opinion, and many admit they have a limited understanding of the details. Voters often say they are not sure whom to believe, offering a version of a comment by Patrick O’Toole, Mary Jo’s husband: “You hear this from one side and that from the other side, and you don’t know what’s right.”

Overlooking Obama’s shortcoming for not not hammering out these speeches much earlier and more often, Patrick O’Toole points to a media failure.  Too many media outlets are following the Fox News approach, which is to have no standards for who they put before your eyes.  There is weak critical analysis of what is said, so the news story is ultimately the talking point barked, when the story should be the talking point supported or debunked.  The consequence is an electorate exemplified by Mr. O’Toole.

Standards have eroded across the board; two months after Betsy “Death Panel” McCaughey was shown on Jon Stewart to have no basis for what was dubbed Lie of the Year, she wrote another column about the healthcare bill for the Wall Street Journal.  It was not accompanied by an editors note cautioning, “This woman can’t find her facts in the bill she is writing about, she just believes they exist.”

Image:  Travis Ruse.

I don’t know if it is because I am “new media” but I am perplexed by the way the Columbia Journalism Review is handling distribution of its content.  Primarily because I have been waiting patiently to share the link to the story they wrote about me (Click the Obama cover, right, to read it).

The magazine is nowhere to be found in Colorado.  I called the Tattered Cover, Denver’s largest and most famous book seller, and they don’t expect to get their five issues of the January/February CJR until the first week of February.  One month after printing!  The chain stores don’t receive any at all.

The CJR has a policy to make their stories live on their Internet site gradually.  They do this, I was told, so that people will buy the magazine.  It’s a foolish hope, especially when it is not for sale.  Regardless, the web generation will wait, or they will forget about it.  Additionally, news about the news is not something people are so hungry for that they have to run out to find the latest issue (unless they are the subject of a story).

Yesterday I discovered the link had gone live.  On Entrepreneur.com.  The story was still grayed-out (meaning only for subscribers) on CJR‘s website, but it was fully reprinted on some random website that uses CJR‘s content for their own profit.  From an Internet perspective, this makes CJR, the most prestigious name in journalism, little more than a content provider for some random website named Entrepreneur.com.

I e-mailed CJR and raised this anomaly, and today they made their story about me live, whilst leaving “Opening India” by Ralph Frammolino a subscription only story that you can still read at Entrepreneur.com.  I originally was supposed to be the last story live, ostensibly under the theory that Wiki is going to draw a lot of web traffic for their other stories.

CJR is emblematic of the inertia in the media industry to change. They keep one foot in the grave, and one outside as they struggle to figure out how to distribute content and still make money.  From my perspective, if you have a deal to redistribute your stories with another website, make sure they don’t beat you to publishing until your next issue is out.  CJR is under-cutting their own web traffic in a misguided attempt to get people to buy their magazine.

It amazes me that brand names like CJR are still trying to push their print publications, when they should be more focused on making their websites their flagship properties.  It has been at least a decade since it was obvious that pushing paper is out, and that web influence and traffic would be the new core model.  There will always be a place for paper (e.g. doctors’ offices, airplanes), but to sacrifice what should be your flagship’s influence to try to force people to buy something on the newsstand makes no sense.  This is especially true when your vendors–such as Tattered Cover, Barnes & Noble and Borders out in Colorado–are only putting the magazine on their shelves a month after printing, or not at all.

Such bumbling disappoints people like me.  Institutions like the Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times, et al. are needed now more than ever as stand-outs in the on-line information morass.  Yet they remain beholden to a model that has been around since Gutenberg.  Meanwhile, the public suffers as they rely on junk news sources as the good news sources are unavailable, and increasingly go unread.

These are not the only challenges facing the media brands, but these mistakes greatly exacerbate the real ones they face.

It’s funny what reporters choose to print.  Adam Rose interviewed me for 10 hours for the Columbia Journalism Review, so he had a lot of different material he could have shared.  One of the things he chose to share was this:

In 2006 I listened to no other bands besides The Libertines and Babyshambles, Pete Doherty’s bands.  I smile about it now, but at the time not only did the music hit me, but also the words and references.  I loved the Babyshambles song “A’rebours”, and I loved it even more because it is named after one of my favorite novels, À rebours, by Joris-Karl Huysmans.  The song articulated how I felt about law school as I faced my inability to return and sat through my last semester without books.  Below is the video.

A’rebours – Babyshambles

You sent for me
I was knock knock knocking on death’s door
You ignore, adore, a’rebours me
You leave me washed up begging for more
If you really cared for me
Ah you’d let me be
You’d set me free
But what you robbed me of is my…
Oh is my liberty

The curtain was calling
You were there blown away and a’rebours
In the mirror bawling
If you want it so much you are gonna have it all
Ah if you really cared for me
Christ knows you’d let me be
You’d set me free
I’m too polite to say…

I defy you all
You know twice as much as nothing at all
It’s still nothing at all
I can defy us all
Tides are now turned and hammered it all
Hammered it all

Ah, no, ah no, ah no…

I’ve been running round this world too much, girl
Pretending not to see
What’s thrilling me, it’s killing me

Oh no, I think I understand
What I misunderstood before
How your love gives me so much more
I am free again, I can see again..

But if I should fall
Would you vow today to pay tomorrow
The fucked off big debt I owe to sorrow…
Ah, oh… sorrow… sorrow…
Ah, oh… sorrow

Ah, no, ah no, ah no…

I finally, just today, was able to read the article about me in the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s two pages and thoroughly researched.  Adam Rose’s writing is good, and he sat with me for about 10 hours over three meetings to work on the story.  He interviewed a few of my interviewees, and I directed him to the haters’ threads at the Wikipedia Review and to my former nemesis User:THF to learn what critics think.  It is currently out on newsstands, although I have yet to find an issue in Colorado.  Even the state’s most famous bookstore, The Tattered Cover, does not expect to receive their five copies of the January/February issue until the first week of February.

There is one inaccuracy that I want to rectify, because I caused it.  Adam wrote, “Although Miller has managed interviews with a few high-profile subjects like Peres, he’s relatively unknown outside the Wiki community. Some of his pieces have page views in the single digits.”

Adam got this from me because Wikinews, like many Wiki projects, has suffered from not having an ability to figure out how many hits our articles get.  This has been a huge source of irritation with the Wikimedia Foundation, since it’s difficult to write without seeing the response to the writing; which topics get more traffic; and which stories are duds nobody cares about.  There used to be a tool we had, but it was highly inaccurate, and occasionally it would reset itself so that the number was not how many hits the article had received in totality, but only since it had reset itself.  Adam had apparently used it after it was re-set to write that.  It would be impossible for any article on Wikinews to have 9 or fewer hits, considering that there are typically at least 30 active reporters who would check out each others’ stories (and edit them).  Additionally, I alone would hit my articles obsessively to edit, review and correct them, and the tool counted all hits, including repeats.  From Brian McNeil, Wikinews guru:

From recent stats I can say Wikinews is getting around 5.5 million page views per month. For a newly published lead you’ll see a minimum of 50-60 hits per hour. At certain times of day the top article will be getting 150+ hits per hour, and with our stuff now listed in Google News there can be stories that get many hundreds of hits per hour.

This was not Adam’s fault, it was mine as I supplied him that tool and likely gave him little context since the reset issue was something that wasn’t apparent until later, and it never occurred to me to inform him.

Below is a snippet of the beginning of the article, now on newsstands.  It gives a good deal of context for the work I did, and it gives it from the perspective of a real reporter writing for the premiere journalism magazine in the United States.  It is now the most high-profile review of the work on Wikinews undertaken by one of its “peers”.

Reporter Adam Rose began working on a story about my Wikipedia and Wikinews work earlier this year.  I received word that it is to appear in the January/February issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.  Adam spoke to many people on Wikinews and interviewees such as Gay Talese and Augusten Burroughs.  Even former adversary User:THF.

I have not seen it, and I do not know what the story says, but I am told it will be in both the print and web editions.  Adam was extraordinarily thorough.