Divorce between US newspapers and AP?

I left United News of India in 1987 after serving the news agency for 17 years. I worked in two newspapers later and taught in media school for seven years thereafter. Thus I have no connections whatsoever with UNI for the last 21 years, yet my loyalty to news agency journalism in general and UNI in particular has remained unchanged.

That is the reason I was drawn to read Rick Edmonds blog today at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=123&aid=152453.
We youngsters working under Mr B R P Bhaskar and Mr K P K Kutty in Delhi’s news room used to hold AP in big awe because of its news coverage and worldwide reach. UNI had tie-up with AP. I was thrilled when my story was picked up by AP's Delhi bureau for the first time and was published abroad.

I moved out of Delhi headquarters and worked as Bureau Manager in smaller centres. Here I had to interact with owners of newspapers to strike bargains for subscriptions and to recover long pending arrears. (That was in addition to my journalistic responsibilities.) I remember how the owners would haggle for cheaper monthly fees. I could not afford to be tough to recover the arrears because these owners would threaten to quit our news service and switch over to PTI’s. Similar was the situation elsewhere in India.
I thus had a fairly good idea about why UNI was never in sound financial health. I notice from Rick Edmond’s blog that even in USA, even in case of the powerful Associated Press, and even during the new era, newspaper owners are no different.
Please read Edmond's blog:
What would happen if newspapers divorce AP?
What would newspapers miss most, I asked AP's Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll in a phone interview Friday, if they followed through on threats to quit the cooperative?Her answer surprised me. For some it would be comprehensive and timely sports coverage that frees up their own staff to cover local teams. But even more fundamental, she said, is "a fast, steady diet of multimedia news for the newspaper's Web site." A couple years after being introduced, AP videos are widely used on news sites and are a big part of the cooperative's mobile offerings. We are in an era, Carroll added, "when people want to know what happens when it happens, and their appetite for video is huge."

Tribune became the biggest player yet Thursday to announce it had given two-year notice and was considering pulling all its newspapers out of the wire service. (The Columbus Dispatch announced Friday it would cancel its contract in 2011.) Tribune's announcement was consequential, to be sure, but Carroll took exception to one headline labeling the move stunning. "We are always having these kinds of discussions (with dissatisfied members)," she said. "The difference is that this time they are announcing" what have more typically been confidential negotiations.

Without denying the severity of newspapers' financial problems, Carroll said, she is hopeful that peace can be restored. But there are barriers. AP has a little flexibility in negotiating with individual papers -- but only a little. "Because we are a cooperative, we can't offer city X a different deal than comparable city Y," she said. "We're not like the used car salesmen who says, 'I need to go in the back room and talk to the sales manager.'" Though Carroll is a partisan and not strictly in the business loop for these negotiations, I sought her out because she takes an editor's big-picture view of the conflict. I found it noteworthy that she wanted to talk more about improved services than deeper rate reductions.This week I got Goldman Sachs' analyst Peter Appert's latest forecast. He sees total industry ad revenues falling from $39 billion this year to $30.7 billion in 2012 (and from a peak of $49.4 billion in 2005). If the industry is shrinking almost 40 percent, from almost $50 billion to just over $30 billion in ads, can AP cut rates correspondingly?Carroll's answer was that AP cannot make those kinds of cuts in its operations, nor should it -- with international markets growing and broadcast and online clients ready for an expanded report. To me, that suggests plenty more friction ahead with editors as AP redirects resources to lucrative lines of business and other clients that are doing better than the newspapers that own AP.

Arun Kumar Bhandari is Chief Editor and GM of UNI

Some how I missed the following story about change of guard at UNI with which I was associated for 17 years until 1987. Thanks to Mr B R P Bhaskar, our news editor and my guru, I came to know about the development though 11 days late:

New Delhi, Oct 1 : Senior journalist Arun Kumar Bhandari today assumed charge as Chief Editor and General Manager of the United News of India (UNI) national news agency including its Hindi wing Varta and Urdu service.
Mr Bhandari has been associated with UNI for almost four decades now and, during the period, he was bestowed several key responsibilities every one of which he fulfilled successfully. After securing a degree in journalism from Punjab University, Chandigarh, he was selected by UNI and posted as Trainee Sub-Editor at the agency's New Delhi head office in 1969.

During his career, besides receiving some organisational awards for reportage, he was honoured by the Himachal Pradesh government for best development reporting and the Madhya Pradesh Vidhan Sabha for parliamentary coverage.A diploma in Journalism (print and electronic media) from the International Institute for Journalism, Budapest, added to Mr Bhandari's qualifications.

He has widely travelled in India and overseas, including the United States of America, United Kingdom, Germany, Egypt, Colombia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Dubai, Singapore and Russia.

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When will the media use the verb ‘condole’ properly?

It is rare that a journalist admits publicly that he/she has committed an error. It is still rarer that a senior journalist, holding the key post of a news editor, owns up a mistake committed by a junior.
(I should know because I was a journalist myself for over three decades.)
It came, therefore, as a pleasant surprise, when Ahmedabad Mirror, carried the following letter in its recent issue under the heading “Mind Your Language”:
When will the media use the verb ‘condole’ properly? The headline at the top of the page on September 20 says ‘PM condoles inspector Sharma’s death.’ Condole means sympathy. You can express sympathy to persons but not to death. Moreover condole (like sympathy) is an intransitive verb and can not take an object (death, in this case). Your headline and the story, should have read: The PM condoles with inspector’s family over/in his death.
Response from AM’s News Editor Pradeep Mallik published alongside was:
Thank you for writing and enlightening us on the correct usage of ‘condole.’ We stand corrected. Looking forward to more mails from you.
Those in the profession will know the importance of such a response when considered that the original story was not written by any AM staffer. It was a PTI story from New Delhi, probably edited and headlined by a sub-editor in the AM, Ahmedabad. And a news editor does not normally read every word of every story. Mallik could have passed the buck, on receipt of the mail from the reader, to PTI. Mallik did not.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court says newspaper can protect source

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that a newspaper reporter does not need to reveal the identity of a confidential source used in a story about a grand jury investigation into alleged prison brutality.
The 4-1 decision dated Wednesday and released Thursday upholds a lower court ruling that sided with Jennifer Henn and her former employer, the Times-Tribune of Scranton.
Two former Lackawanna County commissioners sued Henn and the paper over a January 2004 story that said they were not cooperative in their appearances before the grand jury.
The Supreme Court said reporters cannot be forced to identify confidential sources — a protection granted by the state's Shield Law.
Grand jury proceedings are secret and state law bars prosecutors, court officials or jurors from discussing such investigations. Witnesses are not barred from discussing their testimony outside the courtroom.
Lackawanna County Judge Robert A. Mazzoni had ruled that the importance of grand jury secrecy outweighed the protections of the Shield Law, but a three-judge Superior Court panel determined that Mazzoni had carved out an improper exception to the law. The high court agreed with the panel.

Even American newspaper editors are struggling to adjust to Web

This new study tells us the status of US newspaper industry vis-à-vis new media. In our little research in Maharashtra, we had come across journalists and editors who dread to think of opening their e-mail in-boxes. Planning for the future exploiting new media technology is a far cry. What is your experience?

LAS VEGAS – US Newspaper editors are struggling to adapt as more and more readers turn away from the printed page and toward the Web, mobile devices and other means to get their news, a leading news industry researcher says.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, told a crowd of editors Wednesday at the Associated Press Managing Editors conference in Las Vegas that a survey of more than 250 newspapers calls into question whether newsrooms are planning ahead. "Do we have a plan for the future, or are we just sort of reacting as things come at us?" Rosenstiel said.

Rosenstiel said newspapers are being asked to shift from a product - the physical newspaper - to a service encompassing the Web, mobile devices and other forms to deliver information to consumers."It can be subtle, but it's a fundamental change," he said. Results from the survey released in July showed that just 5 per cent of editors were confident in predicting how their operations would work in five years.

The rest of the editors were equally split between being either somewhat confident or having little or no confidence. "Editors seem cautious and only marginally more confident than not," the study said.

"In the face of such uncertainty, several editors cited their staff's willingness to accept change and embrace new technology as the factor contributing most to their competitiveness." The survey was based on interviews with newspaper editors in 15 cities in four regions of the United States and senior news executives at 259 newspapers across the United states.

Editors attending the conference are mulling questions that were largely irrelevant to newspapers two decades ago before the Internet became a fixture. Today, papers are struggling to generate the same revenues from the Internet as they have lost in print ad sales, which has forced job cuts and tough decisions about content.

Tyler Marshall, who wrote the study titled "The Changing Newsroom: What is Being Gained and What is Being Lost in America's Daily Newspapers," said Wednesday that editors generally feel that things are changing so fast, it's hard to keep up while keeping news standards paramount.

Finley, editor of The Virginian-Pilot, said his newsroom has reorganized twice in the past three years, and could be reorganized again next year. He said the biggest change at the newspaper has been adding a team that focuses on breaking news online throughout the day.

"I don't think we've done anything revolutionary, but what we've had to do, and I think what every competitor has had to do, is be a lot more focused and really think a lot more about what we can do with the smaller staff that we have," Finley said.
Read the study: http://www.journalism.org/node/11961
Associated Press Managing Editors: http://www.apme.com

SC's observations: A warning singal for Media

The supreme court's comments on the media's overreaching itself seem to have not got the attention they deserve, but they need to be studied carefully by practitioners in the media business. the court was referring to the coverage of the aarushi-hemraj double murders, where the media played the "other" investigating agency, taking it upon itself to cast aspersions on the characters of the accused and of family members, to speculate wildly about what could have happened and to then set itself up as an alternative court of law. most of this, of course, happened on the plethora of news channels which disport themselves on our television screens but the print media is also guilty of sensationalising the case.
the media has already been under the scanner, with the information and broadcasting minister ready with his b! roadcast bill which aims to set some limits for tv news channels. this is something to be avoided. as has been discussed, the government should be kept out of getting involved in trying to "regulate" the media. however, the manner in which news channels have been conducting themselves is laying them open to more and more official scrutiny. they must now take action themselves or find themselves being acted against.
the apex court has castigated the media for behaving like a "super super investigative agency" and super is used in the latin sense of "over" rather than the colloquial sense of "wonderful". that is, the media is being seen guilty of extending its own brief and falling on the wrong side of the law. the result is the apex court sending notices to the union and uttar pradesh governments asking if there was any mechanism to restrain the media from reporting sub-judice cases. there is a certain vibrancy in the media which has a positive side too. it can be argued that had it not been for journalistic enterprise and aggression, instan! ces like reopening the jessica lall case would not have happened. this is true enough. but this has another side too, which is often seen in sting operations gone wrong and over-enthusiasm in covering stories that affect real people who may be innocent.
the supreme court's observations should be seen as a warning signal which, if not taken seriously, will affect the media as a whole, not just a few news channels hungry for higher television rating points. tv news has become a business desperate for consumers and all rules are being broken as a result. errant tv channels have to be made to realise that their actions are detrimental to the public interest. some amount of maturity in the tv media will have to emerge and the ethics of the news profession must be inculcated.
Source: http://epaper.dnaindia.com

SC asks media to observe restraint:

NEW DELHI: The hounding by the media of Rajesh Talwar as a key suspect in the Aarushi-Hemraj double murder case till he got a CBI clean chit made the Supreme Court on August 18 to ask aloud - Is there an urgent need for guidelines on responsible reporting of cases under investigation or pending trial?
The pitch was prepared by a PIL filed by advocate Surat Singh, who cited the case of Talwar and asked — Does media have a right to report whatever they please on the basis of police briefing, irrespective of the damage to the reputation and mental agony it inflicts on the accused?
A Bench comprising Justices Altamas Kabir and Markandey Katju, which during the last hearing had observed that the media - both print and electronic - should exercise restraint while reporting the Aarushi case, on Monday agreed with the petitioner that the reporting of the case left a lot to be desired. It issued notices to the information and broadcasting ministry, Press Council of India, Uttar Pradesh government and media houses on the PIL seeking to put in place guidelines for the media for reporting cases under investigation and trial. It sought assistance of additional solicitor general Gopal Subramaniam in this matter.
“We want to lay down general guidelines and not target individuals,” the Bench said while posting the matter for further hearing on September 23. The respondents were asked to file their replies within two weeks. Both the print and electronic media, the bench said, had a powerful influence over the masses. “The media has to be more responsible. It must not do anything by which investigation be prejudiced against the accused,” it added.
Accepting criticism as part and parcel of public life, the Bench said it was not worried about the judiciary or the judges. “We have sufficiently broad shoulders. But we are concerned about the reputation of people like in this case, Dr Talwar,” it said.
So moved was the court by the plight of Dr Talwar that at the stage of mentioning of the PIL on July 22, the Bench had passed an interim order observing that the media, both print and electronic, should exercise restraint in its reporting so as not to tarnish the reputation of Talwar.
Continuing its interim order, that is tying the media with the leash of responsibility, the Bench clarified: “There is no attempt to gag the media. But media has to be responsible at the same time.”
Source: The Times of India, August 19, 2008