Message to @brianrooneyabc and other ‘let go ABCNews staff’!
If “Good Morning America” or “World News” look any different in the coming weeks, it might be because ABC News is employing nearly 400 fewer people.
[…] A bid for survival in a crowded media landscape.
[…]
For some employees, like the longtime Los Angeles correspondent Brian Rooney, Friday was their last day. Mr. Rooney said his contract expired at “exactly the moment when they needed to shed an enormous amount from the payroll.” In an e-mail message, he compared it to “standing looking straight up when the bomb dropped.”
Personally, he said, the next step is scary. “I’m 58 years old with a wife, two daughters in school and a little dog who likes to be fed. They have cut me loose into the worst economy in my lifetime,” he said.
Mr. Rooney said he believed that Mr. Westin was “trying to save ABC News.”
“I hope they succeed,” he said, “although I like to think they will have a harder time doing it without me.”
(via NYT)
Get off the bitch train, take back your life. Show Mr. Westin that YOU can do it better.
Michael Arrington from TechCrunch suggests
What if that group, the most valuable assets that [ABCNews] controls, simply walked out of the building and started their own company? What would that look like?
The New New York Times
But first we have to get you twitterized and get rid of that ABC in your handle, get you on Facebook, and a blog.
soupsoup:
Under California and federal law, this warrant should never have issued. First, California Penal Code Section 1524(g) provides that “[n]o warrant shall issue for any item or items described in Section 1070 of the Evidence Code.” Section 1070 is California’s reporter’s shield provision (which has since been elevated to Article I, § 2(b) of the California Constitution). The items covered by the reporter’s shield protections include unpublished information, such as “all notes, outtakes, photographs, tapes or other data of whatever sort,” if that information was “obtained or prepared in gathering, receiving or processing of information for communication to the public.” The warrant explicitly authorizes the seizure of such protected materials and information, including the photographs and video taken of the iPhone prototype, as well as research regarding the Apple employee who purportedly lost the phone. This fact alone should have stopped this warrant in its tracks.
Second, the warrant likely violates the Privacy Protection Act (or PPA, 42 USC § 2000aa et al.). Congress passed the PPA to ensure special protection for journalists by prohibiting government search and seizure of both “documentary material” (explicitly including photos and video) and “work product material,” material which is or has been used “in anticipation of communicating such materials to the public.” 42 USC § 2000aa-7(a) and (b). The PPA includes an exception for searches targeting criminal suspects (which Chin may or may not be), but that exception does not apply “if the offense to which the materials relate consists of the receipt, possession, communication, or withholding of such materials or the information contained therein.” 42 USC § 2000aa(a)(1). Violations of the PPA could render the law enforcement agencies or the individual officers who searched Chen’s house liable for damages no less than $1,000.
Isn’t it great to watch YOUR government you elected, break the rules they made … and get away with it? Above is just one example.
So the kicker is;
The PPA includes an exception for searches targeting criminal suspects (which Chin may or may not be),
And bc Chin wasn’t accused, so far, of criminal activity (buying obviously to his knowledge prototype product). Unless this clear, the confiscation was unlawful. They did the second step before the first (Apple charging Gawker/Chin for criminal activity).
DOJ’s aggressive prosecution of someone who exposed serious waste and mismanagement at the NSA could, as the NYT’s Shane put it, “raise questions about whether the government is merely moving to protect itself from public scrutiny.” Whatever else is true, decreeing that we must “Look Forward, not Backward” — and then bestowing that Imperial Generosity only to the crimes of the President and his aides but not to courageous whistle-blowers (or, for that matter, anyone else) — is anything but “Justice.”
Michael says: We have to look forward ‘aggressively’ to find alternatives to support and help ‘whistle blowers’. Hope nobody of them read that here …
Must Read: politics & imperfect knowledge, lobby, health care debate, collaboration, online journalism & blogging.
Consider what happened in September [09], when the insurance industry released a study purporting to show that reform would cause insurance premiums to skyrocket. The Senate Finance Committee—the logjam in the legislative process—was set to vote on its bill in less than 48 hours. The study, commissioned by the insurance lobby and conducted by a private accounting firm, represented a clear effort to undermine support. It was the kind of move that lobbying groups make all the time—and, in the old days, it might have worked, since nobody would have seen through the study’s tilted assumptions until, as with McCaughey’s old article, the damage had been done. But within hours of its publication, several blogs, including this one, had published critiques showing just how flawed the study was. The critiques circulated in Washington and provoked a backlash against the insurers. Wavering Democrats said they were offended by the effort at political sabotage; the Finance Committee went on to pass the bill, as it had originally planned.
Not that fact-checking was the media’s sole job over the last year. Speaking for myself, I certainly spent far more time on the more mundane task of explanation—whether it was describing how a particular policy proposal might work or laying out the political dynamics of a particular moment. Occasionally this writing got a lot of attention, because it included a reporting tidbit that qualified as a scoop. More often, it didn’t. But over time I came to realize that the mere sharing of information has enormous value—even to people in Washington who, you might suppose, already know what they need to know.
Indeed, one of the many lessons I learned over the last year is that, even at the very highest levels of power, people frequently operate with limited knowledge and perspective. That’s true of how they think about policy and that’s true of how they think about politics. As one high-ranking official memorably told me in February, while everybody was scrambling to salvage reform after the Massachusetts Senate race, nobody really sees the whole playing field.
[via The New Republic - Finishing ‘The Treatment’]
10 Ways To Earn More Than You Can Working At The Columbia Journalism Review
hunterwalker:
Columbia j-school students received emails last week inviting us to apply for an assistant editor “fellowship” with the Columbia Journalism Review, a full-time position that pays only $27,000 a year. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of jobs out there that pay more— like working at McDonald’s, selling your eggs, or even impregnating cows.
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