Years 2009-2012 Breningstall.com

China Daily buys its way into the Washington Post

Because that's what reputable propaganda-cum-news agencies do. China Watch, a "paid supplement on the Washington Post website, features the usual enlightening mix of material from China Daily with headlines like "Harmonious Diplomacy" and "Increase in defense budget is timely, reasonable."

Apparently, this has been going on for quite six months but it hasn't come to my attention till now.

Nieman Journalism Lab reported last December:

The structure is the same as other Post sections. It has its own sub-categories of content, like business, politics, opinion, and multimedia. The bylined stories can be shared on Twitter or Facebook. You can leave a comment. There are traditional display ads within the section — for China Daily’s own site. In a way, it’s a site within a site, a digital translation of the advertorial insert you might find in a print-edition newspaper. But online, that insert is seamlessly embedded into the the broader publication.

Oligarchs everywhere note: the Washington Post also has a similar Russia Now section. All the news that's fit to... buy?

Here is what China Daily had to say about their distributing partner in 2009:

Some US media organizations shamelessly distort facts when they attack China's policy on ethnic minorities. They even disregard common sense and contradict themselves. The Washington Post is one among them.

Sounds like a partnership made in heaven.

For it's part, the Washington Post says the China Watch section news page mimic "is clearly labeled as advertising", ya da ya da.

Tera Kuwayama: Which of Us Dies First?

You'd almost think it was the first time journalists had been killed in the line of duty, but it wasn't – it was just the first time, in a long time, that western journalists with names like "Tim" and "Chris" were killed.

In fact, two Arab journalists were killed in Libya last month, but their names, Mohammed al-Nabbous, and Ali Hassan al-Jaber, haven't gotten a glimmer of the attention that Tim and Chris have seen. The Committee to Protect Journalists lists almost a thousand incidents since in which journalists were killed in the last twenty years—almost 90% of them were local journalists. The ratio may even be more lopsided, because statistics on journalists often don't even include the people who work alongside them—like their drivers, translators, and "fixers". Those people constitute a vast, grey, undocumented labor force that the international news industry is 100% dependent on. They face the highest risks, and almost invariably, they pay the highest price.

In March, four New York Times correspondents were detained and abused when their car was pulled over by pro-government forces in Libya. The NY Times published blow by blow accounts of their captivity and a series of celebratory reports when they were finally released. The headlines never mentioned a fifth person in the vehicle—a 21 year old driver named Mohamed Shaglouf. In a passing mention, he's described as "missing", but it's generally believed that he's dead. For NYT photographer Lynsey Addario, he was the second person, in less than two years, who'd been killed driving her car.

full narrative gizmodo.com

New Times (er, Village Voice Media) kept afloat by prostitution ads: report

From the New York Observer:

Last week, deputies in Polk County, Fla., arrested 60 people—including a Disney employee, a man with breast implants, a 15-year-old runaway with a 2-year-old infant, and her pimp—in an online prostitution bust dubbed Operation Curtain Call. A year ago the sensational sting would likely have been the next in a long litany of tabloid-friendly Craigslist crimes, but the deputies told the Palm Beach Post that the prostitution services had been advertised instead on Backpage.com, the Village Voice Media-owned online classifieds site.

When Craigslist shuttered its "Adult Services" section last year, no one was naïve enough to think the move would mean the end of prostitution, but did anyone predict it could save alt-weeklies?

Full story.

The Washington Post divides its editorial page into left-leaning and right-leaning columnists. That makes it easier to read only those who agree with you. Or maybe it's an exaggerated way of emphasizing that the Post has four of each.

In other news, I like the Post redesign. It's not perfect- nothing is- but it's better than the previous rendition, which I found so difficult to navigate that I avoided the Post online (reading the articles was fine, but finding them was a different story). Post competitors have been quite to trot out complaints (see here and here) but I find in my first look that the new site is more pleasant to scroll through.

Today's Trickle-Up Economics Fact of the Day: Gannett (USA Today, WUSA TV et al) saved $32 million through employee furloughs. It plans to pay up to $28 million in compensation and bonuses to its top six executives in 2010.

Via Isaiah J. Poole

Gawker: only a shadow of its former self and currently running a two-day-old Charlie Sheen "story" (add big quotation marks) as one of its three anchor pieces. I'm not surprised by the lame subject matter, but I am surprised that an online gossip blog is so sloppy about running old news.  

 

Washington Post Co. side project: that newspaper thing

"...the newspaper has become little more than a side vanity project for the Post Co. and the Graham family which continues to dominate it; it is now, at its core, in the business of profiting off of lower-income students who pay for diplomas, often obtained via online classes. 'The fate of The Post Co. has become inextricably linked with that of Kaplan, where revenue climbed to $2.9 billion in 2010, 61 percent of The Post Co.'s total,' the article detailed; 'the company is more dependent than ever on a single business,' [CEO Donald] Graham wrote in last year's annual report, adding that the newspaper had never accounted for as large a share of overall company revenue as Kaplan does today.'"

- Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon

There was another piece in the Times today about yet another 20 percent drop in CD sales. (Are they running the same news piece every 4 months?) Jeez guys, the writing's on the wall. How long do the record execs think they'll have those offices and nice parking spaces? (Well, more than half of all record A&R and other execs are gone already, so there should be plenty of parking space). They, the big 4 or 5, should give the catalogues back to the artists or their heirs as a gesture before they close the office doors, as they sure don't know how to sell music anymore. (I have Talking Heads stuff on the shelf that I can't get Warner to release.) The "industry" had a nice 50-year ride, but it's time to move on. Luckily, music remains more or less unaffected — there is a lot of great music out there. A new model will emerge that includes rather than sues its own customers, that realizes that music is not a product in the sense of being a thing — it's closer to fashion, in that for music fans it tells them and their friends who they are, what they feel passionately about and to some extent what makes life fun and interesting. It's about a sense of community — a song ties a whole invisible disparate community together. It's not about selling the (often) shattered plastic case CDs used to come in.

- David Byrne, writing in 2007