Reuters is offering up an explanation on how that bathroom note photo of President Bush asking for a bathroom break made its way to the wires.
As you recall from yesterday, Bush wrote a note to Condi Rice during a United Nations Security Council meeting and, well, the rest is history. Or bathroom humor, you decide. But it wasn't, Reuters assures us, a biased attack on Bush.
The white parts of the picture were overexposed, so a Reuters processor used Photoshop to burn down the note. This is a standard practice for news photos, Hershorn says, and the picture was not manipulated in any other way.
Which is the professional way of saying "George Bush did not write 'I have to go poopie really bad, Con-da-lee-za.'"
It's not just NBC that's fallen head over heals for the 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Hell, even the New York Times is hurting for it (need we mention that Britney Spears front page item?).
Now the Associated Press is getting in on the action, launching a new premium wire service called asap (yes, they're hip, it's all lowercase) on Monday that's going to deliver content via all those groovy mediums that only the techno-savvy youngins' understand: audio, video, blogs and wireless text.
Already 100 newspapers have signed on to the program, which employs about 20 randy journalists mostly based here in New York. Sounds like a perfect way for mainstream newspapers to fight off that blog craze and attract younger readers, right?
A prototype also included a photo essay on vendors of street food in cities around the world, a piece that highlights The A.P.'s global reach. While bloggers often write about domestic events, rarely do they venture out to report firsthand on the outside world. The A.P.'s ability to do this could underscore for readers the strength of traditional news organizations that can afford to base reporters around the world.
Well, it could "underscore" it. You know, or not. You know those kids and their attention spans. We have a hard enough time .. oh look, it's President Bush on the telly!
• The Non-Comforter in Chief Bill O'Reilly opines that the government of the United States cannot help you in times of disaster. Bill's advice to America (to the poor of New Orleans, especially): Educate yourself and get a well-paying job. Missing from that counseling? Any advice on how one finds a proper education or a job. Even Newt Gingrich told Loofah Boy that his theory was "un-American."
• The New York Times, in an attempt to get serious about being funny, will bring comics to its pages. But let's call it a graphic novel, shall we?
• If Radar can do it, so can Seed. The indie science-and-society title is back with $12 million in funding after a year's hiatus.
• Google buying Reuters? As if we needed another reason to distrust either.
• Speaking of, Vanity Fair's Power List-icle puts Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page at the top, ahead of even Wal-Mart's chief.
• Richard Desmond has brought over Melanie Danks to fill in the publisher gap at American OK! left by Gabriel "Gaby" Fireman's sudden departure. Meanwhile, the nicknamed staffing continues with former Us Weekly exec editor (and former U.K. OK! EIC) Nicola "Nic" McCartney becoming American OK!'s editor in April.
• Thanks to Suge Knight's self-shooting at Kanye West's VMA party, The Game is running into trouble himself. He was set to attend the Magic Marketplace fashion convention in Las Vegas to promo his Hurricane sneaker by 310, but organizers forced him to leave fearing Knight might send some goons for retribution, even though he had nothing to do with the incident.
• There certainly wasn't any Madonna-Britney kiss to buoy ratings, but Diddy didn't do much to even maintain last year's VMA ratings. The MTV broadcast slipped 22 percent over last year, averaging just 8 million viewers from 10.3 million.
• As part of his reelection campaign, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is ripping on old friend Rudy Giuliani.
• Al Pacino could use some lessons with the ladies. Instead of making young starlets feel comfortable around him, he's scaring them off with his rude 'tude.
• It doesn't matter if you're black or white — unless you're a Hurriance Katrina looter intercepted by a wire service caption.
Egads! The Associated Press is earning itself a reputation of, dare we say it, Reuters.
Newspaper readers (though it could be one guy spearheading an anonymous email campaign) are complaining to their regional dailies who rely on AP copy for Iraqi war coverage that the wire service isn't telling the whole story. And how!
"It was uncomfortable questioning The A.P., knowing that Iraq is such a dangerous place," [Rosemary Goudreau, the editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune] said. "But there's a perception that we're not telling the whole story."
So back here in New York, top editors at the papers who pick up AP stories met for an impromptu state of the union.
"One of the things the editors felt was that as much context as you can bring, the better," Ms. [Suki] Dardarian, [deputy managing editor of The Seattle Times and vice president of the board of the Associated Press Managing Editors] said. "They wanted them to get beyond the breaking news to 'What does this mean?' "
So rather than tell, they want the AP to show. Just like your frosh j-school professor, eh? But if all else fails, there's always teen speak.
Dear Reuters
In case you're wondering why most folks in media kinda, uh, laugh at ya'll, it's because of stories like this.
Richard Desmond, the wealthy one-time adult magazine publisher known in the tabloids as Dirty Des, said on Monday he would launch an American version of his weekly star cavalcade OK! in early August and write a $100 million (57.3 million pounds) check to get it started.
Monday, he announced this? Now we thought the porn mogul had made his plans well aware for months.
xoxo
Jossip
Reuters staffers are pissed - pissed! - after a critical memo from global managing editor David Schlesinger was circulated far wider than he had hoped. The memo said the news company has "terrible quality problems," which naturally insulted the thousands who work for the second-rate wire service.
And how does the bureaucracy deal with such a scandal? By calling a meeting and passing motions, duh!
A meeting yesterday of the National Union of Journalists passed a motion highly critical of David Schlesinger.
The motion, passed almost unanimously, said: "This chapel believes that the note written by David Schlesinger … makes his position as global managing editor untenable. It's particularly offensive for him to denigrate his staff at a time when Reuters journalists are risking their lives in many countries to provide outstanding coverage."
Agreed, but with only MSNBC considering your news content trustworthy enough to rely on (everyone else are mostly AP diehards) might mean Schlesinger has a point. You know, we're just sayin'. (And for the last time, people, it's "roy-TERS." Yey-zeus.)
Editorial Director
