Sunday, December 31, 2006

Not ALL of the news, just all that fits

"if it was edited out of the report that aired, then doesn't that mean it's probably not necessary?"

I never cease to be amazed by how many professional journalists make fundamental mistakes like Tom Shales's rhetorical question above deriding the additional content news producers include in their online components.

No, Mr. Shales, that does not mean that it's "probably" not necessary. It means that an editor made an editorial/commercial decision that whatever was left out was not important enough for the amount of space available, not specifically that it wasn't necessary.

An argument could be made that nothing other than the headline and maybe a short summary paragraph is actually "necessary" for most articles, thus all those syndicated wire service summaries on out-of-market stories you see in almost every section of every newspaper around. But I would imagine that just about every decent reporter around in theory has already eliminated all of the truly un-necessary elements out of their story before they submit it to their editor, especially at larger newspapers like the Washinton Post/NY Times, etc. That is after all their jobs, not just to fill space, except on slow news days, right?

Instead what shows up in print, on the air, online, etc., is a version of the story generally edited for criteria other than necessity, generally to fit the news hole available after sucking out all of the ads/commercials necessary to pay for the distribution and overhead of a publishing enterprise. Even non-commercial entities still have a finite amount of space available to fill due to the physical limitations of their medium.

In print the limitation is the cost of printing: how much does it cost for whatever the next larger available multiple of pages to be produced? If you have a magazine where a printed sheet is cut into 16 individual pages, then you are dealing in increments of 16, so every addition has that consideration. In a newspaper, it's as little as the front and back of a single page, so you don't add just a paragraph, you add a minimum of 2 pages, but that single page often seems to slip out of the paper, so it's much more common to see a full 4 pages added rather than the minimum.

In broadcast, there is no such flexibility, since an hour is an hour any which way you slice it. If you extend a story, it's almost always at the expense of another story, rarely if ever at the expense of even an extra 15 second spot due to the relative cost of air-time.

However, online your limits are generally what the editorial staff has placed on themselves, and of course the attention span of the viewer. Even with ad rates as cheap as they are today, an editor would be silly to cut something that even an extremely narrow segment of the audience would be willing to read/watch, since it truly is lost revenue.

For an example, take a hypothetical current event story about a G-8 summit in Moscow. In print and on the air that story will have to fight with everything else that is going on that day to justify its space in the news hole. Online the only competition is for the precious real estate on whichever section/home page the site uses to link to the story. Once a user clicks on the story, why would you limit the amount of information that you display to that user to what could be justified in the above equation for a newspaper article?

Even more, online you could take an extra 5 minutes and add in links to pre-existing background materials, generating more clicks/page-views and ad impressions. And if you really want to earn your money, you could take a little extra time and maybe have the reporter add a sidebar listing the strange trivia items that generally accompany any such meeting of high-powered/high-ego personalities: what they ate, who sat next to whom, why the French President insists on kissing instead of shaking the hand of a fellow President just because it is a woman, etc. Maybe even add in a little local color, like the recent Economist article detailing the typical experience going through Russian airports ( link for paid online/print subscribers), because how many of your readers are likely to get to go to Moscow?

So long as the additional material generates enough additional ad impressions to pay for the minuscule additional labor necessary, you're on the positive side of the profitability equation, and since that's what pays the bills for the companies that pay reporters to report, that looks like a pretty positive thing to me. As a journalist, I'm interested in informing my audience as fully as I and the limitations of my medium are capable of, and whether that's done in print, on the boob tube, or online, I don't care.

Friday, December 22, 2006

The Art of Cognitive Dissonance

So three Congressmen send a letter to the President reminding him that they'd like him to stop acting as though he has no possible idea how much it's going to cost to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of which has been ongoing for 3 years and that he claims to have no intention of leaving any time soon, certainly not within the next budget year, and the other has been in the same situation for 5 years now.

All this after the entire Congress attached an amendment to the last "emergency" appropriations bill it passed at the President's request requiring him to include the cost of those two wars along with the rest of his Defense budget. Why would they feel the need to reiterate pointedly what Congress would desire of him?

Well....

"Bush indicated in a signing statement that he does not necessarily view that requirement as binding because it is the president's role to submit the budget."

So, what he's saying is "I don't have to follow your instructions on how I have to submit the budget because it's my job to submit the budget"?

What exactly is that supposed to mean? I mean, it is indeed Bush's job to submit the budget, but it's not his job to set the rules on how (see bottom). Just like it's my job (currently) to program systems for publishers, but it's their job as my employers to tell me how and what I am supposed to do (and not do, like run peer-to-peer file sharing software on their networks).

The only time it's not that way is when I'm working for myself, and last I checked Mr. Bush is employed by the American people, as is Congress, and both have their "jobs" according to the Constitution. His job is to do what the American people through their designated representatives in Congress tell him to do. That's why it's the "Executive Branch" and not the "Deliberative Branch" or the "Decider-ish Branch."

So since Caren Bohan's depiction of Bush's position didn't make much sense to me, I went looking to see what he really said. What a pain in the ass that was!

After going through the official Library of Congress site, Thomas, then wikipedia/wikisource, google, and finally two different sites dedicated to signing statements, I eventually found the following at Coherent Babble (warning: I found this to be nearly unreadable at first, and you might as well).

Confession
I don't clearly remember when I last read the text of a Congressional bill. Maybe it was in college 13-20 years ago, or maybe it hasn't been since middle or high school, which would put it over 25, but whenever it was it didn't prepare me for much of what passes for "English" in the rest of the bill. By comparison, the above is downright Shakespearean in its readability!

Back to the matter at hand.

First we see the text of what Bush objects to:

"The President's budget submitted to Congress pursuant to section 1105(a) of title 31, United States Code, for each fiscal year after fiscal year 2007 shall include--
(1) a request for the appropriation of funds for such fiscal year for ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq;
(2) an estimate of all funds expected to be required in that fiscal year for such operations; and
(3) a detailed justification of the funds requested." budget bill section link

Then his response (edited to remove the full list of sections Mr. Bush intends to ignore):

"Several provisions of the Act call for executive branch officials to submit to the Congress recommendations for legislation, or purport to regulate the manner in which the President formulates recommendations to the Congress for legislation. [full list snipped] The executive branch shall construe these provisions in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to recommend for the consideration of the Congress such measures as the President deems necessary and expedient." signing statement link

So I guess Section 1008 is considered "regulat[ing]" him, but again, I'm pretty sure that's their job, just as it tells him when he needs to submit the rest of his budget:

"31 U.S. Code 1105 requires the president to submit his budget by the first Monday in February."
House Archives link