Peoria Pundit

Here’s a start-of-the-work-week tour of the Blogosphere:

• Long before GateHouse Media bought the Peoria Journal Star, I was writing about how Peoria’s only daily newspaper skewed its editorials and coverage to promote some local candidates at the expense of others (here’s one example, out of many). According to this site, another GateHouse newspaper is getting in on the act:
  

  Gatehouse Media, Rick Daniels’ boss – Michael E. Reed should change his company mantra from it’s all about you, to: It’s ALL ABOUT POWER, INFLUENCE & MONEY.

  Under Mr. Daniels leadership The Hingham Journal continues to ‘cleanse’ the Hingham news to fit its Editors’ image and likeness of what she wants residents to read. There has only been once, last year, during Ford’s regime she did not use journalistically-unethical influence to manipulate the outcome of town elections in Hingham.

• It’s always a little slice of heaven when I see Peoria Journal Star articles running verbatim in newspapers as far away as West Frankfort. Ah, the joys of regional media monopolies in which virtually the entire state has to rely on the accuracy and fairness of one and only one reporter.
• On the way in to work today, I heard Dr. Dean Edell complaining about how we’ve evolved from a nation founded by learned men who made decisions rationally to one in which politicians brag about how they don’t bother to read newspapers with all their inconvenient facts. Edell links this attitude to those foolish people who bad-mouth immunizations, while in places like Somalia they have finally eliminated polio through vaccination programs. So I’m a little disappointed at how C.J. Summers approvingly links to a quote from Ben Stein that complains about how scientists are responsible for Nazism and Communism.
• Peoria Illinoisan makes good use of cut and paste in capturing for all eternity the sort of reader comments that the Journal Star doesn’t want to use on its YourPage.
• Hat tip to Chase Ingersoll for sending me a link to a Slashdot article that links to this fantastic article in the New Yorker by Eric Alterman about how newspapers are coping with the growth of the Internet as a source of news. He discusses how online news/opinion sites like the Huffington Post are finding success with a “mullet”-like business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back approach. Specifically, the site hires good writers to put serious articles on the front page, but there’s plenty of reader-generated comments and posts as well that generate interest and links.
  

  Almost by accident, however, the owners of the Huffington Post had discovered a formula that capitalized on the problems confronting newspapers in the Internet era, and they are convinced that they are ready to reinvent the American newspaper. “Early on, we saw that the key to this enterprise was not aping Drudge,” Lerer recalls. “It was taking advantage of our community. And the key was to think of what we were doing through the community’s eyes.”

  On the Huffington Post, Peretti explains, news is not something handed down from above but “a shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer.” Echoing Murdoch, he says that the Internet offers editors “immediate information” about which stories interest readers, provoke comments, are shared with friends, and generate the greatest number of Web searches. An Internet-based news site, Peretti contends, is therefore “alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink.”