With all of the changes happening in journalism, it seems to be a good time to opine and report about the media. Plenty of blogs and bloggers do so brilliantly, but so do a few hearty souls in traditional outlets. A quick brainstorm session brought forth a list of high-profile names: Romenesko and Beaujon, yes. But also, The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz, NYU's Jay Rosen, the Maynard Institute's Richard Prince, plus four more City Paper alumni: Reuter's Jack Shafer, the New York Times' David Carr, former New York Observer media beatster Tom Scocca (now at Deadspin) and the Post's Erik Wemple.

Aside from Prince, all of these people are white men. It's generally accepted that diversity (geographical, economic, gender and race) bring differing perspectives to the newsroom and can enhance coverage. That's why journalism has been fighting (and some could say, losing) a battle for greater diversity for decades.

Beaujon has a theory for why white men are so prevalent in the field: "Media criticism, which is a fly-in-the-soup job, is fundamentally an alt-weekly pursuit, and alt-weeklies' DNA is heavily white and male. In turn, I have a couple theories about that, but my working one is that it's because working at such places gives white males such as myself a chance to feel like an underdog for once in our lives."

I think he's onto something. Alt-weeklies—including the one you're reading right now—are super white. And this particular alt-weekly has at various points employed half of the critics listed. (Maybe the real problem is diversity at City Paper? Hmm.)

At any rate, reporting on longtime acquaintances, colleagues, and even friends, can be a pretty rough business no matter what your demographic background. A willingness to be frequently unpopular—something all journalists have to learn to deal with, though usually not within their cohort—is definitely part of the description.

But maybe more importantly, the ability to criticize probably comes a bit easier for folks who don't ever have the question, "Should I even be here?" hanging over their heads as they look around a room and don't see anyone who looks like them. To that end, it seems highly unlikely that media criticism will diversify until newsrooms do.

Say It Ain't So, Howie: A Monday without the Washington Post Style section delivering a mild scolding from Howard Kurtz to some media organization for violating his keenly honed sense of ethics is like a day without finding something irritating to read in the morning paper over breakfast. (What, you thought we were going to say "sunshine?") So the announcement today that Kurtz is leaving the Post for the Tina Brown-er pastures of the Daily Beast was, to say the least, unsettling. What next? David Broder joining Twitter? Sunday morning talk shows actually producing content that informs viewers? We like our mainstream media to stay right where it belongs: in print, a little bit behind the times without realizing it, and kind of boring. +3

It's a Family Affair: The District is facing a $175 million budget shortfall. So it's only natural that the D.C. Council spent this morning passing a bill to protect animals like raccoons, foxes, pigeons, and sparrows from overzealous pest control officers. The legislation as passed didn't—as rumored—actually set up any special protections for rats and mice. But it would require animal control experts to keep "family units" together when removing wild animals from homes. No truth to reports that Republicans on Capitol Hill are considering their own measure to ensure D.C. doesn't recognize gay raccoon marriages. -1

Babies-R-Us: Two explanations have been offered for the news that D.C. Public Schools enrollment is up this year—either the reforms pushed by Michelle Rhee are working, drawing more parents to send their kids to public schools, or the bad economy means parents can't afford private school anymore, so they're opting to go the free route instead. Now the federal government says both are wrong. The real reason DCPS enrollment is up? There are more school-age kids out there. So presumably private and charter schools will also see their rolls grow. We're just waiting for the Post to say the baby boom is the legacy of Snowmaggedon. +2

White House Goes Solar: Dealing with Pepco may be easier for the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW than it is for many other Washingtonians who install solar power. The Obama administration will put solar panels and a solar hot water heater on the White House, in an attempt to demonstrate the benefits of green living. D.C. residents are eligible for big grants from the District for solar installations. It's unclear whether President Barack Obama qualifies for the help, but since the U.S. Department of Energy is sponsoring the project, he probably doesn't need it. Wisely, Obama resisted a campaign to get him to put the solar panels Jimmy Carter installed back up; Democrats have enough problems this fall without setting up easy Carter-Obama punch lines. +3

Yesterday's Needle rating: 46 Today's score: +7 Today's Needle rating: 53

Stop Us If You've Heard This One: At 2:21 p.m., the bulletin went out from the National Weather Service: "A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 10 PM. A COLD FRONT WILL CROSS THE AREA... PRODUCING NUMEROUS THUNDERSTORMS. DAMAGING WIND GUSTS WILL BE THE PRIMARY THREAT." Fun! By now, the routine should be more or less rote: prepare to swim home after Metro inevitably floods; watch for fires caused by exploding power transformers; expect long delays on any and every mode of transportation. Remember, should Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz's power go out again, check back frequently with City Desk—your number one source for all Kurtz electricity-related news. -5

Daily Show Sells Out: Tickets for the October tapings of Jon Stewart's nightly skewering of politicians who so richly deserve it were snapped up in, oh, about the time it takes to watch a 30-second campaign ad. Which means, chances are, you'll be watching the D.C. editions of The Daily Show the same way you watch the ones taped in New York: On your couch, alone (like always), dreaming in vain that you had John Hodgman there to laugh and/or snuggle with you. -4

Free Water Ice: A new branch of Rita's Water Ice opened in Chinatown, and to celebrate, they're giving their product away through Friday. In Philadelphia, from whence Rita's hails, it's pronounced "wood-er ice," and for some reason, they call a combination of ice and custard "gelati," even though it's nothing like Italian gelato. Also, in Philadelphia they must also have ice made out of something besides water; otherwise, the term "water ice" seems rather redundant. +2

Bring Out Your Guns!: Prompted by last week's shooting in Adams Morgan, the Metropolitan Police Department says it'll pay rewards of up to $1,000 for tips that lead to the confiscation of illegal weapons. Presumably, MPD will be arresting people who have the guns in their possession, or there could be some good arbitrage opportunities for anyone willing to buy some guns online for 400 bucks, then turn themselves in to collect $1,000. If you're wondering why AK-47s are for sale on the Internet, thank these bozos. And remember, guns don't kill people, people do. It's just that guns make it much, much easier. +2

Friday's Needle rating: 47 Today's score: -5 Today's Needle rating: 42

Washington Post

As devoted City Desk readers know, Kurtz's latest torment at the hands of Pepco began yesterday, after a powerful morning storm. The outage came on the heels of a previous five-day power cut last month. During that crisis, the reporter angrily denounced the utility company—and Pepco, after initially offering mere generic online reassurance, soon changed course and assured Kurtz that a crew was en route.

This time, power was restored much more quickly. But not before Kurtz—who said he wasn't seeking special personal treatment—again teed off of the company's "lack of info and misinformation." And the speedy restoration apparently hasn't convinced him that the firm's communications are entirely on the up-and-up. "Pepco lowballed expectations this time," Kurtz tweeted as he announced that electricity had returned.

Stay with City Desk, your number-one source for Howard Kurtz electricity-related news, for coverage of any future developments related to utility service at the Kurtz household.

Kurtz, who endured a five-day storm-induced electricity cut prior to going on vacation, returned home just in time for a second stint without power. Just like during power cut one, Kurtz hasn't hesitated to microblog his displeasure with Pepco. But so far this time, there's no evidence that the social media savvy power company has dispatched a crew to Kurtz's stricken household—despite the fact that the electric cut could mean the pundit would be dangerously misinformed in the event an upoming "Reliable Sources" episode deals with such electricity-powered media as the Internet and cable TV. (We'll assume that a resourceful newsman like Kurtz keeps battery-operated broadcast TVs and radios around for just this sort of emergency).

For 11 uneasy hours, we waited for word on whether the power was back. Was Kurtz banging out some new take on a new bloggers-versus-reporters controversy via a manual typewriter? Was he using a treadmill generator to make sure his flow of information was uninterrupted? Had he tragically drowned in the flood of melted ice cream presumably flowing out of the Kurtz family refrigerator? In mid-evening, Kurtz's avatar emerged from seclusion to announce that he "wasn't pushing to restore my power," only objecting to Pepco misinformation. There's still no word that power has returned—with or without the badgering of the most important man in Style section-based Monday media coverage.

Meanwhile, signs have emerged that Kurtz's major-media colleagues may not be prepared to rally behind his criticisms of the power company. ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper (a City Paper alum) tweeted that his own power cut had been resolved very nicely, and thanked Pepco, hashtaggng his post "the anti-Kurtz." Could such obvious divisions among the Beltway media elite cause overburdened Pepco staffers to play favorites? Or is Kurtz already a target, perhaps because of his trenchant reporting on causes of interest to Pepco workers, many of whom were devoted followers of deposed Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel?

Our reporting has not turned up other examples of leading media-criticism figures deprived of electricity, a contrast that is sure to encourage those who might view Kurtz's as a case of persecution.

But the good news is that despite  the unprecedented loss of power, Kurtz is still tweeting. Which means that the hard working reporters here at City Desk—your number one source for Kurtz electricity-related news—will know as soon as Kurtz and those 33,000 followers exactly when the lights flicker back on that Howard Kurtz HQ. Stay tuned!

Photo via CNN

As of 1:24 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time... We don't know! No update on the electricity situation at the Kurtz homestead in more than five hours. (Though there is a new link to some Playboy photos!) But surely, Pepco is on the case.

Remember, at City Desk, our motto is: "Your number one source for all Kurtz electricity-related news." (Our secondary motto: "No limit on exclamation marks allowed per post.") Refresh the page early and often!

Photo via CNN

Apparently he'll need to work his magic again today; this morning's storms brought bad news to the Kurtz household once again. A plaintive cry issued forth from the Postie on Twitter once again: "No power for 5 days, go on vacation, come back, it rains, no power again. Thanks, Pepco."

Keep checking back here throughout the day for more updates on City Desk—your number one source for all Kurtz electricity-related news!

Photo via CNN

WaPo's Howard Kurtz this morning profiles the frantic lifestyle and obsessive Twitter habits of "Chuckie T," better known as NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd (you know, the guy with the goatee), whose crack team of investigative reporters will vigorously track down any scoop:

"I have the CIA soup of the day — bacon corn chowder! Yes!" Guthrie exclaims as if she has unearthed a state secret.

The Examiner uncovers more scheming restaurant workers skimming the credit cards of unsuspecting D.C. diners, this time at the Cheesecake Factory at 5345 Wisconsin Avenue NW, where three employees are accused of bilking patrons to the tune of $117,000. And you thought the wild blueberry white chocolate cheesecake was a ripoff.

In sports: who needs the Stanley Cup when you can win the American Fitness Index? WTOP reports the D.C. metropolitan area ranks No. 1 in the American College of Sports Medicine's new fitness study:

The report says in the last 30 days, 80 percent of people in the region did some sort of physical activity or exercised. Nearly 29 percent said they ate at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

In the metro area, 90.2 percent of people have health insurance.

The region also has lower than the national average rates of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. 

 

"An overcast Sunday morning brought surprises to the Southwest Fish Market which was flooded by high water on the Washington Channel today. The roadway on East Potomac Park/Hains Point was also partially flooded. Workers at the market did their best to install temporary wooded paths to the market stalls, which were still open and filled with seafood. By early afternoon, the water had retreated, and it was business as usual at the market."

The AP reports "soggy" conditions elsewhere in the northeast.

After the jump: hoops news, etc.

Big local hoops news. The Hoyas earned the 3rd seed in the midwest region and will face Ohio in the first round. The team got a raw deal having to play in the midwest as they face the most stacked region in the tournament with Kansas, the number one overall seed, in that region along with the Terps (the fourth seed), Michigan State, Tennessee and Ohio State. The Hoyas should have gotten a two seed in the east region!!!

Someone please explain to me how Duke ended up a No. 1 seed in the tournament.

In other hoops news, DeMatha beat Ballou in the "Abe Pollin City Title Game."

And finally, Howard Kurtz made an ass of himself on CNN.

HEY SPEAKING OF THE POST: One of the paper's boldface names stinks up the joint with a widely ridiculed column, the paper's executive editor axes it, there's all kinda inside-baseball media swirl, and the paper's media columnist does...nothing about it? Seriously, where's Kurtz on this?

BUT THEN AGAIN THIS IS NOT A MEDIA COLUMN! It's a morning roundup! Some things that happened yesterday:

• Gay marriage day went off without a hitch! Get it? Is this thing on?
• Caps beat Sabres, Maryland beat Duke, Wizards lost.
• That water main break in Crystal City, the buzz of the office yesterday? The traffic problems it caused have been fixed.
• AMAZING Tom Jackman item about a books-for-crack ring at GMU. GMU's paper broke it, and for some weird reason the Post let Jackman link to the story.

Today, there is no other place to start but here: the weather (the roads are just wet for now, but there is still a chance you need to panic). Also, road closures and the March for Life. You going?

Next: Howard Kurtz's story in the Washington Post this morning about how the National Enquirer plans to submit its reporting on the John Edwards fathering-a-baby-by-a-staffer-no-really-he-did-even-though-he-denies-it-see-I-told-you-so scandal for journalism's highest prize, the Pulitzer.

Writes Kurtz in his second paragraph:

Don't laugh.

"It's clear we should be a contender for this," Barry Levine said by phone Thursday, hours after the former presidential candidate admitted what the paper had been reporting all along: that he is the father of Rielle Hunter's baby. "The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, was able to publish this reporting."

From The Enquirer's Web site: "NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation vindicated as former Senator John Edwards FINALLY admits to the world what The ENQUIRER has been telling you all along that John Edwards IS the father of his mistress Rielle Hunter's love child, Frances Quinn." All that punctuation and bolding: theirs. I've never seen an "IS" that big!

You can also read in the Enquirer about Tiger Woods undergoing sex rehab at an "out-of-the-way Mississippi facility." (Pictures here). Like Kurtz said—and he seemed really sincere—don't laugh. They got it right about Edwards.

Speaking of checkbook journalism, check out City Paper's photos from the George Michael funeral at the National Cathedral yesterday

How much money does it take a guy to shut up about how much he hates his bosses? (Yes, this is about Conan.) We'll see if $45 million does it. "We wanted to give him a graceful exit. Hopefully he will be graceful," Jeff Gaspin, chairman of NBC Universal Television Entertainment, told the Wall Street Journal. Graceful is definitely not a word I'd use to describe Conan, but if anything can buy grace, $45 million can.

Conan's final show airs tonight. Maybe now we can all move on with our lives.

On the reading front, looks as if the Post's Style section is making a move to up their local feature count. Today, Dan Zak goes long on a D.C. mural, following on the heels of other feature-box stuff on D.C., including Michael Rosenwald's experiment in listening to sports-talk radio.

Post columnist Colbert I. King goes long and hard about acceptance of violence in the city. Murders, shooting sprees, deaths—no one seems to care, screams King, citing the emergence of a "new normal." And it's not a good normal, either: "That 'new normal' view embraces bike paths and a bicycle center at Union Station, townhouses and parks along the Potomac, couples eating al fresco at neighborhood coffee shops, doggy parks, schools befitting the middle class, and poor people who behave themselves and patiently wait their turn.

The city's chosen means for coping with a crisis shaped by self-destructive forces and a shifting civic landscape? The medical procedure, triage.

Officials won't say it this way, but this is what it means: dividing our social order into three groups — those who aren't going to make it, those who might and those who will."

District rocks!

A perennial: D.C. cops out to get the prostitutes and johns at 5th and K. And another perennial: D.C. voting rights lobbyists are taking their act on the road, where people—surprise!—don't know that we don't have meaningful congressional representation: "DC Vote is reaching out to people like 62-year-old Henry Perry of Tennessee.

Not until the advocacy group visited Mr. Perry in Mississippi earlier this month did he learn that D.C. residents pay taxes and serve in the military but don't have a vote in Congress.

'I think it's really a disgrace that they're denied that right,' said Mr. Perry, president of the Teamsters Local Union No. 667 in Memphis, which also has members in Mississippi. 'I was kind of shocked.'"

Howie Kurtz discusses how powerless the media is when it's face to face with disinformation (i.e., death panels).

Solid tale by Post's Del Wilber on $3 million, sexual molestation, a duped judge, and a defamation case. Not to mention a stolen barbecue grill!.

So the Washington Post appeared to want to make you pay big bucks for meet-ups with their reporters and editors. Politico had the scoop on the Post scheme in which Publisher Katharine Weymouth would host "salons" in which lobbyists and association muckety mucks would pay large sums of money to hobnob with Posties, Obama administration officials, and members of Congress.

Let's stop and just say it: This is/was really, really dumb. Unethical and dumb. Yesterday, Weymouth published a "Dear Reader" letter apologizing for the now-abandoned salons. It reads in part:

"A flier distributed last week suggested that we were selling access to power brokers in Washington through dinners that were to take place at my home. The flier was not approved by me or newsroom editors, and it did not accurately reflect what we had in mind. But let me be clear: The flier was not the only problem."

I wonder if the Weymouth has to put a stop order on the hot appetizers she planned on serving to D.C.'s elite. I hope the Post doesn't have to eat the cost of the flower arrangement orders. And I hope they got a deal on those fliers they're not going to use. Next time: Evites.

There had been a lot of dithering on the part of the Post's staff on the subject of these salons. Howard Kurtz, the paper's media reporter, suggested the events were like the New Yorker Festival. [Um, no the salons would not have been like the New Yorker Festival]. It is really doubtful that the salons would have been open to the public and given big-time ad treatment within its pages. The salons appeared to be private affairs between Washington elite.

The best takedown/summation of this scandal? You can find it at The Awl. The Shadow Editors—featuring WCP alum Tom Scocca—dissect the scandal and the Weymouth letter. It's actually funny.

I am still confused about the extent of the Post's editors and reporters involvement in setting up the salons.

*photo courtesy Business Week.

Local TV isn't likely to expose a crooked mayor, as the Detroit Free Press did.

Arguable point, especially to Tom Sherwood, the dean of reporting here in municipalDCworld. Sherwood quickly banged out an e-mail to Kurtz asking, "[W]hat prompted the wholesale, gratuitous slap at "local tv" not being worth anything when it comes to investigative, serious reporting?"

The tall, baritone-voiced local from WRC-TV has some bona fides in this area. As his missive points out, his reporting has gotten people fired and had policies changed in local government. And Sherwood advises Kurtz to look at the best reporting of local TV stations—you'll find some fine investigative work in there, he says. "A wholesale dismissal, I believe, was uncalled for in your otherwise important story."

"Important story" is a bit too much praise for this particular Kurtz piece. The Post's top media reporter, a very responsive soul, had this to say about the assertion: "I should have qualified the statement a bit; there are a relative handful of stations that do good investigative reporting. But I was talking about the big, sweeping, labor-intensive investigations that topple a mayor or expose sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Given the cutbacks in the broadcasting, those are rare indeed in local TV."

Writing today in the Washington Post, media reporter Howard Kurtz posits that newspaper companies failed to position themselves for the upheaval that's battering their industry. Here's Kurtz on the matter:

The people who run such companies bear a considerable share of the blame. In 1993, just before the Internet became a consumer force, I argued in a book that newspapers had become too cautious, too incremental and too dull, tailored largely for insiders. The rise of hugely profitable monopoly papers in most cities made them increasingly bland, seemingly allergic to controversy.

Then the Net changed America, but newspapers remained mired in two-dimensional thinking. They created sites that were largely a static replica of their print editions. There was little updating, little sense of the dynamism of the Web, and when I started writing a blog for washingtonpost.com in 2000, I had little company in the mainstream media.

Those graphs have a few things going against them: 1) They're self-serving: If you forgot that Kurtz was a pioneer of online journalism, you get a nice reminder here. 2) They generalize about the scourge of "replica" sites without mentioning sites—boston.com, sfgate.com, philly.com—that sought, unprofitably, to become community "portals"; 3) They constitute a facile reduction of what has happened to newspapers.

Blame it all on the moguls—that's essentially the tack that Kurtz is taking. He indicts them for passing up "missed opportunities," which he says were "endless." Whenever you say something's endless, you have to proffer an example or two, and Kurtz supplies the following:

For the first time in half a century, newspapers could compete against television with real-time reporting, but didn't. The Globe's previous owners turned down a 1995 offer from the founder of Monster.com to put Globe classifieds online, before his site became a smash hit. Why did no establishment media company create a Craigslist, a Huffington Post, a Google News, a Twitter, or other sites that have altered the boundaries of news and information?

Let's take these missed opportunities one by one:

1) Failing to compete against television with "real-time reporting": Two problems here. One is that, as far as I know, newspapers did undertake real-time reporting. And if they didn't do it early enough to satisfy Kurtz, surely they're doing it now. As to the strategic question of whether they competed effectively against television, I'm not sure how pivotal that was. After all, how profitable is television news these days, anyway?

2) Of the Globe and Monster.com. OK, fine—a missed opportunity. But how much of one? A red-letter moment in the failure of newspapers this was not. Think about it: If the Globe had indeed moved forward with the job classifieds, it would have been a pioneer within the news industry, and others would have jumped on board. Yet: What made Monster.com special was that it's a dedicated site—one of those verticals that the gurus are always praising—where people could come for one thing. Merely throwing up the same application on a newspaper site wasn't going to save the Globe or the newspaper industry.

3) Not creating a Huffington Post or a Google News or a Twitter. The idiocy in this slam is beyond comprehension. Let's take these one by one as well. HuffPo is indeed an innovative experiment, with tons of aggregation and an ever-expanding menu of original content. Perhaps a mainstream outlet should have come up with this model. But are HuffPo's revenues these days going to save any decent-sized newspaper company? No way. Next up is Google News, and this one's a real laugher. If I'm interpreting this correctly, Kurtz is holding newspaper publishers responsible for having not launched Google News. Which means he's holding them responsible for not launching Google—because without Google, there's no Google News. So, in effect, he's holding them responsible for not owning the entire Internet. Those idiots. Now for Twitter. Yes, Howie, they should have invented Twitter. And perhaps they should have patented the Snuggie, too.

A more thoughtful look at this same question came earlier this year courtesy of Slate's Jack Shafer. His story discussed the entire history of newspapers' attempts to safeguard their future via infotech.

By questioning why newspapers didn't author some of the Internet's great innovations, Kurtz actually comes close to answering the question that he poses. The central problem of newspapers, as we're learning, is that their journalism is losing its commercial viability, to the extent it ever had any. The only way to keep journalism "alive," accordingly, is to dabble wisely in adjacent ventures, as the Washington Post did with Kaplan and its cable systems. If your diversification approach involved other newspapers, as the New York Times did with the Boston Globe, you're sunk.

In other words, newspaper publishers erred in trying to keep publishing journalism. To suggest that "missed opportunities" would somehow have yielded a far more healthy industry is to diminish the forces that have pushed the sector toward extinction. Structural changes in the economy that have leveled department stores and other reliable advertisers. The migration of readers to a new platform where newspapers have no inherent advantage in terms of distribution. And, now, a recession.

Photo courtesy of Matt Callow