Breitbart.com: "Get connected to the news as fast as possible."

While scanning the latest list of top 50 online news sources, I noticed Breitbart.com, which ranks 50 and which I hadn't heard of before in spite of the excessive time I already spend on the Web:

Breitbart.com offers real-time access to top news and analysis sources. You can monitor up-to-the-minute feeds from wires, newspapers, networks, key blogs and more. And there are multiple options for exploring topics by channel. While some news sites select stories for the user and others allow users to rank favorite news stories, Breitbart emphasizes user access to the raw news feeds -- kind of an organized grocery store of news.

Just how stupid, shortsighted and out-of-touch are newspaper executives?

Last week I read the book Burn Rate. A great read. Burn Rate ruthlessly but hilariously chronicles author Michael Wolff's attempt to cash in on the early days of the Internet. One scene that grabbed my attention was when Wolff described a speech he gave before a conference of newspaper editors in 1996:

It was a cross section of Middle-America that I saw in the audience. Two hundred or so inartfully dressed average Joes. They had a far different look from the software groups and technology business audiences I usually found myself in front of. The newspaper editors lacked an edge. They seemed to be looking for a way not to be noticed whereas those other groups were strictly a "shine that light over here" bunch. Newspaper people had fallen way behind the technology curve. Their management, fat on monopoly profits, had no incentive to make the investment in the resources that technology demanded. It was a sad state. Newspaper editor was a job alongside schoolteacher or bank teller. It was a small-town job, underpaid, underskilled, inexorably being downgraded from profession to back-office function.

When I read that, I thought to myself: Wolff was a seer. That's so deadly accurate, it makes me want to cry. The entire newspaper industry is in a steep decline now because newspaper executives didn't wake up in time. They ignored the Internet until it was too late. And Wolff foresaw it all, right there at the very beginning.

There's just one problem with what he wrote: It isn't true. It's a caricature, a striking but false picture. It appeals to a common prejudice in the news business: That management is hopelessly inept, out of touch, unable to change, and if only it would embrace the new, all would be right with the world.

How do I know what he wrote isn't true? Wolff, for one. As it becomes clear his Web dreams are dying, Wolff revisits the newspaper editors at a later conference and decides they aren't so out of it after all:

I was startled by what I heard. The newspaper people of America, one after another, stood up to profess their faith in the Web and their acceptance of the end of newspapers as we knew them.

It had happened, apparently: In the course of six months or so, the Web had become a strategic avenue for every mid-size paper in the country.

The promise here, I heard from representatives of the great old names in American newspapers, was to be able to bring retailer together with customer in some new, wonderful, and efficient relationship. That was the future. Sixty billion dollars in local advertising was at stake.

There was real excitement. They had really gotten it.

Not just Wolff, though, tells me the caricature is a lie. The next book I read was Speeding the Net, which told the story of the first hugely popular Internet browser, Netscape, and how it was eventually overtaken by Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Even before the Netscape browser got its name, when it was still called Mosaic and well before it was released to the public, a newspaper company, Knight-Ridder, was paying attention. This was 1994, two years before the caricature painted by Wolff:

Knight-Ridder ... had become convinced that the Internet represented the future of publishing -- and better yet, that Mosaic represented the future of the Net.

Knight-Ridder was on board, ready to develop an on-line version of its San Jose Mercury-News for publication on the Web. ... Knight-Ridder would buy a license, for a grand total of $50,000, that would entitle the media company to one copy of everything Mosaic would make in the next year.

Knight-Ridder would end up publishing the Mercury-News online, using a beta version of the Mozilla server software.

The first version of Netscape was in beta still! And Knight-Ridder was there.

The story goes even farther back than that, though. Long before the Internet, there was something called Videotex. In the 1970s and 80s Videotex delivered text and graphics electronically to subscribers, who would view it on televisions screens. Who were among the biggest investors at the time? Newspaper companies. Particularly Knight-Ridder, which invested more than $50 million in it, in 1980s dollars.

Videotex failed, for a lot of reasons, but the stupidity of newspaper executives wasn't one of them. One of the Knight-Ridder executives involved with Videotex -- called Videotron with Knight-Ridder -- was Philip Meyer, who later became a professor at Chapel Hill and is considered one of the pioneers of computer-assisted reporting.

I've dredged all of this up because I read a lot about journalism online these days and there's an endless refrain that goes something like this: The people leading newspapers are imbeciles, and if only they had more foresight, had planned ahead and embraced the Internet sooner, newspapers wouldn't be in the quagmire they're in now. What's amusing is that a lot of this commentary comes from people who, as best I can tell, have never met a payroll, who know absolutely nothing about the advertising business and how it works, and who have never created a truly successful blog, much less an entire self-sustaining, profitable Web site, themselves.

I'm not saying there aren't stupid, shortsighted newspapers executives, because undoubtedly there are. I'm not saying that newspapers can't do a better job on the Web, because they can.

What I am saying is that powerful economic forces, forces that are vastly more complicated than the simplistic drivel about newspaper curmudgeons and their resistance to change, are behind the news industry's malaise today. You would think that the litany of business failures over the last few decades, not just of Videotex but also of Wolff's company, of Netscape, of an untold number of Web startups and of Knight-Ridder itself, which was there at the beginning and still couldn't make it work, would induce a little humility in those who think they have all the answers now.

Unfortunately, it hasn't.

Reporters' Guide to Covering the Olympics

... from Human Rights Watch (PDF):

Sports journalists who may be unaccustomed to government monitoring should know that even the most basic reporting activities may be of interest to the Chinese government. Chinese officials do not distinguish sports journalists from editorial writers or foreign correspondents and your judgment of what constitutes a story won’t be theirs. You will want to plan and act accordingly.

This guide spells out your rights as a visiting journalist in China—but also the risks you face, and the risks your Chinese contacts will face once the Beijing Games are over and you are back home. You will find here practical information on a range of subjects, from what documents to carry with you to how to identify public security officials. You will find not only general safety tips but very specific suggestions on how to evade online censorship and what to do if you are detained. You will also find a concise summary of human rights conditions in China and ideas for stories that will give your readers a glimpse of the real China behind the curtain of the Olympic extravaganza.

Remember, the victims of Adolph will be watching how you do.

[via Docuticker]

In search of hard numbers on mass newspaper layoffs

Last week an anonymous reader commented on my post about the newspaper layoff map:

All this fuss over some layoffs. What a bunch of cry babies. Now that the newspapers are going through what the rest of us have been dealing with for decades all of a sudden its big news. There are hardly any news articles about US companies replacing American workers with 65,000 H1B visa temporary workers each year and that is not even counting the L1 visas. Journalists callously wrote articles about how poor foreigners need those jobs. Well where are the articles about how the outsourcing in the news industry is good and helps poor immigrants get jobs. As far as I'm concerned, the current downsizing/outsourcing going on in the news industry is some much needed bitter medicine for the out of touch media.

Journalists do come across as oblivious to the economic reality faced by most other workers. Layoffs are common in other industries, even in the allegedly fast-growing and dynamic high-tech world. Companies like Sun Microsystems, Motorola and Yahoo! have laid off workers in the last year. And in many industries, workers aren't offered expensive buyout packages, as most newsroom employees seem to be getting. They're just let go, period.
Newspaper layoffs don't show up in the mass layoff statistics kept by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last month, after reading about The Palm Beach Post cutting 130 jobs from its newsroom, I looked there for signs of a more general surge in big newspaper job cuts and couldn't find any. The bureau releases the data monthly, with the most recent release for May, so presumably large newspaper layoffs would show up there. I couldn't find data sliced as finely as I wanted it, however, so its possible a trend is visible in other numbers I didn't have access to.
The bureau classifies industries using the North American Industry Classification System. There is a category, 511111, for newspaper publishers, but narrowest data grouping I could find online was a breakdown by "Publishing Industries (except Internet)." That isn't on point because it includes not only newspaper publishers but also magazine, book, directory, software and greeting card publishers.
Here's what the yearly figures since 1996 look like in a Google Chart. I assume the spike in 2001 reflects the dot-com bubble bursting.

Another issue is that the definition of a mass layoff -- "Fifty or more initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits filed against an employer during a 5-week period, regardless of duration" -- doesn't apply in most newspaper situations. The number fired is either less than that or reached through buyouts, which don't count as layoffs.
Newspaper layoffs also don't appear to be fall under the WARN Act, which requires companies to to give advance notice of mass layoffs under certain conditions. The government's guide to what must be reported (PDF) says you may be covered by the law if your job loss occurs as part of:

• A plant closing ... where your employer shuts down a facility or operating unit ... within a single site of employment ... and lays off at least 50 full-time workers;
• A mass layoff .... where your employer lays off either between 50 and 499 full-time workers at a single site of employment and that number is 33% of the number of full-time workers at the single site of employment; or
• A situation where your employer ... lays off 500 or more full-time workers at a single site of employment.

These don't apply to the typical newspaper scenario.
Many states report these layoff notices on the Web, including Kentucky (PDF). The only mention of a newspaper I found after checking a few other states was in Florida, where in March McClatchy reported 71 of its layoffs.
I found the layoff lists interesting to scroll through. They're a window onto the grinding wheels of the economy and put the news industry's woes, however sorrowful they may be, in context. There are lots of layoffs by mortgage companies, restaurant chains and transportation companies. And if nothing else, you can take cold comfort in knowing that you're in the same predicament as the 162 people let go at Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede.

Newspaper layoff map

graphicdesignr plots "paper cuts". - i.e. buyouts and layoffs in the newspaper industry. The closest to home recently was the Lexington Herald-Leader, which is cutting its work force 4 percent. graphicdesignr says the total industry-wide this year is 4,420+.

[via CyberJournalist]

Research Recap

... highlights "the best equity, credit, market and economic research." Their latest post summarizes a Forrester report on newspapers' "Near-Death Spiral":

The inability of print newspapers to provide a high level of accountability to advertisers, combined with falling circulation as consumers abandon their subscriptions for content they can get elsewhere, will lead to print becoming a cost center rather than a profit center for newspapers.

Can't read the full report - "The Fragmentation of Yesterday's Newspaper" - online, though. That will cost you $279 -- $86 more than a year's subscription to The Courier-Journal.

[Via Media Stock Blog]

On the passing of Tim Russert

 

 

Certain stories are always untrustworthy.

This includes stories written within hours of an event and stories about people who have died unexpectedly, as with Tim Russert.  

The first New York Times post about Russert's death called him "a towering figure in American journalism." The Washington Post said he "revolutionized Sunday morning television" and his death would have "a large — and lasting — impact on the work of politics and journalism for months to come."

My first thought reading all that was, "Really?" 

Tim Russert was a celebrity, no doubt. He was likeable, it seems obvious from the outpouring of affection for him. He was an important figure at NBC, where he was a vice president and the Washington bureau chief. He could get really important people to appear on his Sunday morning talk show to talk shop before its 3 million viewers. 

But revolutionary? For taking over a long-running political talk show and reviving it by — gasp! — asking tough questions? I had to look up the definition of towering because its meaning — "surpassing others; very great" — didn't fit with my view of Russert. 

I thought of him as a better-than-average commentator who loved the game and the people in it a little too much. I thought of him as more a political schmoozer than a fact gatherer, a point I made a year ago when the notion of picking up a phone to nail down facts seemed beyond him. Russert began his career as an apparatchik of politicians, hardly the best training for a professional disinterested observer.  

Tim Rutten wrote in the LA Times: 

Watching the cable news networks in the hours after his death, one was struck by the outpouring of admiration and affection from across the political spectrum and from journalistic colleagues of every sort. It was impossible not to be struck — once again — by just how incestuous and claustrophobic the Washington-based nexus of politics and journalism has become. 

Thus, in all that gush across four networks in dozens and dozens of voices, hardly a word was spoken concerning Russert's role in the recent trial of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. That's odd because Libby's conviction on perjury and obstruction of justice charges was, in some large part, based on Russert's testimony. Like former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Russert was one of the high-level Washington journalists who came out of the Libby trial looking worse than shabby.  

That's the way it is when someone dies, no matter who they are. There's an immediate instinct to emphasize the good and suppress the bad. It's understandable, commendable even. But it's hardly an honest reflection of a life. It's hard to put things in perspective when you're in shock. 

Russert led a good life and did good things but it's what people will say long after the reporters have stopped typing that will be the true measure of the man.

ProPublica: "Journalism in the Public Interest"

ProPublica is a New York-based non-profit dedicated to investigative journalism that has hired more than 20 experienced reporters and editors. This week it "quietly" opened its doors on the Web. They call themselves an "experiment" and believe they are "the largest, best-led and best-funded investigative journalism operation in the United States."

Their Web site will feature not only their own work but also a round-up of investigative stories from around the Web; commentary and analysis of some of those stories; and "Scandal Watch," which "will track the top five investigations (other than our own) at any given moment, selected by our editors and ranked by intensity of coverage."

From their about page:

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

Investigative journalism is at risk. Many news organizations have increasingly come to see it as a luxury. Today’s investigative reporters lack resources: Time and budget constraints are curbing the ability of journalists not specifically designated “investigative” to do this kind of reporting in addition to their regular beats. This is therefore a moment when new models are necessary to carry forward some of the great work of journalism in the public interest that is such an integral part of self-government, and thus an important bulwark of our democracy.

The business crisis in publishing and — not unrelated — the revolution in publishing technology are having a number of wide-ranging effects.  Among these are that the creation of original journalism in the public interest, and particularly the form that has come to be known as “investigative reporting,” is being squeezed down, and in some cases out.

ProPublica is led by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Stephen Engelberg, a former managing editor of The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon and former investigative editor of The New York Times, is ProPublica’s managing editor.

Lead funding for this effort is being provided by the Sandler Foundation, with Herbert Sandler serving as Chairman of ProPublica; other leading philanthropies also providing important support. A Board of Directors and a Journalism Advisory Board have also been formed.

 

[via Portfolio.com]

Investigative Reporters and Editors conference blog

... is here. The conference is going on now in Miami.

Newspapers that Twitter

graphicdesignr summarizes May's activity. Hah, I was about to write that The Courier-Journal doesn't Twitter, at least officially, but in fact we do. Guess I need to get out of the office more.

mediabistro.com

You can get a daily email summarizing media news from mediabistro.com:

mediabistro.com is dedicated to anyone who creates or works with content, or who is a non-creative professional working in a content/creative industry. That includes editors, writers, producers, graphic designers, book publishers, and others in industries including magazines, television, film, radio, newspapers, book publishing, online media, advertising, PR, and design. Our mission is to provide opportunities to meet, share resources, become informed of job opportunities and interesting projects and news, improve career skills, and showcase your work.

From the Frontline: Top 10 journalistic uses for Twitter

"It's not all useless banter about cats and cookery," the blog says.  (No, but the flood of disjointed trivia is the main reason I'm lukewarm about Twitter.)

Jeff Jarvis: "Why Twitter is the canary in the news coalmine"

I might have ignored this a few months ago, but since I first learned of two recent news events -- a plane crash and the earthquake that shook Kentucky -- via Twitter and not a conventional news site, I can't deny Twitter's value:

It stands to reason: if you've just gone through a major event, you are sure to want to update your friends about it. If enough people are chattering about an earthquake at the same time, that's an immediate indication of a major news story.

Developers at the BBC and Reuters have picked up on the potential for this. They are working on applications to monitor Twitter, the Twitter search engine Summize, and other social-media services - Flickr, YouTube, Facebook - for news catchwords such as "earthquake" and "evacuation". They hope for two benefits: first, an early warning of news, and second, a way to find witness media - photos, videos and accounts from the event. This is clearly more efficient than waiting for reporters and photographers to get to the scene after the news is over - though, of course, they will still go and do what journalists do: report, verify facts, package, and take their own pictures (which they then own).

Incidentally, while I still consider it an experiment, you can follow me on Twitter.

Social bookmarking for journalists

... as explained by the Online Journalism Blog.

In Uganda it's still the message, not the medium, that matters

While American journalists debate whether to blog, Twitter or become multimedia warriors, the journalism that really matters is still going on in the world:

In a two-pronged operation, police and operatives from the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI), Joint Anti-Terrorism Taskforce (JATT) and the Black Mamba squad raided The Independent again, exactly a month after the first raid.

It is 9.30am on Saturday April 26 and The Independent’s Managing Editor Andrew Mwenda is driving from his home along Golf Course Road in Kololo for the Capital Gang programme on Capital FM radio. As he climbs up Coral Crescent Rise towards Lower Kololo Terrace, two suspicious cars come from in front of him, the front one towards him at breakneck speed. Thinking that perhaps the driver had lost control, he stops and tries to reverse when suddenly three other cars appear from behind, one knocking his rear bumper.

Then a swarm of security operatives surround the car, one young man tries to open the door but it is locked from inside. He pulls out a gun and points it at Mwenda asking him to get out of the car. When Mwenda opens the door, the security operatives pounce on him, forcefully pulling him out of the car, confiscating his phones, watch and car before dumping him into a waiting car and driving off in a heavily defended convoy at break-neck speed.

“There were not witnesses around,” Mwenda narrates his ordeal. “I realised the state wanted me to disappear without a trace. So I opened the car window and shouted at people along the road that I was Andrew Mwenda being kidnapped by CMI. At this point, the security operatives pulled me back and this time handcuffed me so that I do not cause more trouble.

[via TEDBlog]

A Free Online Course in Science Journalism

... is offered by the World Federation of Science Journalists.

The authors and translators of this course are experienced journalists and trainers from all continents. They cover major practical and conceptual issues in science journalism, for example: how to find and research stories, exposing false claims, how to pitch to an editor, turning crisis reporting to advantage and so forth – topics that are relevant to beginners in journalism as well as more experienced reporters and editors in all regions of the world.

Investigative reporting enters the era of chopped meat

Bob Greene was a legendary investigative reporter who died yesterday. A criminal investigator before he became a reporter, Greene oversaw the investigative team at Long Island's Newsday decades ago when it wrote about the heroin trade, shady land sales and political skulduggery. His former colleague Anthony Marro wrote of Greene in 2002:

There had been investigative reporters before, of course, and some short-lived investigative teams as well, including the high-powered group assembled by Life magazine. But much that passed for investigative reporting was leaks from police agencies and prosecutors. While Greene and his team got their share of such leaks, the thing that set them apart from most others was the emphasis on original work. They built their own databases. They developed their own chronologies. They drew their own charts to trace the flow of property and money, and to connect the political and business ties of investors. This is common today, but it was so rare in the late ’60s and early ’70s that other papers interested in setting up investigative teams, including The Boston Globe and The Providence Journal, made pilgrimages to Newsday to see how it was done. And at Newsday itself, Greene took reporters — myself included — who had been keeping notes on the backsides of envelopes and the insides of match book covers and taught them how to gather and organize large amounts of information in ways that enabled them to untangle complicated business deals and tear agencies apart.

Truth is, little of what has been labeled investigative reporting during my 20 years in journalism resembled the painstaking work Greene championed. Most of it was either the newspaper equivalent of the term paper ("give me 10,000 words and a special section on the state of poverty in America") or reporting on the work of government investigators -- uncovering scandals that would have become public eventually, anyway. There's been little groundbreaking work. As Jack Shafer wrote last year:

Newspaper people have enormous egos, if you get my drift, and don't mind massaging the big hairy things in public. Yet the press is hardly the sentry and bulwark of society that reporters imagine it to be. I don't mean to disparage reporters who put their lives on the line to file from Iraq, nor the sleuths who sift through databases to uncover wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies, or any other enterprising reporter. But too many journalists who wave the investigative banner merely act as the conduit for other people's probing ...

Now it appears even what good work is done is shriveling as newspaper profits shrink. Last year Michael Massing wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review:

... top regional papers like the Des Moines Register, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which once prided themselves on quality investigative work, have cut back on their digging, and that has reduced the amount and quality of news flowing up to the national level.

It hasn't gotten any better since. Alan Mutter wrote that this week's Pulitzer Prizes ought to come "with an asterisk":

Staff cuts that have hit the industry in the last few years require fewer people to do more work to fill the paper and feed the website, reducing the opportunities to produce ground-breaking investigations, riveting photos, sparkling features and exceptional coverage of big, breaking stories.

The Web brings with it a new kind of accountability -- more of what government and business does is visible like never before -- and there's no shortage of people out there willing to find fault and share it with the world. I personally believe this is all for the good, and that even as the old media decays, it is being replaced by a richer, better world of news and information.

Still, it's an uncomfortable place to be if you work in the belly of the rotting beast, because you don't know where you'll be when you once again emerge into the light.

In the meantime, there won't be many moments like the one faced by the new reporter on Greene's investigative team so many decades ago. As Marro tells it, the reporter was about to order a salisbury steak in a restaurant on the company expense account. Greene, who liked his steaks thick and had "an appetite that rivaled Diamond Jim Brady’s," stopped him and said:

“When you eat with the team, you don’t eat chopped meat.”

A cure for Web flatulence

It's lovely that so many people have so many wonderful ideas for what newspapers should do to save themselves, but I'm tired of reading about them. Why am I tired? Because the people who write about these almost never offer the information you need to evaluate their true worth. Newspaper print ad revenues plunged farther last year than in the any of the 50+ years since such measurements began. That's why people are being laid off. That's why investigative reporting teams are being shut down. That's why almost no one wants to bid when a newspaper goes on sale. The numbers are bad, really bad.

So if you're going to tell us about your great online project and how it's going to help reverse this trend, you've got to give us some numbers too. You've got to give us the information we need to fairly evaluate it -- as a business proposition. You need to give us something more solid than Web flatulence to decide whether your idea is something the news industry can build profitable businesses around.

We're told we need to build data centers. We're told we need to build narrowly targeted Web sites serving niche markets. We're told we need to go hyperlocal. We're told we need to crowdsource. We're told we need to deploy mobile journalists. We're told we need to nurture citizen journalists. We're told we need to engage readers in conversations. We're told we need to become link aggregators. We're told we need to do podcasts. We're told we need to do video. We're told we need to provide feeds for everything we do. We're told we need to spew text messages, Twitter and build widgets on Facebook. We're told we need to do continuous updates online, 24/7.

Fine. Those are all good ideas. But if you've done it, what were the results? Show us the numbers. Give us a fair and honest evaluation of how you did against your competition, however defined.

These are the kinds of questions I want answered for all online news projects, large and small:

• How many page views did your project generate? How many unique visitors? How long did they stay on the site? Where did they come from? Are they coming back?
• How does that compare with other things you've done?
• Do you have any advertisers for this? Who are they? How much are they paying? Is it generating any other revenue? How much? If it isn't generating any money, why not?
• How much did it cost to make this? How long did it take? How many people were involved? What didn't you do in the meantime?
• Did you make a profit? Did you even try to measure whether it's profitable? How do you evaluate whether it's successful?
• Is it easily repeatable? In other words, is it a strategy that can be adopted by any news organization, at any time, or does it require unique, hard-to-find skills? Can you keep it going if the creator quits?
• Who else is doing this? How successful are they? Do they do it better than you? How easy is it for competitors to duplicate what you've done?
• What mistakes did you make? What didn't work and why? What would you do differently next time?

Of course most us won't answer most of these questions publicly, either because our employers won't let us, or because we don't know the answer, or because it's not our department, or because it's embarrassing, or because we just want to do what we do because we can and it's cool and it's fun. I get that.

But that's what I want to know.

Chauncey Bailey Project

Journalists who have banded together to finish the work of an Oakland journalist murdered last year have a Web site:

New America Media and the Maynard Institute have convened an array of Bay Area journalists, as well as highly respected media organizations and local university journalism departments to form an investigative team to honor and continue the work of journalist Chauncey Wendell Bailey Jr., and answer questions regarding his death. Bailey, the editor of the weekly Oakland Post, was murdered on Aug. 2 while reporting on a story regarding the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery.

In an unusual collaboration, more than two dozen reporters, photographers and editors from print, broadcast and electronic media, and journalism students are launching the Chauncey Bailey Project - an investigative unit that will continue and expand on the reporting Bailey was pursuing when he was gunned down. Devaughndre Broussard, 19, a handyman for Your Black Muslim Bakery, has confessed to the crime, according to police, but many questions about the possible motive for the killing have yet to be answered.

The most famous such effort was the "Arizona Project" on behalf of Don Bolles, a journalist murdered in 1976 while reporting on organized crime.

White Collar Crime Prof Blog: How Not to Ask Questions

Asking clear and direct questions is as important for journalists as it is for prosecutors. The White Collar Crime Prof Blog points out the inadequate questioning revealed in the recently unsealed Barry Bonds grand jury testimony. Many a hemming and hawing journalist can relate to the poor prosecutors criticized here:

While the indictment presents Bonds in a bad light by isolating specific instances of allegedly false answers, skimming through the full transcript shows just how disorganized the prosecutors seemed to be, and how at least one of them couldn't ask a simple question. Whether it was nervousness or perhaps being intimidated by Bonds, the questions come across almost like a stream of consciousness approach to the examination. Here's just one example of the kind of questions Bonds faced: "Let me ask the same question about Greg at this point, we'll go into this in a bit more detail, but did you ever get anything else from Greg besides advice or tips on your weight lifting and also the vitamins and the proteins that you already referenced?" (Pg. 23) Huh? Understanding that a transcript does not necessarily convey the full flavor of the actual interchanges, in reading through the questioning I'm struck by how convoluted the questions are, punctuated throughout with "I mean," "you know," and similar distracting phrases.

What makes perjury so difficult to prove is that the allegedly false answer is not necessarily the most important thing. As the Supreme Court noted in Bronston v. United States, 409 U.S. 352 (1973), "Precise questioning is imperative as a predicate for the offense of perjury." Among the questions recited in the original indictment was this model of obfuscatory inquiry: "So, I guess I got to ask the question again, I mean, did you take steroids? And specifically this test the [sic] is in November 2000. So I'm going to ask you in the weeks and months leading up to November 2000 were you taking steroids . . . or anything like that?"

If the answer is important enough, you should always ask the same question in multiple ways. You don't have to look hard to find examples where prevaricating politicians -- from the non-denial denials of John Mitchell during the Watergate era to Bill Clinton parsing the meaning of is -- stopped short of lying but failed to give fully honest answers. You have to pin those squirming insects to the board.