Pub­lic edi­tor Daniel Okrent in Sunday’s NY Times sug­gests that the Times and other papers treat news reported by other pub­li­ca­tions to be as impor­tant as news reported in-house:

This week, it’s time for some jour­nal­ism heresy. I’d like to sug­gest that news­pa­pers with aspi­ra­tions to great­ness — like the one you’re hold­ing in your hands — learn to be gen­er­ous to their rivals, and in the process pro­vide value for their readers.

A cou­ple of weeks ago I puz­zled over the Times’ fail­ure to treat the Paul O’Neill rev­e­la­tions as the impor­tant news that it most assuredly was. Okrent agrees: “For the his­tor­i­cal record pro­vided by the news­pa­per of record, explo­sive rev­e­la­tions about a sit­ting pres­i­dent by one of his appointees were con­signed to Pages A11, A22 and A13.”

This is Okrent’s best offer­ing since his col­umn debuted, offer­ing read­ers insight into the com­pet­i­tive mind­set endemic to news­rooms, a trait that, taken too far, can betray the readers.

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Colum­nist Mike Lang­berg has a sen­si­ble solu­tion in today’s San Jose Merc: Make spam­mers pay, in money or time, to send bulk e-mails. Imag­ine a world where the gov­ern­ment paid all the bills for the postal ser­vice, and the cost of mail­ing a let­ter was zero. We’d be drown­ing in junk mail, because mar­keters could crank out post­cards and fliers for a few cents each and send them for free. The hum­ble 37-cent stamp and its bulk-rate cousins, in other words, are bar­ri­ers pre­vent­ing abuse of an impor­tant pub­lic resource. Writes Langberg:

Inter­net ser­vice providers, or ISPs, could give their cus­tomers a gen­er­ous num­ber of out­go­ing mes­sages for free — say 1,000 a month — so most e-mail users might never notice the change. But spam­mers would be out of busi­ness overnight, because send­ing 1 mil­lion mes­sages would cost $1,000, more than enough to wipe out their slen­der profit margins.

Per­son­ally I would pre­fer pub­lic behead­ings, but fail­ing that, Langberg’s anti-spam pro­posal sounds palat­able. Why wouldn’t this work?

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MediaChannel.org has launched Media for Democ­racy 2004, “a non-partisan cit­i­zens’ ini­tia­tive to mon­i­tor main­stream news cov­er­age of the 2004 elec­tions and advo­cate fair, demo­c­ra­tic and issue-oriented stan­dards of reporting.”

As the site cor­rectly notes:

Main­stream media have gone AWOL in their duty to serve the pub­lic inter­est this elec­tion year. Amer­i­cans rely on news out­lets to guide civic par­tic­i­pa­tion — by edu­cat­ing cit­i­zens on the demo­c­ra­tic process, cov­er­ing the issues that mat­ter to us most and pro­fil­ing all the can­di­dates on the bal­lot. But elec­tion cov­er­age has dimin­ished in the last 20 years. And the report­ing that does occur tends to ignore issues in favor of polit­i­cal car­i­ca­tures and the “horse race.”

I just signed up here. Here’s wish­ing them success.

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NY Times: Michael Wolff to Leave New York Mag­a­zine for Van­ity Fair.

Michael Wolff, media colum­nist for New York mag­a­zine and part of a failed bid for the pub­li­ca­tion, will be going to Van­ity Fair mag­a­zine as a colum­nist and con­tribut­ing edi­tor begin­ning March 1, accord­ing to Van­ity Fair’s edi­tor, Gray­don Carter.

Mr. Wolff, who has been know for acid-etched por­traits of New York media moguls, will write eight columns a year for Van­ity Fair on the media indus­try and three long features.

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When it comes to the secu­rity of our elec­tions, the news just keeps get­ting worse and worse. This just in from the New York Times: Secu­rity Poor in Elec­tronic Vot­ing Machines.

Elec­tronic vot­ing machines made by Diebold Inc. that are widely used in sev­eral states have such poor com­puter secu­rity and phys­i­cal secu­rity that an elec­tion could be dis­rupted or even stolen by cor­rupt insid­ers or deter­mined out­siders, accord­ing to a new report pre­sented today to Mary­land state legislators.

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NY Times: Pixar Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios, which pro­duced last summer’s pop­u­lar “Find­ing Nemo,” will likely end its 12-year part­ner­ship with Disney.

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Blog­ger Vir­ginia Postrel in the NY Times: The Trend of Van­ish­ing Tech Jobs. One researcher sees an upside for the U.S. in the out­sourc­ing of pro­gram­ming jobs.

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NY Times: For the Jog­ger Crav­ing Data, a G.P.S. Tracker. Track­ing the dis­tance you jog can be a dubi­ous and both­er­some task. Most pedome­ters require a user to esti­mate the length of his or her stride, some­thing that is dif­fi­cult to do with pre­ci­sion. But with the Fore­run­ner 201, a gad­get from Garmin that straps onto your wrist, you can shelve the pedome­ter and bring home bet­ter work­out records.

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NY Times: Last Car. Geek Party. Spread the Word. For dozens of Web freaks, hack­ers, geeks and oth­ers like them, the last car on BART on Fri­day is a place to meet, min­gle, and act up. (Small quib­ble: the Times calls it “the Bay Area sub­way” but nobody out here ever calls it a sub­way, for it’s above ground 98 per­cent of the time. It’s just BART.)

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New York Times: Mak­ing of the Dig­i­tal Press Corps, 2004. A pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year brings a new flock of can­di­dates and a host of elec­tronic advances for the jour­nal­ists who fol­low them. Excerpt:

A dead­line every minute, once the pre­serve of the wire ser­vices, is now the motto for most of the press corps, from print reporters with news­pa­per Web sites to still pho­tog­ra­phers, cable pro­duc­ers and blog­gers. The news cycle has con­densed into one end­less loop, and with it has come a end­less stream of tech­nol­ogy to accom­mo­date it, or fuel it, since it is hard to say which came first.

Cam­paign reporters, like war cor­re­spon­dents, are not nec­es­sar­ily gad­get geeks. But the rapa­cious 24-hour news cycle has forced them onto the cut­ting edge to do their jobs bet­ter — or at least faster. The equip­ment is even alter­ing the shape of the correspondent’s day, which now includes scrolling in the morn­ing through The Note, an online polit­i­cal brief­ing from ABC News, and check­ing one another’s Web sites at night, try­ing all the while to get a jump on every­one else.

And for back­pack jour­nal­ists, the Times offers this: One Pos­si­ble Cost of Mobile Tech­nol­ogy: A Tired, Aching Back. Along with the changes wrought by gad­gets in polit­i­cal cam­paign cov­er­age has come the ques­tion of just how much stuff to carry around. Many reporters are find­ing that the more equip­ment they can merge the bet­ter, and the less to lose. This makes a device like the Hand­spring Treo 600, a com­bi­na­tion tele­phone, key­board, orga­nizer, dig­i­tal cam­era, MP3 player and more, very appeal­ing. Newer and faster do not always mean lighter or more streamlined.

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