No bad deed goes unrewarded in our celebrity-driven culture.  And by “celebrity,” I mean anyone who has been in the news.  John Yoo has been in the news a lot.  He’s the author of several of the infamous “torture memos.”  Yoo’s contorted pseudo-legal rationales for torture helped enable one of the most shameful episodes in […]

Apparently not everyone agrees that all newspaper companies are irremediable.  There are a few who think current market prices undervalue some newspaper stocks.  Poynter’s Rick Edmonds says:
You heard me right:  Publicly traded newspapers stocks have been doing quite well lately.  Here are the numbers comparing three-month lows (typically around March 9) with prices at Monday’s […]

Please note that 21st News will not be updated again until May 11th.  I will be out-of-pocket (don’t ask) for a few days.  Please return to the site on Monday!
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A New York Times article linked to on this Web site poses the question of whether CNN’s “middle-of-the-road” approach can survive in a cable news landscape of right and left-wing ranting.  The article I think underplays CNN’s self-inflicted wounds.  The network has steadily diluted its once-powerful brand over the years by straying from its straight-down-the-middle […]

On one end of the spectrum there are people like Jeff Jarvis, whom the New York Times columnist David Carr rightly calls a “digital scold.”  Jarvis is a smart guy who routinely goes over the top in lumping all newspaper management as Luddites who cling to the silly notion that users of their content should […]

The mainstream media wants to be relevant.  Sure, they have to figure out a new business model, but there’s that pesky matter of the product - the content in modern parlance.  No question, the mainstream media, especially newspapers, do most of the real reporting that the bloggers opine about.  But many mainstream outlets are still […]

Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal is mad.  No, he doesn’t appear to be terribly upset at the reckless and inept coverage of Wall Street by his employees at CNBC.  Zucker is angry at Jon Stewart.  Stewart, you’ll recall, skewered CNBC with a barrage of facts, humor and outrage.  That was followed days later by […]

These days when I see a rare headline proclaiming a news organization’s success, I cheer.  But not when I saw the New York Times’ headline “CNBC Thrives as Hosts Deliver News With Attitude.”  I just got more depressed about the state of the news media.  I guess CNBC’s relative success is yet another example of […]

 Gary Kamiya of Salon.com wrote a passionate warning, cited the other day on this site, about what the decline of newspapers means for the practice of journalism, otherwise known as reporting:
What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting — on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who […]

Michael Kinsley is one of my favorite columnists.  He’s a brilliant writer, analyst and observer.   His New York Times op-ed arguing against paid content as a solution to newspapers’ accelerating decline is well-reasoned.  But in this case, I think he’s wrong and a slew of other analysts is right.
It’s like the stimulus package.  It’s not […]