Warning on the carpeted cat perch I bought today:

Strictly intended for cat use only. No human use is intended as serious injury, including death, could occur while climbing on or playing with this furniture…

I’m so glad the culture of the U.S. demands such idiot-proofing. It’s kind of like precluding an episode of Jackass with a warning to not try such things at home. If you’re the kind that would, you’ve earned the moniker and wouldn’t have listened to a warning anyway.

Wish Tom over at Prints the Chaff a faithful goodbye. One of the better editor’s blogs out there has faded to black.

“I’d rather do this right or not at all — that is, post every day and give the topic the time it deserves, rather than let it whither or fade into irrelevance,” he writes in his last dispatch.

Thanks for the consideration. Thanks for the dedication. And, from this blogger, thanks for the inspiration.

Don’t forget that Tom leaves behind his Banned for Life list, something that every journalist should make his or her own.

Cheers, and good luck with your normal life, Mr. Mangan.

Over at Poynter, Amy Gahran asks the question, “How healthy is a blog-only news diet?” That’s her headline on a piece about how Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion plans to try a test of the blogosphere as a rounded information source.

My reaction – biased of course, since I blog – is that surely a blog-only diet must prove more fulfilling than the TV-only diet consumed by most Americans.

Rubel, my dollar says, will pass just about any current events test you can give him after a week without the mainstream press.

This Pew Research Center survey has garnered pixels elsewhere (at editorsweblog.org), but I thought I’d point out some interesting numbers.

• The percentage of journalists who see the press as too cynical has dropped at both the local and national levels over the last five years. Roughly, the ratio in 1999 for both local and national journalists just barely topped half. Currently, it sits at about four in 10 for both.

• For ideological parity, the profession needs more self-defined conservative journalists. “Just 7% of national news people and 12% of local journalists describe themselves as conservatives, compared with a third of all Americans,” the survey says.
• Eight in 10 local journalists, and nine in 10 national journalists, feel that a belief in God is not a prerequisite for a moral foundation.

Click through and read the whole survey. It seems a small universe (under 550 of the thousands of U.S. journalists). But, even a small mirror shows you a bit of your face.

The mailman delivered my copy of The Newspaper Designer’s Handbook yesterday, and I thought I’d pass on my impressions.

Buy this book.

Cross-trained copy editor/designers out there, particularly those who came to copy editing first, will find it a rich resource. Those who began designing by accident, and who have no real formal training (e.g., me), will find it invaluable.

It answers such pressing questions as:

• What the hell is a pica, anyway? Don’t laugh. Journalists who joined the profession after full pagination find it less vital to know that little tidbit.

• How can dummies help me work smarter, not harder? (And what does 4-38-1 mean in headline lingo?) Yeah, I design without a net sometimes too, but I find that sections come out cleaner when I sketch them first.
• Does a proportion wheel have a purpose other than as a coaster?

The book also includes illustrated pages showing what cool, old-school copy editors call page elements. That way, when some crusty journo winces at your ugly armpit, you’ll know what he’s talking about.

The drawback? I bought a used copy, and it cost $50. Pricey, but author Tim Harrower did a thorough job. And, like that textbook you wish you hadn’t sold in college, it also has a CD. The disc features tests and exercises. Smartly, it’s an HTML interface, so it works across platforms. (Sadly, the HTML they’ve used only seems to work 100-percent in Internet Explorer. Safari, the Macintosh browser, doesn’t display the main page correctly. Opera seems to work alright, except for “click-to-enlarge” image windows.)

I’ll quit the rave, but thought it deserved it. I asked Dick Thien, a founding editor of USA Today, about design books more than 18 months ago. Unreservedly, he told me this book was the only one I needed. I’m glad I finally got it.

I’m, of course, behind the times. The magazine In These Times that is.

I tripped over this magazine during a Web search. It bills itself as a magazine that “explores topics from a progressive perspective for a readership committed to the advancement of civil rights and responsible social policy.” It’s based in Chicago, and has apparently been around for 27 years (presumably not all of those on the Web).

Check it out, particularly this article by contributor Kurt Vonnegut. Also, their cover story for the current issue is an interesting piece on sickness in soldiers serving in Iraq caused by depleted uranium artillery shells.

[Ed. note: This is the second, and last, installment of my interview with Christopher Allbritton, reporter, editor and publisher of Back to Iraq 3.0. He left for Iraq on May 12.]

War stance

Christopher Allbritton shies away from support of the current war in Iraq, and mentions that fact often through his dispatches. He aims for the ideal of transparency, rather than objectivity.

Creeping bias, he said, is inevitable.

“I think that it’s a fallacy to expect people to believe that doesn’t happen,” he said of bias bleeding into reporters’ prose. “So, be open about it, let them know. Let them make the decision whether to trust you or not based on that bias.”

Thorough, fair reporting earns respect from readers, he believes.

“I’m credible not because of my background or who I am. I’m credible because my readers have decided I’m credible.”

He has seen support come from a spectrum of viewpoints, despite his stated stance against the war. He says he even got a commendation letter from Lucianne [Ed. note: corrected to 'Lucianne' from 'Lucian' 5/19/04] Goldberg, whose name history inextricably links to the Bill Clinton impeachment, after last year’s Iraq trip.

“I think of objectivity as a transparency of method,” he added. He likens journalism to the meme of politics being like sausage: It might prove tedious to see how it’s made, but making the process available benefits all.

He suggests that journalists, in their Web forays, take advantage of the medium and post transcripts and audio recordings of interviews. Such strategies for transparency, he says, boost credibility.

Perils of self-publishing

Self-publishing is a line drawn from one point. Allbritton tries to overcome the lack of editors in his model of journalism through extreme care.

His mother, an avid reader and editor, and his spell-checker catch the minor errors, he says.

“Other than that, I just have to be really careful,” he said. “And I sometimes have to slow down a little bit.”

“I mean, I no longer try to be first. I know that, when I try to be first, I get into a rush, I make mistakes or I write weirdly structured sentences or, you know, get names misspelled. … And I try to bring more depth to it to make up for the fact that I’m not breaking it.”

Web reporting, then, is an evolving creature. Reporters get as close as they can to “truth,” and post their material. Readers help them vet it.

“You hope that people look at the Web site, and will forgive you your minor sins for your greater virtue,” Allbritton said.

Balance

Independent reporting also pressures journalists more when balancing sources.

For example, Allbritton says that Iraqis have a culture of exaggeration – part of the national character to a degree. It is also a vestige, he says, of dealing with the brutal former regime and the false witness often associated with trauma.

At the same time, Coalition Provisional Authority officials, he says, have an interest in favorable portrayals of events in Iraq.

“How do you reconcile the two? You just report as fully and honestly as possible … and hope you get somewhere close to the truth.”

“You’re probably not going to hit it exactly. You’re going to get some things wrong. … But, you do the best you can, and you hope that with an accumulation of stories and facts from other reporters all competing against one another that you have this kind of ‘media Darwinism’ that kind of gets the truth to funnel up.”

This trip

Allbritton says this trip begins in Baghdad, and he’s not sure how much latitude he’ll have beyond the capital city.

“The roads are really, really unsafe,” he said. “It really depends on the security situation to see which areas I can travel to. I’ve been hearing from people that it’s just almost impossible to get out of Baghdad.”

But, unlike many other in-country journalists, who have editors to remind them of insurance costs, Allbritton has the option to leave the Green Zone.

“The only thing stopping me is concerns for safety, and that’s the call I have to make. I don’t have an editor, in that sense.”

In light of recent unrest and direct targeting of Americans, Blocletters wishes Christopher Allbritton a safe return to Iraq. Use that concern for your safety wisely, and keep us informed.

Cleverness, skill and luck collided to create the Web site Back to Iraq. Now in its third iteration, Christopher Allbritton’s site for war dispatches continues to display cleverness and skill.

And the luck will have to continue, too, as he heads to Iraq for his third reporting excursion this week.

History

Inspiration for Back to Iraq hit Allbritton in 2002. The former New York Daily News and Associated Press reporter financed a trip to the Middle East.

“I went to Iraq originally in 2002 basically as a fishing expedition for commercial freelance. And when I got back, I came up empty, and I wasn’t really getting anything. So I decided to put it up on a Web site.”

Blogspot.com hosted the first humble version of the site. Before long, Allbritton decided to take independent reporting further – to reader sponsorship. He drew inspiration from such sites as savekaryn.com, which a New York woman used to raise money to pay credit card debt.

“I thought, well I can do better than that,” Allbritton said. “I’ll have people donate, and I’ll actually report for them. I’ll actually give them something more than warm and fuzzies.”

Back to Iraq 2.0 was born. His fund raising proved meager at first. But a Wired News article in mid-March 2003 spurred donations, and he headed to Iraq just in time for the war.

Method

Allbritton’s novel form of journalism may prove an important facet of the profession’s future. The basics, however, stay the same.

“I’m a reporter,” he said. “I’m a journalist; I just use blogging the same way that people use laptops. It’s just the easiest tool to get the job done.”

By most measures, that job is a success. His current trip’s fund-raising total is more than $11,000. The site’s donor list numbers in the hundreds. On Technorati, a site that monitors connections among weblogs, a recent check showed Back to Iraq 3.0 is linked to by nearly 500 other sites (mine among them), a sign of respect in the Web world.

Though he publishes his work electronically, the way Allbritton works compares with any print correspondent.

On this trip, he’s taking two small laptops, a pair of cellular phones, a satellite phone, a GPS unit, a voice recorder, a Web camera and a digital camera. He also packs an extra hard drive, for backups.

These items, and uplinks via Internet café, allow him to publish Back to Iraq from the country. They also help him provide extra services for donors. Paid donors get a private listserv, see extra photographs and read additional posts, and have direct email access and participate in hosted chats.

“I’ve always wanted to be a foreign correspondent,” he said. “I got kind of sidetracked for a while covering technology, but this is what I really want to do and this is my way of getting to do it.”

Could it be that the New York Times (and me, by extension) fell for a publicity stunt? It’s not too far-fetched. I’ve been a PR hack, and it happens more than newspaper people want to admit.

Michael Moore has said on CNN, as the Beeb reports, that he knew in Spring of 2003 that Disney would not allow Miramax to distribute Fahrenheit 911, which, as Moore’s track record shows, will prove uber-critical of the powers that be.

That means, as I pointed out in the previous post, that we were duped. But, so was the slew of 24/7 news channels that went with the story, splashing around file footage of the scraggy-faced Moore.

Ah, nuts.

Props to BuzzMachine for pointing the way.

Disney has decided not to distribute Michael Moore’s new film, Fahrenheit 911, through its child company, Miramax. At least, that’s what the BBC’s reporting. (Ed. note: The Beeb’s coverage riffs heavily off The New York Times, but their site requires registration.)

Michael Moore, on his site, has this to say: “For nearly a year, this struggle has been a lesson in just how difficult it is in this country to create a piece of art that might upset those in charge…”

Turning down distribution causes controversy and more coverage (like me writing about it here). It’s basically free hype for the movie, and just before Moore takes it to Cannes. Someone should tell Disney that, if they want the movie to go away, they should embrace it. I mean, it’s Michael Freakin’ Moore. It’s not like he’s going to go away. He’ll just get crankier and find another distributor.