Paper suing TX Gov Perry to get clemency report of possibly innocent man who was executed

The Houston Chronicle and Hearts Newspapers are suing Texas Governor Rick Perry, R-Texas, for the clemency report on Cameron Todd Willingham -- a man who was executed but may have, in fact, been innocent.

I first read about it nearly two months ago, and you can too with this 16,000 word article from the New Yorker. Worth reading every word.

The report is a summary and status of the case against Willingham that was given to Perry at 11:30 a.m. on the day of Willingham's 2004 execution in the fire deaths of his three daughters. Anti-death penalty advocates say modern fire forensics show the blaze cannot be proven as arson.

Perry's office has refused to release the report, claiming it is a privileged document. The clemency document was used by Perry in the process of deciding whether to give Willingham a 30-day stay of execution.

“When it comes to human life, there is no place the governor should be more transparent in his decision-making,” said Jonathan Donnellan, an attorney for Hearst and the Chronicle.

Gallup polling: We're better than news outlets

There was an interesting blog post in Gallup's The Queue blog basically saying they're better than newspapers (whose circulation is down) and TV news (with CNN dropping to dead last among cable news networks).

These new realities reaffirm why we do what we do here at Gallup.com. Quite simply, we do what no one else can do -- which is to provide empirical, rather than anecdotal, insights on the news of the moment. Put more simply, we let our data drive our news. Data that no one else has. That's why at Gallup.com, every lead has a data point, and every story has a graph.

We don't want you to visit Gallup.com instead of visiting other news sources. We want you to visit Gallup.com in addition to your favorite news sources. It's perfectly fine with us if you turn somewhere else for context and background, and then come to us for the data or empirical evidence to complete the picture.

What do you think?

AdAge looks into the future of ESPN -- including holograms

A pretty cool look into what we can expect from the sports media behemoth in the near future from Ad Age. And that includes holograms:

New hologram technology coming to ESPN in the spring, based on Electronic Arts' "Virtual Playbook," will enable anchors to be digitally inserted into shots from remote locations. The idea thrilled Chris Berman and Bob Ley, the two anchors with the longest tenure at the company.

"This is just an example of the cutting-edge technology that will save us so much money on airfare for the World Cup," said Mr. Ley, referencing ESPN's forthcoming coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which will be broadcast from South Africa. Mr. Ley first appeared via green screen from a separate conference room down the hall, only to appear seamlessly on the screen seated between Mr. Berman and Chuck Pagano, ESPN's exec VP-technology.

Mr. Ley looked remarkably more realistic than Will.i.am did during his appearance on CNN last fall, which was precisely the goal. "We looked at that and we said, 'How can we do it better?'" Mr. Pagano said. "How can we extend our internal studio to the outside world?" Although the convenience seems inherent, you can expect many jokes like the one Mr. Berman made in response to Mr. Ley: "You look like Kazoo on 'The Flintstones,' sitting on my shoulder."

The whole piece is interesting, so go take a look.

ESPN columnist attacks Twitter after ESPN social media ban

ESPN really doesn't like social media. After their ban of Twitter, a columnist on their site decided to blast Twitter.

Isn't that timing weird...?

ESPN banning Twitter for most instances

The Worldwide Leader in Sports, ESPN, is like a lot of companies these days. Seemingly every person on their staff has a Twitter account. I follow about a dozen of these folks to find out the latest about sports news, including their RSS feed Twitter account.

But now ESPN has decided that all this Twittering by their reporters isn't a good thing and has banned tweeting except for cases where it serves ESPN's interests.

Ric Bucher, who covers the NBA for ESPN and ESPN.com, said in a Twitter post today that the sports giant is prohibiting Twitter posts that don't serve the network. Bucher has more than 18,000 followers on the site.

I caught the tweet by @RicBucher.

Here it is:

The hammer just came down, tweeps: ESPN memo prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN. Kinda figured this was coming. Not sure wh ...

He followed up with a tweet that says,

My guess is I can still tweet about my vacation/car shopping, etc. Which I will do, if I can. But the informal NBA talk is prob in jeopardy.

In other words, there is no longer any reason for me to follow ESPN personalities for scoops on sports news.

G.E., News Corp muzzle Olbermann and O'Reilly

So says the New York Times at least.

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to bring it to an end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Weird.

Huffington Post health coverage sucks

I'm not sure about the Huffington Post. The site is undeniably popular and many people reference it (I have done so a few times at my other blog). But sometimes it is just... wrong.

Especially on health coverage, and Salon Took them to task for their poor, misleading and occasionally outright wrong coverage.

As a physician, I am not necessarily opposed to alternative health treatments. But I do want to be responsible and certain that what I prescribe to patients is safe and effective and not a waste of their time and money. A recent Associated Press investigation stated the federal government has spent $2.5 billion of our tax dollars to determine whether alternative health remedies -- including ones promoted on the Huffington Post -- work. It found next to none of them do. The site also regularly grants space to proponents of the thoroughly disproven conspiracy that childhood vaccines have caused autism. In short, the Huffington Post is hardly a site that promotes "a reasoned discussion," in its founder's words, of health and medicine.

Best correction ever

I don't think this was a very well-reported article, based on the correction that was necessary:

Correction: July 22, 2009
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

That's from the New York Times. Allessandra Stanley should be ashamed.

Mark Cuban doesn't like the AP

I think that Mark Cuban has a beef with the Associated Press, judging by what he said on Twitter moments ago.

Why do people believe that AP stories are factual ? Their fact checking is horrid, their balance non existent. They are worthless IMHO

I lost a little respect for Bill Simmons

*sigh*

Simmons talking to Mediaite:

1. How do you get your first news of the day?

ESPN.com, RealClearSports, hoopshype, Buster Olney’s baseball blog, Mike Lombardi’s football blog, Deadline Hollywood Daily, Drudge Report, TV Tattle, Google Trends, my Twitter page.

Drudge Report? Really?

Though I do like his take on Twitter:

Facebook is a social network; Twitter is a media/marketing vehicle disguised as a social network.

Elaborate hoax tricks reporter into writing a story about "young chef"

This is an incredibly interesting story:

may be a young and relatively inexperienced reporter, but the other reporters in my office have never come across a scenario quite like this one. Not one reporter in my office could think of a time in their careers when a source had made up such an elaborate hoax and then conned a reporter.

Read it. He even tricked his mom. His mom!

ESPN taking over local big city sports one city at a time

I don't think that we'll be seeing ESPN: Albuquerque any time soon so Rick Wright and the rest of the folks at the Albuquerque Journal dont' have to worry. But those in bigger cities?

Be afraid, be very afraid.

ESPN launched ESPN Chicago in April. ESPN announced today that they will be launching ESPN Dallas, ESPN New York and ESPN Los Angeles -- all markets where there are not only multiple sports teams (Dallas has the Cowboys, the Mavericks, the Stars and the Texas Rangers) but also ESPN-owned radio stations.

So why should the local sports press be afraid?

Since its launch three months ago, ESPNChicago.com, which recently signed an exclusive content syndication deal with The Huffington Post Chicago, has emerged as the top sports site in Chicago. In June, the site had 600,000 unique visitors which logged 1.4 million total minutes of time, an increase of 57 percent and 112 percent since May, per comScore.

Not to mention the fact that ESPN has been hiring the best people to cover every sport, has consistently good opinion pieces, has the most content and the ability to report on each and every sport out there

Dan Shulman, a former writer for ESPN's Page 2, took a look at the trouble the LA Times sports section will be in:

Here's a basic case study: Does the Times think it has a lock on the Lakers? ESPNLA.com has (a) full-time TV reporters based in LA, (b) JA Adande, (c) a top Lakers blog (Forum Blue and Gold) as part of ESPN.com's TrueHoop Network, (d) a local radio affiliate and (e) the power of ESPN. Oh, and Bill Simmons is based in LA. Good night, game over.

As quickly as a good nugget can be reported by someone like the Times, a quick-acting (and inexpensive) ESPNLA intern (or low-paid editor) can have it on the ESPNLA site. It's called aggregation, and you can already find it daily on ESPN.com's Rumor Central pages. That's the craziest part: The economics of ESPN's local strategy are jaw-droppingly cheap, especially relative to local newspapers' costs.

ESPN has quickly become the go-to place for all things sports in the United States. And by branding themselves locally in these big cities, they are directly competing with the newspapers that have never had to deal this sort of competition before -- and they can do it cheaper.

The question is that if newspaper sports departments get winnowed down, who will be the beat reporters for each sport? Will ESPN Chicago, Dallas, New York and Los Angeles all eventually be forced to hire beat reporters?

But it seems clear that ESPN (and to a smaller degree, AOL's Fanhouse) will soon be in all the major cities with major sports teams. I'd bet on an ESPN Boston coming within the next year.

Many popular web stories start with traditional media, move to blogs

From the New York Times:

For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign.

I wouldn't be surprised if that time between the traditional media reporting on the story and the time it appears on blogs has gone down since Twitter made such huge gains in popularity; nearly every successful blogger and many journalists that I can think of use Twitter to learn about new stories and promote their own stories.

Murdoch: Facebook is just a directory

I'm not completely convinced that Rupert Murdoch completely gets these whole "internet" and "social networking" things. Murdoch, of course, owns MySpace through his company News Corp.

And even as MySpace loses market share to Facebook, Murdoch doesn't quite get it, calling Facebook just a directory.

Speaking about the recent shakeups at MySpace:

I mean, it will be a very different social site to, say, Facebook.

Facebook is more of a directory. People go looking for their relatives or their friends, who they are going to meet. With MySpace, people go there to find common interests, share music, that sort of thing.

I disagree -- both sites are places where people go to connect with people they already know, and Facebook's design and lack of annoying flashing ads has made it much more popular over recent months.

Gwyneth Paltrow "Disses" NYC and the USA?

The New York Daily News ran a story with the headline "Gwyneth Paltrow disses New York, U.S., people who 'always have BlackBerries on'." But it seems to be a bit of hyperbolic Drudge-bait (and it did get posted on Drudge) after reading the article.

She seems to be "dissing" a certain part of New York and American coverage. While talking about Spain, Paltrow said:

"Also, the way people live over there. They seem to enjoy life a little bit more. They aren't running around as much as in New York."

Umm... yeah.

Stupid headline for the story.

Twitter ain't off the record

From Benson, aka @desertronin.

It was discussing if a Capitol Hill staffer can expect his tweets to be off the record just by declaring it to be so in his bio on Twitter.

Farrauto put up a sentence on his Twitter account stating that all of his “musings” are off of the record. It’s like standing in the middle of a room of people, some of whom are his friends and others of whom are reporters, and shouting at the top of his lungs, then not expecting the reporters to write about any stupid things he said.

Anything you say in a publicly available place is on the record.

And anything that you put on Twitter from a non-private account is public. It's searchable, you can find everything on Google, on Twitter's search engine... so to think that by slapping up a disclaimer saying your publicly available "musings" are off the record is almost as funny as the press releases I constantly receive that have this disclaimer at the end:

Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail,including all attachments is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review,use,disclosure or distribution is prohibited unless specifically provided under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and destroy all copies of this message

Sorry, Farrauto, anything you say in public is on the record.

And if your tweets are not protected, then they are completely public.

As the Washington City Paper put it:

You cannot speak into a microphone and be off the record at the same time. Those two things are incompatible and should never be attempted.

Twitter is just another kind of microphone, a internet-based, 140-character microphone.

Most ridiculous idea to save newspapers

Richard Posner is an idiot. At least that's the impression I get from this part of his blog post on how to save newspapers:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

In other words, Posner wants people to have to pay to talk about their news stories.

I agree that people who steal wholesale any news story or blog post should face the consequences. But completely dismantling fair use provisions to save newspapers not only wouldn't work (it's ludicrous to think that people linking to news stories is causing any sort of financial hardship for newspapers) -- it's just a dumb idea.

Via Jay Rosen on Twitter.

It's 5:30 on a Saturday. Do you know where your governor is?

The Associated Press attempted to find out where the governors in 40 US states were as of yesterday. This is, of course, in response to the Mark Sanford saga that eventually found him having flown to Argentina for a week to be with his mistress.

Where the governors were wasn't all that exciting. But what was more interesting is how many of their offices refuse to release their public schedules -- you'd think that is something that they would put on their websites in most cases.

Instead, they try to hide the most basic thing about their jobs -- where and with whom they are meeting on state's business.

No wonder Sanford thought that he could get away with something like flying to Argentina to be with his mistress.

Ambushing O'Reilly's ambushers

One of Bill O'Reilly's favorite techniques is the 'ambush' where an O'Reilly staffer runs up to someone with a camera crew and asks them misleading and accusatory questions.

On the Media tagged along with Gawker while they tried to ambush Jesse Watters -- O'Reilly's ambusher. After a discussion of the O'Reilly team's tactics.

@PeteHoekstra digs deeper

Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) is still digging deeper, a day after, via Twitter, comparing the Iranian election protests to an unsuccessful political stunt that House Democrats tried to pull.

From Politico:

The incident he was referring to occurred in August last year when Nancy Pelosi shut out the lights in the House chamber after passing a motion to adjourn for the August recess. Republicans had taken to the floor for a pre-election round of bashing Pelosi and Democrats for failing to lift restrictions on offshore drilling.

It should be noted that there are a few differences between the victimized Iranians and the oppressed Republicans.

Pelosi, unlike Ahmadinejad,didn't dispatch her Revolutionary Guard to beat them up or shoot them in the streets, nor did she have the capacity to block their access to the Internet, rig a national election to keep them from being seated in the legislature or place them under House arrest when they protested.

Is there any question as to why Republicans are mocked so often?