A journalism disaster in Georgia

The conventional thinking warns that the stories that get news organizations in trouble are the ones they’d least expect. It’s not the sensitive major investigations because those get so heavily vetted before publication.

LOL. Try getting The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to agree with the conventional thinking right now.

this is the revised headline atop the atlanta journal-constitution’s investigation into sexual assault within the university of georgia football program. an editor’s note atop the revised story said: “the headline, subheadline and portions of the text of this article were changed on July 19, 2023, after the AJC determined that certain statements contained in the article when it was originally published did not meet the AJC’s editorial standards.”

On June 27, the AJC published a seemingly worthy expose alleging that the University of Georgia football program under head coach Kirby Smart engaged in systematic protection of players who had been accused of sexual assault. The story claimed the AJC knew of 11 such situations but, notably, included the names of only two of the 11 players.

The article prompted the university’s athletic association to send a letter to the AJC, claiming major inaccuracies and bias. It raised the possibility of reporter fabrication, and demanded a retraction of the entire article. College athletic programs hide and twist facts a lot, but the nine-page, highly detailed letter made a persuasive case that the report had to be somewhat or perhaps seriously flawed.

On Wednesday, after a necessary investigation by other AJC reporters and lawyers, the news organization corrected major parts of the story, changed the headline and fired the bylined reporter. It did not retract the story and in a public statement said it had determined there was no fabrication and that only two aspects of the original work were in error.

But one of those aspects, to my mind, was the premise of the story.

The AJC said it could confirm only two instances of accused players getting soft treatment from the university, not 11. Two is too many, but it’s not enough to make a case for systemic bad practices by the Georgia football program, as the AJC originally tried to do.

The outlet tossed gasoline and a match on its reputation.

Yes, every newsroom must trust its reporters to a large degree. But with a hugely negative angle such as this, I’m mystified that some editor (apparently) didn’t go one by one through the 11 cases – with player names – and confirm sufficient evidence of each case. Even if just for internal reassurance.

It’s also not clear why the initial article didn’t have any details of eight of the supposed examples. Build your case. Make it hard for the non-believers. That’s a basic of investigative reporting and writing, especially if you’re taking on a worshipped institution.

There’s another issue. Georgia’s rivals.com website reported last week that the fired journalist, Alan Judd, had resigned from the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1988 because of multiple interviewee complaints of misquotes and he could not produce the interview recordings he claimed to have. Judd told the site before he was fired that situation occurred “during a rough period in my life (and) has no bearing on anything today.”

Did the AJC, which hired Judd in 1999, know of this? And should this have disqualified him from journalism 35 years ago? I recognize the worth of second chances, but to me, the answers are yes and yes. That would have meant the AJC wouldn’t have benefitted from two decades of good investigative reporting by Judd. It also would have meant no mess like the current one.

The AJC previously did some good investigative work into the Bulldogs athletic program. And it no doubt will do some more. But the non-believers will have an argument forever.

Presenting the Don’t Fall For Social Media Challenges Challenge

i’m posting a photo of the “sleepy chicken challenge” because i know you’re smart enough not to actually do this. it can easily lead to a drug overdose.

Here’s a rare Arenblog cooking tip: Don’t marinate your next chicken dinner in NyQuil. It’s terrible.

OK, I didn’t really do that. But you’d think from a wave of news media reports last year that a lot of people did.

The “sleepy chicken challenge” is just one example from a long list of supposedly widespread social media “challenges” that the news media have dutifully reported on and warned against in recent years.

Letting the public know that reckless social media posts are inviting people (especially young people) to try bizarre, alarming and even dangerous stunts is a worthy public service. The problem is, evidence indicates that in most cases the challenges were not widespread on social media and people really weren’t doing them in any significant numbers.

They were overblown moral panics boosted by some lackadaisical news media.

The latest instance occurred last week in this state, when national media such as NBC’s Today Show and People magazine picked up an ABC 33/40 report that four drowning victims in the past six months had died while engaged in a “boat jumping challenge” that originated on TikTok. The basis for the report was an interview with a member of the Childersburg Rescue Squad.

But that first responder quickly backed off that statement when asked again by AL.com, and the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency issued a statement saying there was no evidence that any of the drowning deaths were connected to a TikTok challenge. There’s not much evidence online that such a challenge even exists.

According to social media experts, here are just some of the other supposedly trending social media challenges that got overhyped by the news media in the past few years. Not to say instances of these never happened, but the public attention and fear greatly surpassed reality.

• The “Tide Pod challenge” that required eating a small packet of laundry detergent.

• The “electrical outlet challenge” that required touching a coin to the prongs of a partially exposed electrical plug.

• The “slap a teacher challenge.”

• “Devious licks,” which required vandalizing a school restroom.

• The “cheese challenge” that bizarrely entailed throwing a piece of sliced cheese onto a baby’s face.

Naturally, the performance of each of these was supposed to be videoed and posted on social media.

The blame on journalists for overselling goes down when a well-meaning government regulator or a company steps in with a public warning of its own. It’s understandable to report that. That happened, for instance, with the Food and Drug Administration and the NyQuil chicken.

Nefarious influences have played a role, too. The Washington Post reported a remarkable story in 2022 that Facebook paid a PR firm to conduct a behind-the-scenes campaign to make rival TikTok seem dangerous. The “slap a teacher” and “devious licks” challenges, which actually appeared first on Facebook, were among the firm’s smear attempts.

Regardless of the actions of others, reporters can conduct their own internet research to figure out the origin and spread of a topic. Reporters whose beat is the internet know how to do this, but it’s useful for all reporters.

My department colleague Dr. Jess Maddox, who recently wrote about the purported boat jumping challenge and whose social media expertise I’m leaning on in this post, wrote a commentary last year as part of Nieman Lab’s 2023 predictions for journalism.

She made the key point that most of the threat of dangerous copycat behavior comes from talk about the behavior in the news media and on social media, not from actual videos of the challenge being performed. “Unless people in the press retain internet experts … they’ll continue to do more harm than any internet challenge ever could,” she wrote.

The headline atop her prediction? “Journalists keep getting manipulated by internet culture.” Yep.

Use of Espionage Act vs. Trump isn’t dubious. Here’s a case that is.

members of reporters without borders advocate for Julian assange’s release from prison in london in 2021.

(Update June 25, 2024: The Julian Assange case ends with his plea of guilty to one felony count of obtaining and publishing classified national security information. His sentence is the equivalent of time already served while fighting extradition to the U.S. This avoids a court ruling adverse to press freedom. But for the first time the U.S. government has used the Espionage Act to punish a publisher.)

Donald Trump on Saturday mocked the Espionage Act of 1917, the law by which he faces criminal charges for absconding with classified government documents. “They want to use something called the Espionage Act,” he said at a convention in Georgia. “Doesn’t that sound terrible?”

He should be familiar with it, actually. His administration used it as the basis for a terrible criminal case against the founder of the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

The act, passed to try to stifle dissent about U.S. involvement in World War I, has generated much debate over the years about what it should be used for. Infringement of the First Amendment led to revisions that stripped away the law’s original purpose. Since then it has been used to punish spies working for other countries (see, for example, Robert Hanssen, who died in prison last week) and it clearly applies to mishandling of records such as the Trump case.

It also has been used more controversially to punish government employees who leak sensitive information to the press, including revelations that benefitted the public interest. The case pending against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sends the Espionage Act of 1917 into a whole new area: Targeting the journalists who publish leaked information.

Before I stand up for his actions in this case, let’s be clear that Julian Assange is a bad guy.

Facing investigation in connection with a sexual assault in Sweden in 2012, Assange took asylum in the London embassy of Ecuador, which expelled him in 2019 for being a belligerent guest. Now imprisoned in London, Assange is fighting an extradition request from the United States that was granted by the British government. The most recent British court ruling, on Friday, went against him.

In 2019, the U.S. government charged Assange with 18 crimes related to WikiLeaks’ publication (almost 10 years prior) of leaked, classified government documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This action ignores the constitutional right to publish secret information in the public interest, even if the original source of the information broke the law in providing it.

The Justice Department argued that it wasn’t infringing on First Amendment rights because Assange engaged in conduct that was not protected. It’s true that journalists can’t commit or abet a crime in the course of gathering information, and if the Justice Department had stuck to its lone original charge – that Assange violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by helping Chelsea Manning try to crack a password to a secure government computer – the defenders of press freedom might not have been so outraged. Because hacking is not a protected journalistic activity.

julian assange in 2013

But the Justice Department didn’t stick with just that. It later announced 18 new counts, including 17 brought under the Espionage Act of 1917. The Obama administration used the Espionage Act aggressively against leakers within the government. With the Assange case, the Trump administration became the first to use that law as the basis for action against a publisher (and it did so despite some dissenters within the Justice Department who were concerned about First Amendment rights). Some major news organizations around the world have urged the Biden administration to drop the case, but so far it isn’t doing so.

Many press freedom advocates see little difference between what WikiLeaks did and what national security reporters do regularly. “Every national security journalist who reports on classified information now faces possible Espionage Act charges,” journalist Laura Poitras, who published classified documents provided by Edward Snowden, wrote in The New York Times in 2020.

The federal government claims Assange is a criminal because he was not a passive recipient of leaked information, but instead engaged in active solicitation. Does that view therefore criminalize reporters who engage in the very normal practice of telling potential leakers why there’s public service value in revealing certain government acts? Does that view criminalize the many news organizations that provide encrypted methods for confidential sources to deliver sensitive information? These are legitimate worries that come from the Assange case.

But this case isn’t merely about the reporting process. The charges also arise from some of the content that WikiLeaks published. Poitras cites worthy revelations about war crimes and civilian deaths. But the Justice Department points to disclosure of identities of Afghans and Iraqis who aided the United States, thus placing them in danger of retribution, as well as to disclosures about U.S. war tactics.

Ethical and responsible journalists won’t publish such details. This is also more evidence that Assange doesn’t really qualify for the label of journalist. But a lack of professional ethics or standards doesn’t nullify a constitutional protection. Nor does being a bad guy.

Let’s end live TV coverage of politicians talking

When the audience for CNN’s live “Town Hall” laughed at Donald Trump’s ridiculing of a proven sexual assault victim, do you think CNN’s president was pondering how many alienated Fox News viewers he would capture, or maybe how happy a conservative billionaire on CNN’s board would be? I know he wasn’t doing what he should have been doing: Vomiting.

Wednesday night’s live event manufactured by CNN was predictably disastrous. Even some CNN employees anonymously acknowledged the shame the cable network had brought upon itself. Trump discharged his familiar lies endlessly despite the commendable but essentially ineffective efforts of moderator Kaitlan Collins, a UA journalism grad with a track record of aggressive questioning of Trump.

CNN had to know what it was going to get from Trump. Either it didn’t care or foolishly thought it had a way to mitigate. Its baffling choice for an audience – Republicans who supposedly were still deciding who to support for president in 2024 – tells me it didn’t want to mitigate anything.

Many media critics and academic researchers argue persuasively that responsible news media must no longer give time or space to liars and haters, no matter how prominent they are. I have previously argued against this, believing it’s easier to fight a known enemy than a hidden one, and believing in the ability of the audience to recognize the bad guys.

This view is increasingly hard to defend. Consider first the gullibility and denialism of large segments of the American public. Consider also that lies and hate speech don’t merely poison civic conversations. They can, in the minds of extremists, justify violence. And they have.

But it’s unlikely the news media will decide to ignore people of established political influence, including the malignant ones. The danger inherent in this demands at least that TV networks will not serve as puppets.

Toward this end, it’s time for networks to stop live broadcasting of events in which elected politicians talk. This means town halls, debates, speeches, rallies, one-on-one interviews, whatever. It’s just too impossible to do effective, real-time fact checking. The power of a moderator, if there is one, is limited.

Instead, show these events on tape, loaded up with visual, annotated truths. Excerpt the daylights out of them. Render them to voiceovers or graphics. Splice in knockdowns. (CBS’s controversial taped interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene in April would have benefitted from this, as “Wow” is not an effective knockdown.)

I make no distinction based on the person or the political party. But a network reasonably could. That would mean less live air for Republicans like Trump, but they’ve earned that.

I don’t think an end to live TV coverage is enough to neutralize the toxicity of some of our elected leaders and candidates. But it’s a big step up from the debacle that CNN gave us Wednesday night.

If you’re a reporter, how sneaky are you willing to be? Here’s a test.

first story by the mccurtain (oklahoma) gazette-news.

I’ve never seen “sneakiness” listed among the requirements for any reporter jobs but maybe it should be.

A reporter for the McCurtain (Oklahoma) Gazette-News ended up with a flabbergasting story when he secretly left a voice-activated audio recorder in a public meeting room after citizens were told to leave a session of the McCurtain County Commission. The reporter, believing county officials had a practice of continuing to discuss government business in violation of the state open meetings law, retrieved the recorder and discovered comments lamenting that Black criminals couldn’t be lynched anymore and talk of killing local reporters.

Since the paper’s first report on April 15, the local Black community has held public protests, one of the officials has resigned, and the FBI is investigating. The newspaper, whose story got national media attention, released the full three-hour audio on April 21.

Various recent media reports offer conflicting views of whether the reporter broke Oklahoma law about secret recordings. The key question seems to be whether, in that setting and with other people in the room, the people in the conversation had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

 The reporter’s actions got me to thinking about other circumstances in which the reporting process may enter an ethical gray area. Journalists shouldn’t break the law, but that doesn’t mean they should engage in any and all conduct that’s legal.

Here are some scenarios of newsgathering – all from real-life situations that I’m familiar with – that require at least a moment’s pause and contemplation. I don’t think any of these are illegal. (Check your state’s laws anyway so I’m not responsible for you getting life in prison, OK?) For each of these, there isn’t an obvious, consensus answer. Would you do any of the following, if the story were important enough?

• You see two newsmakers at the restaurant table next to yours. They’re talking loudly and you can hear everything they say about a newsworthy topic in which they are involved. Do you report what they say? (I say yes, but only after giving each individual a chance to elaborate, clarify or backpedal the next day.)

• Similar scenario but this time it involves adjoining hotel rooms. (Don’t scoff. This really happened.) (I would treat this as off-the-record information and use it to try to leverage on-record confirmation from the newsmakers or others.)

• A newsmaker is giving a speech at a meeting advertised as open to the public but not to the media. (Again, this really happened.) Do you remove your press badge, attend and report? (I’d have zero problem with that.)

• Let’s make the previous scenario more complicated. The speech is open to a club that has 200 members but not to the media. With so many attendees, you know you could blend in and get inside. Would you do that and report? (I’m a “no” on this one.)

• You need a phone interview with a central figure in a major controversy, but the bureaucracy (secretary, media relations person) is putting up blockades. Would you claim to be someone other than a journalist just to get past the call screeners? (That’s another “no” from me.)

• You’re doing an interview with a newsmaker in their office. On their desk is a letter that you’re able to read and you can see from the subject line that it’s about a major story that you’ve been covering. Do you keep reading to see if it’s news you should get confirmed later? (I would advise not to read it.)

• You anticipate a contentious interview with a key person in a high-profile news story in a state that doesn’t require all parties to a conversation to consent to being recorded. You doubt the person will grant permission, but you want the public to hear it for themselves. Do you secretly audio record the interview? (I would do so but not make it public unless the interviewee publicly challenged my accuracy.)

• In response to a public records request, you get a document that is partially blacked out. But the redaction is poorly done and you can see what’s hidden or have the technology to defeat the redaction. Do you publish the hidden information? (Yes, in a heartbeat. The Crimson White did this once for some SGA election results and it was beautiful.)

As I said, the importance of the information in these situations is key. In McCurtain County, knowing that some of your government leaders are racist and fascist was well worth all the sneakiness involved.

A demon and a Lemon: Big-name firings were not the same

You ought to do some soul-searching if you’re a big-time media figure who gets fired and the media reporters have to offer possible reasons in list form.

But that won’t happen with Tucker Carlson, who, despite being fired by MSNBC, CNN and now Fox, is incapable of shame. And maybe couldn’t find his soul anyway.

One remarkable aspect is that Fox even did this to its biggest ratings winner. I feel certain it was not because of anything Carlson said on air because he crossed any boundaries that might exist a long time ago. It may well have sprung from offensive comments off the air about top Fox executives. But almost certainly it had something to do with money.

Fox may have decided he’s a legal liability, since he mightily bolstered the Dominion Voting System lawsuit against the network and attracted another lawsuitt from a former “Tucker Carlson Tonight” producer who claimed Carlson and other show executives created a hostile work environment for women.

Which brings up another remarkable aspect: The continuing self-destruction of male national TV news stars due to credible allegations of sexual assault or harassment. I can think of Carlson (hostile environment is a form of harassment), Bill O’Reilly, Chris Cuomo, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Chris Matthews, Mark Halperin, Eric Bolling and Ed Henry. Phew, I gotta rest. Don Lemon too, although he didn’t get fired at the time.

Obviously, abhorrent behavior like this takes place in all kinds of fields and institutions. But I think a heady combination of ratings, fame, ego, money and power leads to the feeling that they can do whatever they want to whichever subordinate they want – and are even entitled to it.

And in the case of someone like Carlson, when your nightly job is to denigrate the less powerful groups of society, it’s only a short step to practicing misogyny in your real life.

I’ve written about Fox News before (here and here). With its history, Fox may be more mindful of its treatment of women today, but I hold no hope that Carlson’s firing signals a lasting change to the dreck it churns out on its primetime opinion shows.

As for Carlson, in older days when there were only three, over-air networks, he’d have nowhere else to go. But today there’s always a right-wing cable network or website or podcast that’s got a bad agenda and no standards. In other words, the only kind of medium where Carlson could work.

Don Lemon

The longtime, opinionated CNN anchor got fired the same day Carlson did. But Lemon’s ouster was a bad decision.

Yes, Lemon said stupid and offensive stuff too often. But if media reports are correct that he was fired for violating CNN policy against challenging Republican guests on its shows, that’s a black mark for CNN’s new leadership. Maybe don’t call out your own control room as Lemon did, but pushing back is exactly what interviewers are supposed to do.

In Brandon Miller case, blaming the media is way too simple

The University of Alabama men’s basketball program ended its season Friday having squandered its national championship chances and its good reputation. In the same process, the reputation of the news media took a thorough pounding, as well.

Many UA fans blamed the press – mostly the press outside of Tuscaloosa – for sparking national hatred of the program that showed itself in arena chants and on social media, culminating with death threats and armed security for star player Brandon Miller, who was part of the chain of events that led to the shooting death of a young mother. I got to wondering if the blame was valid.

This first requires recognizing that the news media didn’t all react to the story the same way and so can’t be lumped together. Some journalists, especially local ones, argued adamantly that Miller had done nothing wrong and that UA’s zero punishment was the right decision. On the other extreme, some commentators declared this the biggest disgrace in college sports history, warranting the end of Miller’s season, the firing of coach Nate Oats, and the suspension of the program while you’re at it.

The most clearly inexcusable conduct was the reports that couldn’t get the facts straight. More excusable, but still a target of criticism, was the accurate reporting of police accounts of the shooting that later seemed not to match everything that happened. It is becoming more common for news organizations that publish police statements about major cases to launch independent reporting to confirm or challenge those statements. (Tuscaloosa Patch was one that did that in this case.)

Against this backdrop, I wondered if the reporting and opinionating could have incited the venom of fans around the nation.

“Blame cannot simply be assigned to media; however, the media can certainly play a role in triggering anger, outrage, and other strong emotions,” said my department colleague Dr. Scott Parrott, a sports fan who teaches what academia calls “media effects.”

In an email, he cited “media personalities who make livings on controversy.” Their aim is conflict. “The approach divides sports fans into ‘us’ against ‘them,’ which elicits even stronger emotions and divides us. Politicians use the same tactic.” 

Other factors are at work, too, Parrott said, naming social media and the intense nature of sports fandom. “Debates over morality and justice carry over into social media, where people can comment under the cloak of anonymity — we have all seen how poisonous social media can be. When you throw in fanship, it can become an emotional powder keg in which empathy and rational thought disappear, and people are so angry they threaten the life of a young man.”

For the Saturday NCAA games in Birmingham, I sat among the avid and the rabid. And I was reminded how mean-spirited some sports fans can be. The news media and the university certainly aren’t blameless in the saga of UA’s basketball season, but there’s a whole lot more going on than that.

A speculative Top 10 list of Fox News’ “journalistic processes”

FOX BUSINESS HOST LOU DOBBS WAS AMONG SEVERAL FOX PROGRAMS THAT GAVE AIR TIME TO SIDNEY POWELL AND OTHERS TO MAKE FALSE CLAIMS AGAINST DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS. ONE DAY AFTER A LAWSUIT BY ANOTHER VOTING COMPANY, FOX CANCELLED DOBBS’ SHOW.

Fox News may not be capable of shame, but the public humiliation of it from the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit just keeps getting better.

Dominion claims Fox News damaged it by knowingly broadcasting false claims that Dominion engaged in vote fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Among the current legal contests in the case is whether to protect or reveal some internal Fox communications that are currently blacked out in legal filings.

On March 10, Fox lawyers argued for continued secrecy because “prematurely disclosing these other details on Fox’s internal and proprietary journalistic processes may allow competitors to appropriate these processes for their own competitive advantage….”

Just goes to show that you can find good comedy anywhere.

It’s hard to conceive that whatever Fox wants to keep hidden could be worse than the journalistic malpractice that other internal Fox correspondence in the case has already revealed. (For honest observers of Fox, confirmed is a better word.) Even harder to conceive is that Fox has some trade secrets that competitors might want. Newsmax, maybe. Anyone credible, never.

I tried to envision Fox’s “proprietary journalistic processes.” I imagine it’s a Top 10 list something like this:

1) Decide stories based on ratings. Same with opinions. Doesn’t matter what you really believe.

2) Distort truths that our audience won’t like. Make up claims that they will.

3) On matters of life or health (e.g. pandemics), exceptions to No. 2 are not required.

4) Appeal to fear and racism (e.g. crime, immigration). They go hand in hand.

5) Attack vulnerable people. They don’t have enough money to buy ads.

6) Hammer on topics that hurt our political opposition before an election. Then forget about them.

7) Accompany all unsubstantiated statements with “we’re only raising questions” or “we don’t know that this isn’t true.” Or invite guests who will say them for you.

8) Treat all guests with respect. Don’t challenge them on anything.

9) Inform supervisors of any Fox journalist who deviates from an agreed-upon narrative.

10) Support powerful people who want to trash free speech and libel protections. But not too much. We may need those things if we get in legal trouble.

Fox, which I have written about before, is not a bad, dangerous news organization. It’s not even a news organization. It’s a political propaganda network. The current litigation against it is a rare case in which to root against the media.

Big, unanswered questions don’t have a statute of limitations

ALABAMA BASKETBALL PLAYERS MARK SEARS (LEFT) AND BRANDON MILLER ANSWER MEDIA QUESTIONS FOLLOWING A GAME IN OCTOBER 2022.

After Alabama basketball player Darius Miles was charged with capital murder, coach Nate Oats called NFL Hall of Famer Ray Lewis for advice. I don’t know what Lewis might have told Oats beyond what has been reported, but he might have said: “The damn news media will never let it go.”

Lewis should know. In 2000 the Baltimore Ravens linebacker was charged with murder in connection with the stabbing deaths of two men in Atlanta. Lewis ended up pleading guilty to obstruction of justice. But Lewis never fully accounted publicly for his actions that night.

So a Sports Illustrated reporter new to the NFL beat decided to go into the locker room and give Lewis a chance to do so. Thirteen years later. Unsurprisingly, Lewis got angry. The reporter got blacklisted by Lewis’ teammates, chewed out by the Ravens’ media relations staff, and threatened with loss of access to the locker room.

Well, so what. Can’t chicken out of asking questions that need to be asked just because someone will get angry. And the time lag? That, according to a 2018 retrospective article by the SI reporter, Robert Klemko, was the fault of Lewis and the Ravens for making sure reporters never got access to Lewis in anything other than a controlled forum.

Moving to present day, the University of Alabama has granted the news media zero access to players since the revelation in court that two other players, star Brandon Miller and Jaden Bradley, were at the scene of the fatal shooting of Jamea Jonae Harris on Jan. 15. Both players have continued to play.

If I’m a UA administrator, in the current fraught circumstances, I probably wouldn’t want a press availability, either. But that doesn’t change the professional and moral necessity for the news media to seek a complete and truthful account of events that night. The victim deserves that, and it’s the only way to fairly judge the actions of the university.

It’s a great PR tactic to stonewall and then later claim mootness because of the passage of time. The media can’t let that tactic work.

It will be interesting to see if the media opportunities required by the SEC and NCAA men’s basketball tournaments lead to interviews with Miller. (Certainly UA has had plenty of time to coach Miller and everyone else on what to say.)

No matter how many media relations people get mad, or how bad it will look to fans, someone someday has to ask, “Brandon, did you know the gun was in the car?” He doesn’t have to answer that or any of the several other unanswered questions about the tragedy. But the media have to try. And it doesn’t matter what year it is.

I'm failing to get outraged about the death of The Birmingham News

Gonna make this short because, as grateful as I am for every wonderful person who has ever read an Arenblog post, I write primarily for my students and I can assure you they don’t give a sheet* about the end of newspapers in three of Alabama’s largest cities.

Today marked the end of The Huntsville Times, The Mobile Press-Register and The Birmingham News, for which I busted my tail for 30 years and in which I took enormous pride (on its good days, anyway). 

Certainly, I am saddened. It’s not merely the end of a print version of The Birmingham News. It’s the end of The Birmingham News. There isn’t a Birmingham News website. It’s al.com with the option of a Birmingham-focused homepage. The Alabama Media Group’s daily paid digital product is called The Lede. It still says it’s “From The Birmingham News” but that’s not really so anymore. The bylines don’t say “Birmingham News.”

It’s possible to be sad and accepting at the same time, of course. Eventual death, I think, is the fate that awaits all daily newspapers, though no one can predict when. Certainly, many other newspaper companies continue to make money (albeit less and less) from their print editions. AMG’s parent Advance Local still has newspapers in other states. But AMG had an uncommon situation because its state and local print stories in Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile had already appeared on its free and heavily trafficked website. 

Throughout journalism history, methods of delivering news have come and gone. For instance: flyers, Pony Express and telegraph. Digital platforms ripped apart the traditional business model of print (though print readership began to decline before the internet became widespread). Print was nice because it delivered a common set of facts as the starting point for community debate and action. But digital platforms, for all their bazillion faults, are so much better: More immediacy, more options, more effective ways to present journalism.

What matters for news in Alabama going forward is its quality, and that has little to do with how it’s delivered.

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* A “sheet” is a printing press term.