Reporter Says Journalism Experience Helped Her Handle Phone Calls From Man Who Was Holding Ex-Wife Hostage
A Connecticut newspaper reporter who received a series of phone calls from a man who had taken his ex-wife hostage and was holding police at bay says her experience as a journalist helped her through the ordeal.
Karen Florin, a court reporter for The Day newspaper in New London, received the calls from ad executive Richard Shenkman on Tuesday after he took ex-wife Nancy Tyler hostage in their South Windsor home, the paper reported.
"I think my 15 years of reporting experience prepared me for this," Florin said in an e-mail interview. "Imagine being a rookie reporter and receiving phone calls from somebody who was holding a hostage? I had to try to keep him calm at the same time that I was eliciting information from him."
Shenkman called Florin four times over a three-hour period. During their conversations (see video from The Day website) Shenkman made a series of bizarre requests. At one point he asked Florin to have a priest sent to his house to give Tyler her last rites. "I don't understand why you want a priest to give her her last rites if you're not going to harm her," Florin told Shenkman.
At another point Shenkman told Florin, "I don't want to take innocent people's lives."
Florin responded, "Well then why do you have your wife there, your ex-wife?"
Shenkman held police at bay for 13 hours and threatened to blow up the house. Tyler eventually managed to escape, and Shenkman was arrested after setting the home ablaze. He is being held on $12.5 million bail.
Florin said Shenkman probably called her because she had interviewed him previously. Florin had covered the couple's divorce proceedings and Shenkman's 2007 arrest for allegedly burning down a summer house.
"I had listened to him patiently during phone calls over the years and had reported his point of view even when it was unsavory," she said. "I knew him for five or six years. I had covered a local Indian tribe, the Eastern Pequots, when he and his now ex-wife were their media reps. I then covered him when he was charged with burning down a home that was in dispute in the divorce."
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Profits Are Down, But Many Newspapers Still Make Money
So are newspapers still profitable or not?
That’s the question lingering in the air after the Inland Press Association this week released a report that seemed to suggest the newspaper business was doing better than expected.
But some readers questioned the math and methodology used in the study, which surveyed 120 papers from 2004 to 2008, and a revised version was quickly issued.
So what’s the upshot?
Newspapers are hurting. Declining circulation, advertising and classified revenue has drained profits at U.S. dailies over the past five years. On that point, all agree.
And yet, according to the IPA, many papers are still profitable, though less so than a few years ago.
So what happened to all the dire predictions of just a few months ago that said the newspaper business was on the verge of going belly up?
“The doom and gloom stuff was somewhat overdone,” Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, said in a phone interview.
The doomsayers overlooked two things, Edmonds said.
First, “A lot of the declines in ad revenues are related to a large extent to the recession, and it’s not likely that things will continue to deteriorate at this rate.”
Second, big newspaper companies that found themselves saddled with massive debt – like the Tribune Co. – got a lot of media attention, but much of the coverage ignored an important fact:
“Most individual papers are still making a reasonable profit margin – just not as much as they used to,” Edmonds said.
That’s not to say newspapers don’t have a tough road ahead. “The trends are negative and the requirements for cutting expenses have been tough on papers,” Edmonds said.
But the cost-cutting, while painful, should make newspaper companies more viable when the recession recedes, he added.
“At the end of the day, these companies are operating more leanly now,” Edmonds said. “The business will be smaller and there may be more reductions, but there should enough profit there to make a viable business for some years to come.”
And while some pundits still proclaim that the future of news is on the web and only on the web, online ad revenue – which has also waned with the recession – just isn’t enough to support most news companies.
“Display advertising to websites is there, but it’s been kind of disappointing,” Edmonds said. “The very biggest websites have big enough numbers that they get a certain amount of advertising, but with the smaller sites, there’s just not traffic to interest certain advertisers.”
The moral of the story? Online news still needs a money-making business model. And until one is developed, don’t count newspapers out just yet.
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Complaints About News Coverage of Michael Jackson's Death Miss Sight of What News Is
A pop icon dies young, under tragic circumstances. Millions around the world mourn, and the media respond with nonstop coverage – TV specials, newspaper headlines, magazine covers - all of which the public devour. Ratings soar, papers fly off newsstands.
Yet others complain that it’s all too much. The news media should focus on more serious matters, they say – war, politics, the economy - anything but the life and death of a pop singer.
Sound familiar? This was the scene in the hours and days following the death of John Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980.
The first announcement of Lennon’s death came from ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell, who interrupted a Monday Night Football broadcast to tell viewers:
“Yes, we have to say, remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City, John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”
The next evening, anchors of the big three network newscasts all led with the story of Lennon’s death, placing it ahead of serious news like the threat of a Soviet invasion of Poland and negotiations to win the freedom of the American hostages in Iran.
CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite began his newscast this way:
"The death of a man who sang and played the guitar overshadows the news from Poland, Iran and Washington tonight."
Was Lennon’s death more important, in the grand scale of things, than the big issues of the day? Probably not. So why did the media devote such wall-to-wall coverage to it?
Because, as any good reporter can tell you, issues are important, but people – real, individual human beings - are what we find interesting.
A statistics story about the more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq? That’s important.
A profile of a young mother with two toddlers who has lost her husband in combat? That’s interesting, to say nothing of heartbreaking.
Readers may say they’re likely to read both articles, but any editor knows it’s the latter story that most will read, and remember, and comment on.
Fast-forward to today, with 500 TV channels, 24/7 cable news and the Internet. The media environment of 1980 – no MSNBC, no Facebook - seems positively Neolithic by comparison.
Yet even with the enormous glut of information available to the casual surfer or viewer, there are those who still complain that too much media attention has been devoted to the death of Michael Jackson. Indeed, nearly two-in-three Americans feel this way, according to a poll last week.
It makes no difference that even with all the Jackson coverage you still can, with the click of a mouse, call up more news, from every corner of the globe, than you could ever actually read. The complaints still come.
But the news has always been a mix of what we need to know and what we want to know. And sometimes it's not just about presidents and prime ministers, but about artists and authors, singers and dancers.
"A newspaper is like a buffet," a great editor once told me. "There should be something there for everyone."
Now, there are many motivations for the blanket coverage of Jackson’s death, and some of those have to do with profit. Cable news ratings have soared in recent days, and some news websites have seen their traffic skyrocket.
Sure, there are profits to be made with stories like these. That’s why they call it the news business.
But whether it’s war or the economy, politics or yes, the death of a pop star, news, in the end, is the story of people’s lives. And even his detractors must admit that Michael Jackson’s life made for a strange, tragic and ultimately fascinating story.
It's what Walter Cronkite understood when he began his newscast on the evening of Dec. 9, 1980: Sometimes the life and death of a man who sang songs overshadows everything else.
Read more: Dismiss Michael Jackson For His Eccentricities? Maybe. Dismiss His Music? Think Again.
Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images
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For Newspapers, Slide in Advertising Revenue Continues
There's more bad news for newspapers: Ad revenue was down for the first quarter of this year.
Overall ad sales for print fell 30 percent in this first quarter of 2009 compared to the same quarter last year, according to Business Insider. Classified ad revenue, siphoned away by Craigslist, plunged 42 percent in that period.
That's the steepest year-over-year drop ever.
And if you think online ad revenue will save the day, think again: Online ad sales fell 13 percent in the same period. That's the first first double-digit drop in online ad sales since the Newspaper Association of America started measuring them in 2004.
Total U.S. online advertising in the first quarter fell 5 percent compared to last year.
Newspapers have always relied on ads from big-box department stores as a major revenue stream, so it's no surprise to learn that Macy’s has halved what it spends on newspaper ads since 2005. That's $616 million in lost ad revenue.
What to do? Aside from praying the economy will pick up soon, no one really knows. One option might be cooperative arrangements like the one between the Tribune Co. and the Dallas Morning News. Under the deal, Tribune Co., which is itself in bankruptcy, will sell national print and online ads for the Dallas paper. The hope is that centralizing sales through a single clearinghouse will make ad buys easier for large companies.
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
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Huffington Post is Sexy, Erudite and Controversial
Arianna Huffington
Huffington Post is flashy. It's sexy. It combines gaudy tabloid excess with erudite commentary by some of the country's brightest stars in the worlds of politics, entertainment, business and journalism.
And it's one of the most popular blogs on the planet, drawing millions of visitors and pageviews every month.
But HuffPo, as it's known, has also sparked controversy with its practice of excerpting articles from other news sites. Some have even accused HuffPo of stealing.
Read the entire article.
Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images
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Did Media Spend Too Much Time Covering Michael Jackson's Death?
Did the U.S. media spend too much time covering the death of Michael Jackson?
Nearly two-in-three Americans - 69 percent - feel the media devoted too much time to the story, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
Overall, the Jackson story and the Iranian protests received similar levels of coverage. The protests in Iran took up 19 percent of the newshole for the week, the Jackson story 18 percent, according to the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
But from the time the Jackson story broke Thursday afternoon to the end of the day Friday, 60 percent of the news coverage studied was about his death, his life story and his legacy. Iran coverage dropped to 7 percent of coverage in that same period.
Whatever their feelings about the Jackson coverage, many followed it closely. The poll found that 30 percent of respondents followed stories about Jackson very closely, and 31 percent said it was the story they followed more closely than any other.
(That compares to the 28 percent who followed the death of Tim Russert very closely last year; the 30 percent who followed the death of croc hunter Steve Irwin very closely in September 2006; and the 54 percent who very closely followed the deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. in July 1999 and Princess Diana in September 1997.)
Eight-in-ten African Americans said they followed the Jackson news very closely, compared with 22 percent of whites. Women (35 percent) followed the story more closely than men (26 percent), and 38 percent of under people under 40 followed the news very closely, compared with people between 40 and 64 (27 percent) and those 65 and older (20 percent).
Half of those polled said they felt the media had the right mix of coverage on Jackson's life, career and scandals; 26 percent said the coverage focused too much on the scandals and 11 percent said it focused too much on his career.
What do you think about the Jackson coverage? Comment here or in the forum.
Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images
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Seven Things the Iranian Uprising Showed Us About Citizen Journalism
The Iranian uprising of the past few weeks was a watershed moment for citizen journalism. As the regime clamped down on foreign journalists, average Iranians using Twitter, websites, blogs and YouTube spread the word about what was happening in a way that mainstream news organizations could not.
So what has this experience demonstrated?
1. Citizen journalism is here to stay. Any doubt about that was erased in the last few weeks. The legitimization of citizen journalism that began with coverage of the Mumbai terrorist attacks last year was solidified, once and for all, with the Iranian uprising.
2. Citizen journalism is fast. Bloggers and twitterers were the first to report much of what was happening in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere.
3. Citizen journalism is, more often than not, pretty reliable. So far, mainstream news outlets have reported few problems with the accuracy of the information they received from Iran.
4. Citizen journalism isn’t perfect and, like all journalism, must be checked and edited. For example, some of the videos from Iran that purported to be new turned out to be several days old. CNN, for example, vetted the videos it received on its iReport site and showed more than 100 of them on television.
5. Mainstream news organizations will use citizen journalism – especially when nothing else is available. From CNN to The New York Times, mainstream news outlets used pictures and videos from citizen journalists on an unprecedented scale during the Iranian uprising.
6. Citizen journalism and mainstream journalism can be used collaboratively. As reported by Brian Stelter in the Times, Nico Pitney, the senior news editor at The Huffington Post, aggregated Iran news on a blog that combined professional reporting and reliable reports from citizen journalists.
7. Citizen journalism can be powerful. When people holding camera phones filmed the death of a young woman named Neda who had been shot at a demonstration, those horrifying images became a powerful symbol and rallying cry for the protesters.
Photo courtesy Tehran 24
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Dismiss Michael Jackson For His Eccentricities? Maybe. Dismiss His Music? Think Again.
You don’t know what you have until it’s gone. I discovered that, yet again, on a drive home this afternoon, with the radio on:
“A-B-C, It’s easy as 1-2-3, as simple as do-re-mi, A-B-C, 1-2-3, baby, you and me girl,” the young Michael Jackson sang.
It’s a simple, even banal lyric, but as I listened I found I couldn’t resist punching my foot into the space next to the gas pedal. If I could have stood up and grooved to the music in my minivan without careening off the road, I would have.
Let me be clear: I’m a middle-aged man who listens, mostly, to the art music known as jazz. I don’t own a single album by Michael Jackson and have never seriously considered buying one. Through the years, as a reporter working in newsrooms around the country, I’ve read the bizarre stories about the king of pop and made the same jokes about him that every jaded journalist has. It’s clear he was, at the very least, a profoundly troubled person.
But since I have little way of knowing the details of Jackson’s personal life beyond what I read in the news, what I want to say here is that those who would, because of his strange behavior, diminish his accomplishments as a singer, dancer and entertainer miss a very big point:
He, quite possibly, brought more moments of pure happiness – the kind of happiness that has to do with the simple pleasures of being alive - to more people on this planet than any other human being alive today.
Think about it. His album “Thriller” is the bestseller of all time. 65 million copies sold worldwide. Seven of the songs were top 10 singles.
Why? Play the titletrack on your Ipod, computer or stereo. Try not to tap your foot or move your body in some way, somehow. Try not to. If you’re anything like me – which is to say, a living, breathing human being - you can’t help yourself.
Humans respond to rhythm. It’s the constant pulse of life that’s pumped, every second, by a living heart, the beat of the human engine driving blood to every corner of the body.
Yet there’s a tendency among some to dismiss the kind of pop music that makes us want to move our bodies in time to this rhythm. Not intellectual enough, not contemplative enough, not serious enough. Not – and let me be blunt – white enough.
What do I mean? Remember when MTV, in its early days, wouldn’t play Michael Jackson’s music videos? When it played only the pallid songs of white, one-hit wonders who’ve long since faded into obscurity? When it only started to air Jackson’s music after it became obvious that it was quite clearly the most popular music on the planet?
I could digress here and talk about how Jackson was a pioneer and a force for a more equitable world, but let’s save that for now; the point is, the racism that for a time kept Michael Jackson’s music off MTV was blasted away by the music itself, by the sheer force of its powerful, all-too human beat.
Dismiss Michael Jackson for his eccentricities, maybe. But dismiss his music as pop fluff? You might as well dismiss the impulse that drives young people everywhere, in the hours after sunset, to dance halls and nightclubs.
And so it was that on a drive home today I found myself listening to the voice of no more than a boy singing a simple, catchy lyric to an absolutely irresistible beat. And as I noted the tapping of my foot I also noticed a few tears streaming down my face, a surprising and embarrassing occurrence for a man who never bought a Michael Jackson album but who, many years ago, gathered up the hand of a pretty young woman and, in a moment of nervous anticipation, and to the strains of a song by Michael Jackson, asked that girl to dance.
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Pictures of the Week - The Life and Death of Michael Jackson
No doubt about it - the shocking and untimely death of Michael Jackson, the king of pop, was the biggest news story of the week. So this week's "Week in Pictures" gallery consists entirely of photos of Jackson from over the years, and shots of his fans, who gathered around the world to mourn his death.
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Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images
Who Broke the Story of Michael Jackson's Death?
A woman cries on the phone as she tells a friend that Michael Jackson has died at UCLA Medical Plaza in Los Angeles. The iconic pop star, 50, was rushed to the hospital after reportedly going into cardiac arrest.
So who broke the story of Michael Jackson's death?
Early news reports indicate it was TMZ, the Los Angeles-based celebrity gossip site owned by Time Warner.
Here's the TMZ page carrying the news of the star's demise. The information is attributed to what appears to be two anonymous sources, one in the hospital and another who may have been with the paramedics at his home.
The Los Angeles Times appears to have been the next news organization to report Jackson's death, though the paper first reported Jackson as being in a coma, then later confirmed he had died.
An early story by The Associated Press attributed news of Jackson's death to the Times, but in a later version the wire service had found its own source on which to peg the information. The AP story attributed the news to "a person with knowledge of the situation."
Techcrunch reported that several major websites, including the LA Times and TMZ sites, were temporarily knocked out of service after being inundated with millions of web surfers seeking the latest info on the death of the king of pop.
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Photo by Ann Johansson/Getty Images