Food for thought: Have another banana?

Editors who get on their high horse are apt to slip on a fruit peel and go down, steed and all.
We see so many ethical stands. We hear so many grand statements of news as separate from advertising, which journalists call “the dark side.”
Then in the middle of every week we get their food sections, glaring in self-contradiction.
These labor intensive, soft journalism, tepid ventures into consumer reporting, if you can call recipes serious reportage, are a bigger staple than rice and potatoes.
The media critic may lose a job. The book page may disappear. The news bureau may shut down.
Food sections endure.
They wrap supermarket fliers and run grocery coupons. Some peddle wine and spirits or boom high-end restaurants for this nation of foodies.
Now this is the entry point for Harry Highminded, the editor, to blurt at me that eating is news too: “Ever see anyone give up food, heh-heh-heh?”
Well, yes, actually. Famine is increasing. Food riots are starting. Americans are malnourished either through obesity or poverty.
The real news of food is in genetic crops, the biofuels competition for corn and the safety of meat and produce.
News pages covered the massive South Korean protests against American beef imports. How many food editors followed up with coverage of safety in local meat markets?
Or how many check out jail, school and nursing home menus for nutrition?
Or publish health department inspections? Some do, to be sure.
But it’s the unusual food editor who sees a role in questioning advertisers who are the reason the editor has a job.
Media’s hypocrisy over the weekly homage to buying and eating is not a moral cesspool we’ll all drown in. And I’m not on my own high horse.
But it does us all good to admit our hunger for ad revenue isn’t satisfied by pretense at purity.
I agree food is a huge category of news and ripe for investigation and exposition.
Tell me where my milk comes from and why the price is zooming. Explain why Super Wal-Mart is America’s breadbasket but what that’s done to competitive choices. Report on the Food and Drug Administration for scaring us but not protecting us against salmonella in our produce.
Cover nutrition, the real story, not gluttony as typical food sections do.
But don’t try to con me into believing most newspaper food sections are any more than advertising vehicles.
That’s too big a bunch of bananas to swallow on horseback or anywhere else.

Who do you want in a digital knife fight?

The long knives go slit-slit faster and deeper at benighted newspapers. Publishers reserve the longest, sharpest blades for slicing off their own noses to spite their faces.

It's the darndest thing. Newsroom budgets have a one-for-one ratio of product quality. So where does the front office slash? Why, the very place that would bring in more customers for themselves and their advertisers.

Ad reps advise clients to buy more space in a downturn when merchants need more traffic. They don't do it. They advertise less. But that's the argument.

When publishers need a better product to boost the bottom line, they invariably cut back too. If that's not hypocritical, it's sure short-sighted and makes for a brutal nose job.

They imagine they are in the business of printing words on paper. So they reduce pages and the wordsmiths to fill them.

The truth is, they really are in the information business. They need constantly to create demand and to generate ad attraction with more and better information. But they do the old biz school thing that reduces costs in a version of supply side economics instead of spending wisely to create product demand.

The newspaper industry is a metaphor for failed imagination.

If Silicon Valley had thought that way, I'd be writing this on an upright typewriter instead of a computer.

That's why I like the advice of columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., although he admits he was slow coming to his own view. The Internet should be at the core of journalism, not off to one side, he now writes http://www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/story/574088.html

"And then maybe we should hire away the bright people who figured out how to make Yahoo and Google profitable and ask them to make our sites profitable, too."

Go, Leonard.

Publishers recognize the virtual world when their IT Departments show them. But they're not thriving in it like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, now competing with downloadable texts via Kindle, http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA or like Craig Newmark, the Internet entrepreneur taking the classifieds away from conventional print http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/user_accounts.

Bezos and Newmark and all the Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other dagger gaggles may look like a publisher's worst nightmare.

But if I'm in a knife fight, I want a guy who's good with a stiletto at my side.

This just in: Government discovers rumor!

Can’t fool Washington. It’s just slow on the uptake.
Word-of-mouth is humankind’s oldest form of communication.
Dame Rumor flies, wrote ancient poets such as Virgil. Truth is a pedestrian.
The feds were bound to get around to investigating that hare and tortoise race.
The Securities and Exchange Commission wants Wall Street to stop spreading false information.
Lots of luck with that.
Those turkey buzzards of day trading, the short sellers, make a living from bad information and misinformation and disinformation. They borrow stock at a high price to sell low and pocket the difference.
The shorters naturally benefit if gossip hurts a company on the Exchange while they hold its paper.
Speculation flitted right behind rumor out of Pandora’s box.
Journalism could tell federal regulators all information is baseless until verified.
But fact-checking is a tedious process that suffers when a reporter is close to deadline and when the financial world is in near panic mode as it is lately.
So we shouldn’t be cynical either about editors’ stern warning to authenticate or the SEC’s crackdown on illegal trading practices.
Realism simply tells us rumor mongering is a never ending story, with us always.
The wagging tongue as way-of-life is how vast numbers of non-readers of newspapers and non-watchers of TV are getting their news these days. Much of the news actually is commentary if not downright gossip.
Abandon all hope for straight poop as you enter the blogosphere. Yes, this blog is an outpost in the vastness of cyberspace too.
That’s why you see my name, my picture, my bona fide credentials listed – the stuff of credibility, the eternal enemy of rumor.
Trusted sources: That’s what professional journalism is all about, regardless of media platform.
The government might defeat rumor in the marketplace. Not likely. But it might. The weapon would be instantly available truth, denial, explanation to counter every whisper.
But that would require government, corporations and the financial world to be quick with credibility too.
Every reporter knows those institutions trade in deception and withheld information and controlled flow of news.
So short sellers and average citizens take rumors for granted.
Credible journalism can’t. That’s why there’ll always be a market for honest reporting.
Uphill battle that it is with Dame Rumor whispering in your ear.