Who? What? Why? When? Where? These are the five governing principles of any news story and the basic tools of the journalism trade. Anyone who has ever worked in the industry knows this and most readers do to as these facts make up the foundation of any good story. Unfortunately, these days (look at me, sounding all old and shit) not everyone remembers the rules. I’ve just spent more time than I would have liked searching through a clumsy video replay of yet another round-table discussion on the future of news (or in this case, “traditional media”), looking for the names of the participants as well as the date this occurred. I was able to piece together the names, although the date was found only through a trusty “new-media” tool I like to call Google: June 4th, 2008. The original broadcast was on GroundReport.com, but it contained no information next to the video as to who the participants were and when this discussion took place. Both IWantMedia.com and GroundReport.com have included this information elsewhere on their sites (found it too late), but it was easier for me to Google the information, ending up back on the original sites I started from, than to search through the mass of nothingness accompanying the video. Perhaps new-media has something to learn here? I’m not sure if that lesson is to be learned from Google or perhaps a legacy company like the New York Times… More on that later.

Anyway, I’ve included below the discussion that took place at NYU’s J-school about the future of traditional media. The discussion was hosted by I Want Media and Ground Report, one a media industry general information website, the other a citizen journalist/news platform (still in its infancy, as I discussed earlier). Both are worthy ideas and worth a look. The discussion was fairly interesting and featured Michael Wolff (Vanity Fair and Newser.com), Kenneth Li (Reuters), David Carr (New York Times), Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch.com), Keith J. Kelly (New York Post) and Johnnie L. Roberts (Newsweek).

What did they have in common? They are all men, all happened to be in the same television studio in New York at the same time and for the most part, they all are media commentators and journalists with something at stake (although some of them are obviously less complacent than others about their careers). Other than that, as you’ll see, the line is pretty clear as to who “gets” it and who doesn’t. Schonfeld and Wolff were on their own it seemed simply because of the way they approached the discussion where as the other panelists spent half their time defending old media and the other half of the time blaming new media and news aggregators for “stealing” their content. More on that to come… My favorite part of the discussion was the last question of the night: “What are you all doing to secure your future in this industry?” Not one of them was able to provide a viable response although clearly Scholfeld and Wolff have a head start on the others.

At least I thought Wolff had a head start until I saw this news about the AP looking to shut out news aggregators (like newser.com) from publishing its content (and that of its affiliated newspapers). We’ll see how far that one goes, especially considering the New York Times Company is guilty of doing the same thing (see the lawsuit here brought by Gatehouse Media), although the lawsuit against their Boston.com subsidiary was settled out of court. Seriously, now the AP is resorting to suing instead of embracing to stop this change? For one, it explains why The New York Times Company settled out of court…

But the real kick in the teeth on this one is the following quote from the AP’s William Dean Singleton, “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.” I know Dean Singelton. I met him during my childhood right before he bought my father’s paper, fired and then re-hired the entire news staff so as to do away with seniority and by doing so drove away the best talent that paper had known. To say the least, I’ve never been a fan of his…

The Associated Press’ Linda A. Johnson is a business reporter who predominately covers the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Here is a segment of a great piece she wrote last fall on the influence pharmaceutical companies try to exert over the medical and academic communities by giving them gadgets, lunches, trips, paid research posts, etc. We first wrote about this problem last May when NPR failed to report the ties their guests had to the pharmaceutical industry and again in June of 2008 referencing the Harvard Medical School staff failing to declare kickbacks.

“Recent articles and editorials in major medical journals blast the industry. Medical schools, teaching hospitals and physician groups are changing rules to limit the influence of pharmaceutical sales reps. And three top editors of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine last month publicly sided against the drug industry in a U.S. Supreme Court case over whether patients harmed by government-approved medicines may still sue in state courts.

As more voices have called for change, new guidelines for how drugmakers and doctors should interact are coming from both industries, and doctors say some abuses of the past have ended. But the industries’ dealings remain fraught with potential conflict because the sectors depend on each other so much — medicine on drugmakers’ research dollars and drugmakers on the credibility researchers give them.”

There is no doubt in my mind that this piece of reporting covers the delicacies of this issue in a well-written, fairly comprehensive manner. The medical, academic and pharmaceutical industries are forever linked and important to each other, but there exists a line where support becomes inappropriate influence. The pharmaceutical companies will do anything they can in order to spin, peddle and influence those around them. This includes journalists.

As you will see in the video below, apparently Linda A. Johnson, the reporter who writes almost exclusively about the pharmaceutical industry, enjoys her own set of perks provided by Pfizer, and I’m sure other companies’ communications departments as well.

Here is a list of stories, published in leading newspapers around the world, where Johnson writes about Pfizer and their business practices. I guess she has a front row seat, huh?

Pfizer to disclose payments to doctors next year

Pfizer CEO: Wyeth merger will bring what’s needed

Pfizer deal gives Wyeth say on board, breakup fee

Pfizer launches new website on medication safety

NewsVines list of articles, written by Linda A. Johnson

Glenn Greenwald, of Salon.com, has for a long time been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration for all the right reasons (or should I say correct reasons, as he can be just as judgemental of Democratic decisions or inaction). In his latest piece written yesterday, Greenwald rightfully chastises the New York Times, Washington Post and AP for their inability to separate fact from fiction.

His discussion, which goes on in great detail describing why terms like ‘policy disputes’ must not be used in place of the actual description (‘war crimes’), is very, very valid and should not be discounted in its importance. As we all know, words are powerful things and nothing is more important to a journalist than the words he or she chooses to use in reporting on a story. So, Greenwald has a point when criticizing Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times when he wrote yesterday,

“The opposition to Mr. Brennan had been largely confined to liberal blogs, and there was not an expectation he would face a particularly difficult confirmation process. Still, the episode shows that the C.I.A.’s secret detention program remains a particularly incendiary issue for the Democratic base, making it difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone for a top intelligence post who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since the Sept. 11 attacks.” (Emphasis courtesy of Salon.com)

Mazzetti’s inability to report the facts is not only a failure to do his job correctly, but an insult to those of us who read that and automatically think, WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!?

Greenwald makes a very valid point in summing up this portion of his piece… The rest of it is well worth the read here.

“Hence:  ”war crimes” were transformed into “policy disputes” between hawkish defenders of the country and shrill, soft-on-terror liberals.  “Torture” became “enhanced interrogation techniques which critics call torture.”  And, most of all, flagrant lawbreaking — doing X when the law says:  ”X is a felony” — became acting “pursuant to robust theories of executive power” or “expansive interpretations of statutes and treaties” or, at worst, ”in circumvention of legal frameworks.”"

The next possible Idiot-in-Chief, Sarah Palin, has apparently been using her Yahoo! email account for official Alaska business. This was first revealed months ago, but only just resurfaced because she got caught! Hackers have infiltrated the account (big surprise), revealed some of its contents and now the Secret Service is asking the Associated Press for copies of the records (too convoluted to explain, just go here if you care that much).

Of course this explains how she became the Republican Vice Presidential Nominee! Everyone knows how much spam Yahoo’s filters don’t catch, well apparently Palin clicked on the email entitled, “Be McCain’s VP for a day” hoping it would give her a boost of sexual prowess. Palin was just looking for a hunting partner, but didn’t even blink when McCain asked her to be his soul-mate instead. This now makes sense why everyone was surprised when Palin was picked as McCain’s running mate, but the folks over at Yahoo! were too busy saying no to the merger with Microsoft to bother saying no to this sacrilegious partnership. Well, chalk up another win for Google: On the recommendation of Karl Rove, infamous for using unofficial email accounts for official business, Palin is now using Palinisafox@GMail.com.

Oh, by the way, here are a couple of screen shots of Palin’s actual Yahoo! email account thanks to Duncun.

UPDATE – Sunday evening – Apparently, because the 20-year old college student knew enough to be dangerous, but not enough not to get caught, his identity has been revealed and he has been arrested. You can read more on the technical details of this case here.

While the AP remains the default source of national and international news stories and photographs for daily newspapers, the organizations remains (like it’s clients), a bit behind the times when it comes to competing with new media. Although it has recently announced an iPhone app to get news on the go (see more here), they still depend on news being filtered, checked and then processed before “publishing it.” I am doubtful that this is what is needed in this world and certainly trends show us otherwise.

GigaOM (started by Om Malik), announced over the weekend a new service called GigaOM daily. The model has been, I think intentionally, left ambiguous to see how it pans out and molds itself over the coming weeks and months, but for those who are truly addicted to news ‘as it happens’ this could be your pipe… Of course if you’re looking for the finest these services have to offer in grammatical correctness (so to speak), then stick with the AP and its reputation is at least halfway decent. But if you don’t mind some misspelled words (or sometimes even missing words) in sentences (see this post which was linked through GigaOM daily yesterday), then GigaOM daily might work. Either way, it should be interesting to see if people can keep up with most of the “news” or whether they want to. We will reach a saturation point at some point with RSS feeds, Twitters, etc., but for right now lets just keep piling them on and see how relevant the Associated Press remains.