The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

1Sep/100

The Solomon Scandals’ bureaucratic setting—a few decades later

imageMuch of The Solomon Scan­dals is about con­flicts between friend­ship and duty. A rick­ety high-rise may tum­ble as a result, with hun­dreds of IRS and CIA work­ers inside. Wash­ing­ton has a cul­ture of traded favors, one rea­son why Con­gress and the Inte­rior Depart­ment unwit­tingly let the oil spill hap­pen in the Gulf.

imageAnd how about the Gen­eral Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion in the era my novel depicts? GSA was still recov­er­ing from the Nixo­ni­ans’ politi­ciza­tion of it. A $600,000 cafe­te­ria went AWOL at the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, for exam­ple, even though the lease required one. The land­lord had been a pal of Vice Pres­i­dent Spiro Agnew.

Portrait of Martha JohnsonUnder Barack Obama or for that mat­ter under Zeus or Jeho­vah, the GSA would still have its flaws. One tick­lish mis­sion is to pick the most deserv­ing recip­i­ents of gov­ern­ment con­tracts; so the cor­rup­tion poten­tial is high. But guess what? Among the 28 large agen­cies ranked by The Best Places to Work in the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment, GSA’s lead­er­ship recently came in fourth in the cat­e­gory of effec­tive­ness of lead­er­ship, includ­ing the integrity factor—a stark con­trast to the Bush years, when Admin­is­tra­tor Lurita Doan resigned amid accu­sa­tions of crony­ism. Over­all the “Best” this time was eight, and from afar, I sus­pect the rank will get bet­ter under Admin­is­tra­tor Martha N. John­son, who, fit­tingly, served as VP for orga­ni­za­tional cul­ture at Com­puter Sci­ence Cor­po­ra­tion.

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30Aug/100

A guide to the Solomon Scandals site

image What? A Web site about a novel—and yet here’s a series of arti­cles on hyper­local jour­nal­ism?

My expla­na­tion: The Solomon Scan­dals itself is a dark and highly fic­tion­al­ized look at the news­pa­per indus­try as it existed in the late 20th cen­tury after Water­gate. But the pesky issues per­sist in real life—for exam­ple: Just how trust­wor­thy are news­pa­pers? And how about the peren­ni­als such as the con­flict between friend­ship and duty, espe­cially in a place like D.C.?

Rather than just rant on and on about the obvi­ous, I thought it would be more con­struc­tive and inter­est­ing to come up with solu­tions, such as a rein­ven­tion of local cov­er­age. Hence the hyper­local series. At the same time, you’ll find basics about the novel—everything from an overview and char­ac­ter list to a Q & A with my pro­tag­o­nist and a con­tin­u­a­tion of it, a long Roth­man bio that along the way depicts the social milieu in which I’ve set Scan­dals. A shorter ver­sion of the bio is here. Scan­dals is on sale at Ama­zon and else­where and was required read­ing in a his­tory course recently at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity. (1969 photo taken by the late Jack Weir.)

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28Aug/100

Solomon Scandals hyperlocal series so far: A list for latecomers

Late to the hyper­local series in the Solomon Scan­dals blog? In reverse order, here’s a list of key parts.

imageHow hyper­local jour­nal­ism can help big media grow closer to local com­mu­ni­ties, just posted today.

TBD D.C.-area news site not a steady riser in early Alexa stats. But let’s wait for the full story.

Crisp, lively Web pages from promis­ing new TBD hyper­local site—but D.C.-oriented lead story is a BIG yawner here in Alexan­dria, VA.

TBD’s hyper­local judo is smart and eth­i­cal: How should rivals at the Wash­ing­ton Post and else­where respond to all the link­ing ahead?

imageRx for Patch’s hyper­local sites? Down­play McMaps and beef up some of the writing—and pho­tos and story placement.

Wash­ing­ton Post vs. Patch.com and Examiner.com

Smile! You’re on TBD TV—at least if you’re an affil­i­ated blog­ger with Skype and the news gods beckon

How Wash­ing­ton Post and New York Times could out­gun hyper­local sites like TBD and Baristanet.

George­town Dish joins TBD blog net­work: Deju vu angles—in Wash­ing­ton Post’s backyard.

How TBD could use hyper­local jour­nal­ism to kick the Wash­ing­ton Post’s butt.

TBD, meet NYC’s West­side Inde­pen­dent: Role model for SOME neigh­bor­hood blog affiliates?

imageWash­ing­ton Post vs. Allbritton’s TBD Web startup plans: BOTH sides could do better.

Hyper­local jour­nal­ism: George­town pub­lisher robbed—and eager to tell neigh­bors about it. Les­son for the Wash­ing­ton Post?

‘What Would Google Do’ with my old steel­town news­pa­per in Lorain, Ohio? Here’s what I’D do.

Please I’ve avoided a for­mal approach, so you won’t see “Part One” and so on.

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28Aug/102

How hyperlocal journalism can help big media grow closer to local communities

imageUpdate: Other hyperlocal-related posts here.

I killed my Wash­ing­ton Post sub­scrip­tion sev­eral years ago, one of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans to give up on printed news­pa­pers.

My Rea­son #1 was the trash fac­tor. But many read­ers have other, less friendly expla­na­tions. More than a few trust the press about as much as they do HMOs, banks and big busi­ness in gen­eral. For some, the local daily might as well be a giant paper Pinoc­chio. Just this week, a futur­ist was say­ing that news­pa­pers would be irrel­e­vant in 12 years, thanks to such prac­tices as Web-based crowd-sourcing. Wish ful­fill­ment for many readers?

Hyper­local jour­nal­ism, how­ever, could at least help the Wash­ing­ton Post and other estab­lished news orga­ni­za­tions regain trust by grow­ing closer to their com­mu­ni­ties with good, ver­i­fi­able con­tent and oppor­tu­ni­ties for read­ers to speak back. Ide­ally it could grow rev­enues, too. In the era of Google News and sto­ries from thou­sands of sources, all over the planet, why not focus on com­pelling local sto­ries? Why not encour­age neigh­bors to care about neigh­bors, not just about distant—in more than one sense of the word—politicians and movie stars? Already flag­ship news­pa­pers reel in a mere 56 per­cent of the read­er­ships of cer­tain major met­ro­pol­i­tan media com­pa­nies, per­haps partly reflect­ing hyperlocal’s grow­ing importance.

image But how to do hyper­local prop­erly and max­i­mize syn­er­gies between it and other activ­i­ties within a news­pa­per com­pany or broad­cast­ing one, while reduc­ing redun­dan­cies? Ahead I’ll share my spe­cific ideas with estab­lished news orga­ni­za­tions in mind, fol­low­ing up on ear­lier hyper­local sug­ges­tions for them. My biggest goal for this series is to lay out hyper­local strat­egy options for every­one, not favor the giants; and, in fact, The Solomon Scan­dals novel fea­tures a large, col­or­fully dys­func­tional news­pa­per. The big guys and media monop­o­lies in particular—even and espe­cially in small towns—have their sins, includ­ing a fix­a­tion in some cases on lucre at the expense of jour­nal­is­tic qual­ity. Gor­don Gekko would be proud.

Still, “big” has its glo­ries, too. Well-financed chain papers, for exam­ple, with the right peo­ple in charge, can bet­ter resist neigh­bor­hood car deal­ers enraged by local­ized sto­ries about safety recalls. That’s not all. Often—it’s hard to generalize—the very best hyper­local jour­nal­ism can’t hap­pen for long peri­ods of time on the cheap. And even the most gung-ho of the small-fry stand a good chance of burn­ing out eventually.

I recently sold a small e-book Web site, which, although focused on a topic-related com­mu­nity, not a geo-based one, beset me with many of the chal­lenges described here.

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21Aug/100

‘Journalism warning labels’: Helpful in Assange case?

Check ‘em out. Might this one apply to some com­men­ta­tors’ reac­tion to the false sex accu­sa­tions against Wik­iLeaker Julian Assange?

Journalist hiding their own opinions by using phrases like 'some people claim'.

Via Dan Bloom.

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