Media Quotes of the Week: Police protect pig's privacy to is it time to end post-match interviews?

PA reporter Catherine Wylie‏@wyliecatherine on Twitter: "@WestYorksPolice said they couldn't give out further info about an incident involving an escaped pig on the M62 citing 'data protection'."

Nick Cohen in City University's XCity magazine: "There is massive over supply. There are 74 schools offering graduate journalism degrees in the UK. They're taking the money of thousands of students each year when there aren't the jobs to go to.If bankers were doing the same thing they'd be arrested for mis-selling."

News Corp ceo Robert Thomson in The Times [£]: "Google’s commodification of content knowingly, wilfully undermined provenance for profit. That was followed by the Facebook stream, with its journalistic jetsam and fake flotsam. Together, the two most powerful news publishers in human history have created an ecosystem that is dysfunctional and socially destructive. Both companies could have done far more to highlight that there is a hierarchy of content, but instead they have prospered mightily by peddling a flat-earth philosophy that doesn’t distinguish between the fake and the real because they make copious amounts of money from both."

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Tal Smoller: "Worries about the spread of fake news on Facebook, and the backlash against YouTube's inappropriate advertising placements, may inadvertently boost publishers' near-term monetization of online content. The proliferation of news from unverified publishers could spur readers to subscribe to publishers' established paid-for publications. Moreover, the arguably more controlled, predictable content on publishers websites and apps may prove a safe haven for brands reevaluating their digital ad spending on social media."

(((Dan Hodges)))@DPJHodges on Twitter: "Trump's spokesman said Hitler never used chemical weapons. And they accuse us of peddling fake news."

Those were the days: New York Times newsroom 1942 [Wikipedia]

From Yahoo Tech: "More than half of the jobs at US newspapers have disappeared since 2001, with a large portion of the losses offset by employment gains at internet firms, government figures showed Monday. The data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed US newspaper employment fell from 412,000 in January 2001 to 174,000 in September 2016. In the internet publishing and portal segment the number of jobs grew from 67,000 in 2007 -- the earliest for which data was available -- to 206,000 last year."

Peter Wilby in the New Statesman on the Mail's Legs-it front page: "You can call all this shameful, demeaning and sexist, and you would be right. But it is also brilliant: an example of political comment (or propaganda, if you prefer) wrapped in a package that many people will enjoy, laugh at and talk about. It is what tabloid newspapers do. They humanise news that most people might otherwise find dull and abstract. If you don’t like it, don’t read them."

Tom Utley in the Daily Mail on the possible return to Manchester by the Guardian: "Chins up, Polly, Zoe & Co. If you are sent back to Manchester, it’s too much to hope your paper will re-connect with reality. But at least you’ll be reunited with your old friends at the BBC, the prodigals exiled to Salford before you. As the great echo chamber of the subsidised Left moves north, you can be sure that they, at least, will welcome you with that proverbial fatted calf."

Steve Busfield on the International Business Times calls for the end of the post-match interview: "Back in the dark ages the only football manager you would regularly hear of having spoken to the media was Brian Clough – and that was because he was tremendously entertaining. Of course there was also an awful lot less football on television back then. Nowadays the pre and post-match interview is a staple of sport on the box, a function of the need to fill endless hours around every game...Fans watch football for the sport not for the eloquence of the players and managers. Sportsmen and women are admired for their physical skills rather than their loquaciousness. Let's end the inanity of the post-game interview and accept that the reason Clough was so famous was because he was the exception and not the rule."

[£]=paywall

US press has turned into 'prim schoolmarms'

Andrew Sullivan gives the mainstream US press a hammering in the Sunday Times today questioning why major stories are being broken by the National Enquirer and Rolling Stone.
Sullivan writes: "There are many reasons for the sharp and seemingly unstoppable collapse of much of the mainstream media in America, but one seems to me to have been overlooked. Many US newspapers have simply become pale, quivering shadows of what they once were.
"Once, they aggressively scrutinised the powerful and exposed secrets, but they have — with some exceptions — become mouthpieces for the powerful, enablers of propaganda and prim schoolmarms when it comes to telling people what they want to know.
"Why, for example, did we have to find out from the National Enquirer the entire truth about the character of John Edwards, the former presidential candidate, when he was exposed as having an affair? Why did we have to rely on blogs to ask the question that every Google search revealed was the most common with respect to Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court nominee: is she a lesbian? Why did Al Gore’s encounter with a masseuse, which cannot have been irrelevant to the former vice-president’s surprising divorce, appear first in a tabloid?
"Why did it take a freelance reporter from Rolling Stone to expose the rifts and tensions among President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan team? Every leading newspaper has a Pentagon correspondent; this was a story that changed history; the reporting skills it required are not spectacular. Michael Hastings, a freelance, simply took advantage of a stop-over in Paris, close access and, yes, a notebook ... and wrote it up. Where was the rest of the press?"

• The Sunday Times is now behind a paywall so no link.
  

The dilemma of state help for press: 'Will watchdog ever bite the hand that feeds it?'

Interesting Reuters piece here that was picked up by journalism.co.uk showing how a request for state aid to bailout failing newspapers in the US has provoked a debate about whether such help compromises the freedom of the press.
It follows a request by legislators in Connecticut petitioning the state government to step in and save two local papers from closure. But Paul Janensch, a journalism professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, and a former reporter and editor sums up the dilemma of accepting state aid as:"You can't expect a watchdog to bite the hand that feeds it."
Reuters reports that in Connecticut the state's Department of Economic and Community Development is offering tax breaks, training funds, financing opportunities and other incentives for publishers, but not cash.
The US debate echoes a similar one in the UK when the editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger suggested state aid might be needed to save regional newspapers from folding. It provoked this response from Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors:"No, No, No! the last thing any newspaper should do is accept subsidy from the state. The particular strength of the UK newspaper industry is its independence."