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Cell Phones and YouTube Usher in a New Era of Accountability

Through the eye of a cell phone camera, an outraged and shocked public witnessed the shooting death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant at a BART station in Oakland in the early morning hours of the first day of 2009. And now, as a result, a tragically common American story—young black male killed by a police officer—may be headed toward an uncommon ending: justice being served.

Former San Jose State University literature professor Shelby Steele, now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is in the news today for taking issue with the GOP’s distribution of a racially inappropriate video, Barack, the Magic Negro.

The idea sounded so weird, it was as if someone had snuck a clip from The Onion into Fly’s Sunday New York Times. But there it was: NYT columnist Maureen Dowd, writing about the work of local newspaper reporters being outsourced to India. It seems that a Southern California publisher by the name of James Macpherson has hired reporters in Bangalore to write about everything from the Pasadena Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony to city politics. The smalltime operator even has a name for this neat trick of buying with rupees and selling for dollars: He calls it “glocal” journalism.

It gets better (or worse): big-time newspaper publisher Dean Singleton, owner of our very own San Jose Mercury News (and every other Bay Area newspaper but the Chron) has endorsed the idea.

Rumors have swirled that San Jose Magazine was about to bite the dust, and confirmation came this evening with an item by the Mercury News’ Sal Pizarro. The columnist reports that the December issue will be San Jose Magazine’s last. Instead of plugging plastic surgeons and lawyers on glossy pages, the company will reinvent itself as a video production company, according to Publisher Gilbert Sangari.

Paper To Abandon San Jose?

The San Jose Mercury News recently reported that it’s considering pulling up stakes in San Jose.  On Oct. 18, the newspaper reported that it might move many of its offices to another location.  Publisher Mac Tully said, “We would be interested in staying in San Jose and we would keep all of our options open.”  How nice.

I seem to remember that when the Mercury News was purchased a few years back that the new owners assured that nothing much would change.  Here are a few “hits” (and misses) surrounding Dean Singleton, the architect of the Mercury News’ “makeover.” 

Last week, the San Jose City Council voted to demolish the old library building. Did you read about it in the paper? Neither did I. Where will the city move all of the city employees who work in the building? How much will it all cost? This is a story that should have received coverage.

The Mercury News is rapidly reaching a terminal stage and those of us who care about it are very worried. The announcement that the paper is cutting another 40 people from the editorial staff is only the latest development in the steady downward spiral the paper has been taking over the past year or so. The Mercury and MediaNews management officially blames the changes on the economics of running a newspaper—falling revenues from advertising—but it is non-local ownership that is at the root of the decline. The “new” MediaNews Mercury is even beginning to make the Chronicle (where they are also cutting staff) look good.

Has the Mercury News changed?

That was the September 8 headline on San Jose Inside. At last count, there were nearly 90 posts in answer to that question, though in truth about half of them seemed to be from two people arguing over who was more hateful and who was more racist.

I certainly have no intention of diving into that well. But I was struck by some of what I read about the paper, and, as the Mercury News’ executive editor, I’d like to address it. I appreciate the invitation from the editor of San Jose Inside to write a guest column to do so.

When you’ve worked at newspapers for 25-plus years, it’s probably unavoidable that you develop a thick skin about what people say about what you do. And at a large paper like ours—with more than 680,000 readers on weekdays, and some 740,000 on Sundays—you hear a lot, some of it positive but, given human nature, more of it not.