Just when you thought the Arizona Republic couldn't get any worser!
Today it publishes a feature—complete with massive photo—on the cover of its business section about …
… Starbucks using a new cup size.
A. New. Cup. Size.
That’s what warrants a cover feature at the Arizona Republic.
As usual, the story itself is correspondingly insipid. Here’s the lede:
Phoenix-area coffee junkies who have grown immune to Starbucks’ maximum 24-ounce jolt now can boost their caffeine intake by 30 percent without loading up on extra shots.
The Seattle-based coffeehouse chain is test-marketing a new 31-ounce cup for iced coffees and teas in Phoenix and Tampa to determine whether customers are ready to supersize their caffeine.
For what is essentially ad copy for a corporation, it’s mighty fine prose. A graf later, looking for a little color to brighten up the story, reporter Max Jarman intrepidly finds a customer drinking from one of the new cups.
Turns out he was drinking decaffeinated ice tea.
Jarman doesn’t say what the drinks will cost, nor does he mention the nutritional issues. Extrapolating from info on Starbucks’ own nutrition pages, you can see that a 31-ounce Frappuccino will contain about 600 calories, and more than 100 grams of carbs.
As for the illustration, it’s a big picture of a coffee cup with a big ol’ Starbucks logo on the side. Some drawings to the right of the photo are a great example of the expository journalism a newspaper can provide its audience with, given some planning and just a tiny bit of creativity.
I think anyone looking at the result will immediately apprehend that a 31-ounce cup is bigger than a 24-ounce cup.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday over in the Living section, the paper has continued its fascination with psychics.
The hedline of the story is this:
Psychics see their popularity rising
Medium’s popularity a sign of public’s growing fascination with the other side
I suppose its relevant to mention that the story is about no such thing. It quotes one alleged psychic saying she was busy, but she never says she has more business than normal, and no one else does, either. (Indeed, she’s the only purported psychic quoted.)
The story does more than you’d expect by quoting a psychic debunker, but then, in an almost parodic descent into a rabit hole of journalistic over-objectivity, finds someone to quarrel with the debunker!
But Richard Mann, a professor emeritus of psychology and religion at the University of Michigan, says people have always expressed a connection with the dead….
Worst of all, the story is a wire piece from Detroit. It’s just amazing to think that an editor at the paper decided that of all the wire stories available that day, the crappy one about the psychics was the one to run.
Previously in PHXated:
5:49 PM
Dan Gillmor and the "Mediactivization" of America
That’s Dan Gillmor’s goal in a new book, Mediactive. Gillmor, a professor at the Cronkite School, has posted the first chapter online.
It seems as if it will be a survey of the changes in media we’re seeing (most notably the implosion of print media’s business model) and his vision of how journalists—and, importantly, consumers of their work—might see their way through.
I get a sharp pain behind my eyes when I read a lot of the idealistic prescriptions for American journalism. There’s a lot of “coulds.” People could participate in journalism a lot more than they do.
But let’s face it, most won’t—because they don’t care, because they don’t have the skills, or, in most cases, simply because they have a life and have better things to do.
In that context, this graf is refreshing:
Don’t get the idea that this is some kind of stern lecture about how you must do this or that or else you’re a bad person. Nor is this an “eat your (insert vegetable you loathe) because it’s good for you” exercise. We’re talking about doing something that’s often fun, if you have the slightest curiosity about the world, and downright useful the rest of the time.
I’m interested in the whole book. As he posts chapters, if I have something to say I’ll discuss it here.
A few thoughts on the first part of the first chapter—not to criticize but rather, as he asks, to provide feedback for iterations of the book as it’s being written. Gillmor writes:
Yet to assure a continued supply of quality information, we have to address the other side of a classic economic and social equation: demand. And to put it mildly, our demand today isn’t so great. In fact, it’s downright crappy.
Unless we all demand something better than we’ve been getting, we will get more of the same sludge that now dominates the world of news. I have nothing against entertainment. But information that doesn’t help us make better decisions about our families and our communities leaves us short-changed.
Two comments. One, I’m not sure it’s productive, in this particular discussion, to apply value judgments like “crappy” to demand. Believe me, I find the taste of the average American consumer positively horrific. And it’s fun to ridicule it.
But the future of journalism demands a tough engagement with… well, reality. And reality is what is going to dictate the success of media in the future. So let’s remember that people never really bought news. (Gillmor makes this point, one of my pet contentions on the issue, early in the chapter.) A lot of them were buying advertising, and in the end, what people paid made up only a small fraction of the average newspaper’s budget.
So there’s never really been a mass demand for news where it counts, which is the pocketbook. My point is just that, in this context, demand isn’t crappy. It is what it is—and those who hope to create the news of the future need to figure out what people want.
That said, there’s a big upside to this: People actually didn’t want a lot of what they were getting, because it was being provided by monopolies that were mostly serving their (that is, the monopolies’) advertisers. That’s why, to note just one obvious example, papers still have travel sections. The advertising department demands it.
So the good news is that a lot of the resources newspapers did have were wasted, journalistically. Only a small part of the average newspaper’s editorial budget went to actual news. In this context, the upside is that the new creators of content are free from a lot of the crap—here the word is appropriate—newspapers used to foist on us.
I’m sure Gillmor will get to those points as he goes on. I’m enjoying it thus far.
7:00 AM
Do psychics have PR agents?
It sure seems like it. Hard to believe a big-city newspaper would be receptive to a pitch from the tarot-card industry to drum up some business—but it’s even harder to contemplate a paper coming up with this story on its own:
When the going gets tough, Valley residents apparently go in search of the metaphysical.
Local psychics and astrologers say that while they’re seeing some decline in business as longtime clients cut back on discretionary spending, the recession is bringing them many new customers.
I missed this gem in the paper; it was brought to my attention by the blog Mediactive, overseen by ASU j school prof Dan Gillmor. Says he:
No newspaper, as far as I know, gives its pages over to self-described psychics. Yet the Republic’s story quotes several, along with the astrologers, with a straight face.
It even provides a helpful sidebar explaining the difference between psychics, astrologers, fortune-tellers and mediums (in each case with the same level of “here’s what they say, never mind what science says” logic). For example, we learn that a psychic is “sensitive to non-physical or supernatural forces and influences, able to see into the future and into the events in a person’s life. Often uses tools such as tarot cards, crystals or tea leaves.” Gosh, thanks the the deeper insight.
12:00 AM