Sign Me Up, New York Times. I'll Pay.

Next year, the New York Times will begin charging frequent users of its website. A certain number of stories every month will be free. After that, there will be a charge.

I don't want to pay for something I'm used to getting for free. But the alternative is even less appealing: further erosion of the quality of news-gathering.

Some years ago, when we first started to see warning signs for the newspaper industry, I wasn't too worried. People will always need information gatherers, so the market will always support information gatherers. But I wasn't thinking about the quality question.

There's big money out there for bloggers and pundits who riff off news stories gathered by AP and major newspapers. Because it's more cost effective to talk about the news without gathering it, the pool of news gatherers could shrink even further -- so far that quality and reliability could fall to unacceptable levels.

So sign me up, New York Times. I'm ready to pay.

Oh, for the love of Pete ...

Two weeks ago the SF Chronicle ran an article telling us how to pronounce 2010, according to a certain association. That any association is issuing such dictates is bad enough. That they put it in a press release is worse. That the SF Chronicle actually ran with the story is worse yet.

But, worst of all: The "certain association" is basically one guy with some oversized cojones. (He calls himself and his chums the National Association of Good Grammar, or NAGG.)

Here's the article.

Here's LanguageLog's response.

I'm offended not just as a language lover but as a journalist.

Oy.

Yikes

From the main page at latimes.com today. Their layoffs are showing.

Okay .... NOW I'm going dark.

Weasel Words

There are a few words that are indispensible to the media and others because they allow them to imply things that they cannot ethically say. King of them all is "amid."

Suspect a correlation between the Afghan war debate and a sudden increase in the president's approval ratings? Just say, as Yahoo! News did in introducing an AP story yesterday: "Obama's job approval rises amid concerns."

Financial news sites would lost without the word "amid." Like "Stocks plummet amid interest rate fears."

Are interest rate fears causing the stocks to plummet? Are war concerns directly causing the spike in the president's approval rating? The news agencies don't know. They didn't research cause and effect. They only know there's a correlation.

But they suspect cause and effect. All they have to do is say one occurrence took place "amid" another.

I'm not saying this is bad, by the way. It's probably more often good than bad. The news agencies want to show that there probably is a cause-and-effect relationship at work. Just they didn't have the time or resources to prove it.

Still, even if they're using it honorably, "amid" still ranks as the ultimate weasel word.

From the front page of Los Angeles Times' Business section today

Oops.

Most Underrated Outrage of the Last Eight Years

I can never stop being a waitress. I did the job off and on for perhaps ten years. But at one point it seeped into my skin and became part of who I am. So I'm forever condemned to having to fight the urge to bus unbussed tables in restaurants, to run over to the soda fountain to refill my own glass, and to call strangers "hon." (Okay, maybe not that last one.)

Similarly, I can never stop being a journalist. Though my reporter gigs were in the bottom rungs of the business — community news — the ethos of that job seeped in. So I'm forever condemned to countering almost any bit of information I hear with, "Says who?" (a habit that will forever keep me off the guest lists of Trivial Pursuit parties) and mentally sifting through spin and fluff to find the "nut" — the main kernel of information in any report. (What do you mean by "You look good in those pants"? Are you implying something about how I look in other pants?)

Anyway, on this, the first day of a new administration, it's my inner-journalist who has something to say about the last eight years. The last administration gave us — all of us — many reasons to be outraged. But there's one I'll never forget.

On Jan. 9, 2005, it came to light that the Education Department had paid $240,000 to commentator Armstrong Williams to promote the "No Child Left Behind" program. The consequences of this action were mild compared to the deceptions of marketing the war in Iraq. But the process by which this deception was perpetrated was far more insidious.

When the vice president of the United States tells the people that Saddam Hussein has attempted to purchase nuclear materials, he is taking responsibility for the information. He's putting his byline on the report, so to speak.

But when a government contracts an independent commentator, it is purchasing the guise of independence. It is attempting to pull off a deceit that violates the public trust on a level that to-our-face lies do not. It's an attempt to supplant news with public relations. (Indeed, public relations firm Ketchum was involved in brokering the transaction.) And it's a violation whose lessons I hope we never forget — just as I will never forgot the time George H.W. Bush yakked at Japanese banquet (not because it was an outrage to my inner-journalist but because it was horrifying to my inner-waitress).