The Washington Post is running an article this weekend about Barack Obama's favorite locution "Let me be clear." If this story seems somehow how familiar to you, its because you might recall reading a very same story, as told by the Associated Press in October. Or, maybe it was the the Politico version that ran in August. Turns out that the only concept more hackneyed than Obama's use of "let me be clear" are news reports about Obama's use of "let me be clear." (more...)

Attention readers of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune or any of the Tribune Co.’s dozen other publications: something is missing from your paper this week. The Tribune Co. is struggling. Struggling to keep readership up, costs down, and its news empire afloat. So this week, as an experiment, they taking a week-long break from the Associated Press. (To understand the complexity of this decision, let me point out that I read about this on the Chicago Tribune website - in an AP story.) Content from Reuters, Bloomberg and CNN will fill the spaces normally occupied by the Associated Press. And, if editors are creative, readers won’t have a clue that anything has changed. But the simple test of “can we get by?” overlooks the broader role of the AP because much of what the AP provides is unseen by readers, listeners and viewers. The organization keeps event calendars, staffs bureaus in state capitals, distributes pool reports and acts as a non-partisan clearing house. In short, the AP is the 24-hour foundation for almost every newsroom in the country. (more...)

Two weeks after its creation, @FakeAPStylebook has netted more than 40,000 Twitter followers, 2,500 list mentions, and may soon have a book deal. What does it take for a Twitter account to blow up like that? Tweeting a lot helps. Oh, so does being funny, particularly to AP-embittered journalists. For instance: "All mentions of the band Dokken should be followed by the parenthetical aside '(rhymes with ROCKIN').'" (more...)

disturbing trends For the last three weeks or so pretty much the only topic of conversation in media circles has been the White House's 'war' on Fox News. If indeed the goal of the White House was to distract both Fox News, and the media in general, from relentlessly attacking the Health Care Bill than, voila, mission accomplished! We have a health care bill. There has been nary a tea partier, or death paneler on Fox in the interim. Enter, the White House truce with Fox. Maybe. But also enter a much larger problem. (more...)

This morning the Associated Press joined Talking Points Memo and Gawker as practitioners of the 'open notebook' method of reporting — well, inadvertently. (more...)

The sky is falling! Oprah's ratings are down 7% last season, and as is the case with all things, this must have something to do with Barack Obama, somehow. In an article about the ratings decline, the AP quotes an author who says that Oprah's endorsement of Obama has hurt her in the heartland. David Carr follows suit on Media Decoder: he says that Oprah's decline is "understandable against a backdrop of atomizing audiences," but could be because she alienated part of her base by going political. It's a theory, but does it pass the sniff test? (more...)

Last week, the Associated Press's decision to run a photograph of mortally wounded Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard moments before his death in Afghanistan gave rise to enormous controversy. It was condemned by Robert Gates, who called the decision to run the photo "appalling;" "The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right – but judgment and common decency," wrote Gates. Bernard's family was strongly against the photo's publication, but the AP ran it anyway, saying that "the photo itself is a part of the war we needed to cover and convey." (more...)

Brilliant idea from Business Insider: Embeddable posts. Henry Blodget posted Thursday about the new feature, which permits bloggers to embed entire posts on their sites, rather than ye olde copy-and-paste. It's a genius idea, since it incorporates Business Insider branding and makes it easier to include the whole thing than just paste in an excerpt, where attribution may be less apparent. (It's also an eye-friendly layout; it's text-only so no photos, and comes in two sizing options.) It's a smart move and I wonder if it wasn't inspired in part by Tumblr, which has a handy "reblog" button that makes it ridiculously easy to copy someone's post, links and attribution in place, and join that conversation. I have no doubt that far less "reblogs" would take place on that platform were users required to copy and paste in the post (and those pesky links). (more...)

A couple of weeks ago the AP made waves when it announced that, having had it up to here(!) with people using their content for free, it was going to begin tracking its content on the Web to “to assure compliance with terms of use.” After which they spent some time trying to clear up the misconception that they'd gone a little batty. (more...)

Out with the old, in the with the new, the amateur and anybody who can get a following on Facebook. This week Politico filed two stories about photojournalists in the nation's capital that provided (yet another) moment to see how photojournalism has evolved over the last two decades: the retirement of Pulitzer-winning AP veteran Ron Edmonds; and the rising stock of a Hill press assistant-turned-photojournalista Charlotte Sellmyer. (more...)

The AP, which lost a number of members last year and has been threatening for some time to take a variety of actions to protect its content, appears to have settled on one: They are going to track their content around the Web to "to assure compliance with terms of use." Sort of the media version of "get off my lawn!" (more...)

News reporters like to catch readers’ attention with a few zingy lines at the start of an article. Sometimes, these so-called “ledes” go horribly wrong. In Today’s Worst News Ledes, we highlight some of the biggest offenders:

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