According to the data, MSNBC devoted ten percent of its airtime last week to President Obama, and fully 92 percent of that was “airtime coded ‘citizenship and religion rumors’ and ‘birther’ coverage.” By comparison, CNN and Fox devoted just five percent of their airtime to the president. Of that, PEJ says CNN’s coverage of the president was 100 percent devoted to “citizenship and religion rumors,” while Fox’s coverage was only eight percent.

Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of PEJ says MSNBC consistently devotes more of its airtime to politics, based on PEJ’s research, while CNN generally spends the least amount of time on politics of the three cable networks.

Moos’ reporting also found the President was way off when he said today that “the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate.” According to the PEJ figures, only four percent of coverage overall involved the birther question. The biggest story of the period surveyed was the economy, at 39 percent.

The full report can be found here.

Everything about the article, written by Nick Summers, is encapsulated in its unwieldy headline: Blank Slate: Jacob Weisberg Was a Web Pioneer. But He Doesn’t Much Care for What Works on the Web Now. Can Slate Recover?

Summers’s report isn’t a hit piece—he makes sure to praise Slate’s “consistently smart” content, which includes “unhysterical political analysis, Farhad Manjoo on iPhone stuff, the impish Explainer column, Doonesbury, TV dissections, [and] Jack Shafer‘s bile.” Even so, it’s pretty harsh on Slate’s supposed lack of web-savvy:

Slate’s founding date is also its biggest liability. If Slate invented blogging, it definitely didn’t invent social media, distribution deals, verticals, the slide show, search-engine optimization or other technologies essential to succeeding as a Web publication today‹and can even be said to do most of those things poorly. On Twitter, @slate has 96,832 followers, fewer even than the musty New York Review of Books.

“Technologically, we’ve had a hard, hard decade,” said David Plotz, Mr. Weisberg’s protégé and the current editor of Slate. “Compared to our competitors, we’re behind, not agile. We’re used to a Web that’s a little bit slower, a Web where there weren’t so many great competitors as there are now.”

Summers also slams Slate’s unprofitable nature and its relative lack of growth. “The site’s internal numbers show that page views for October were up just 6 percent, to 83.6 million, and unique visitors were down 21 percent — growing pains as the site weans itself from longtime traffic teat MSN.com and develops its own, more clicky readers,” he writes. “Over the same time period, Gawker has more than doubled its audience, and the Huffington Post has a global readership roughly three times as large.”

Weisberg himself struck back at Summers today when he sent his staff a memo about the article. Jim Romensko at Poynter Online got a hold of the email, which is just as harsh on Summers as Summers was on Weisberg:

You may have seen the story about Slate that’s up on the New York Observer website today. I wanted to take a minute to respond, because while the facts in the article are mostly accurate, the thesis — that Slate’s doing badly and that the Internet is passing us by — couldn’t be farther off the mark. It is true, of course, that I’m gayer than Andrew Sullivan.

First, on the business side, we are going gangbusters. September was record revenue month for us. October looks to have been another. Slate is up 25% so far versus last year. With results like that, the Observer might have been able to keep Simon Doonan.

… What was most wrong with the piece was the notion that we’re not focused on what works on the Internet in the way our younger competitors are. I talked to the author extensively about our new tech team, Slate Labs, our breakthroughs with long-form journalism on the web, the Frescas, the Hives, predictive polling, the excellence of our Twitter feed, and how we finally cracked the case on commenting. I’m afraid the nice young man had no idea what I was talking about. I told him that new competition is pushing us to innovate more quickly than we did in the years when we had a category largely to ourselves. He ignored all that, using our candor about past weaknesses against us and portraying us as not caring about SEO, aggregation, etc.

The piece is a good example of a kind of bad journalism we thankfully seldom see at Slate, which starts with a premise and ignores any evidence that doesn’t support it. Please continue to prove it wrong.

The feud gets even thornier when Summers’s history is taken into consideration. Before joining the staff of the Observer in October, Summers worked for Newsweek—which, until recently, was owned by The Washington Post Company, which also owns Slate. That means for years, Summers worked one floor away from Slate’s staffers, and is likely friendly with some of them. (In fact, Summers and Slate reporter Christopher Beam, both alumni of Columbia University, started a blog called IvyGate together in 2006. Beam, however, is based in Washington D.C., not New York.) His negative article, then, must have seemed especially rough to his former colleagues.

Summers doesn’t seem to have responded to Weisberg’s takedown yet, though he did retweet Romenesko’s tweet about his Poynter post. Feel lost in a hall of mirrors yet?

Update: Summers has written a response, in which he says again that Slate’s “traffic momentum” isn’t very impressive and directly contradicts points Weisberg made:

Here is that quote again, but with my recollection noted in brackets on each point. “I talked to the author extensively about our new tech team [I mentioned it in the piece], Slate Labs [I didn't write about this—and should have], our breakthroughs with long-form journalism on the web, the Frescas [I called these efforts a "runaway success"], the Hives [we did not discuss this], predictive polling [we did not discuss this], the excellence of our Twitter feed [we did not discuss this], and how we finally cracked the case on commenting [we did not discuss this].” If Mr. Weisberg did mention those latter topics, it was so briefly that I did not record it in my notes.

Mr. Weisberg views my thesis as “that Slate’s doing badly and that the Internet is passing us by.” I disagree somewhat. I wrote that Slate produces fantastic editorial content, and that there is concern among staffers, amply documented, that Slate is falling behind.

(Disclosure: I was an intern at Slate from January to May of this year.)

Newsweek

In the Poynter Institute’s The Biz Blog, Rick Edmonds toys with this idea:

Before anyone else asked the rude question, the vigorous 91-year-old Harman told Newsweek’s staff at a meeting Monday that creating a succession plan will be high on his list of priorities. By [Harman's] and [Washington Post CEO Don] Graham’s estimates, the magazine is years away, at best, from breaking even.

So if making a profit is not really the point, why not set up a nonprofit structure to operate the magazine — as, for instance, Rick MacArthur has done at Harper’s for 27 years?

Edmonds evaluates the benefits as well as the risks — and cites an interview he conducted with James Hamilton, “a Duke University expert on media economics.” He begins by explaining how it is a legally plausible scenario, but would call for decided changes to the publication:

…in order for the Internal Revenue Service to grant Newsweek nonprofit status, the magazine would have to establish that it is being operated for an educational purpose. That would presumably be defined as a mission to provide information and foster dialogue on national and international affairs.

…But in practice, Newsweek would need to ditch or drastically dial down its coverage of topics like Lady Gaga and how to get your kid into a good college. Entertaining people and helping them be better consumers are part of the contemporary media mix, Hamilton has argued, but neither would fly with the IRS as legitimate nonprofit activity.

Essentially, Newsweek could justify nonprofit status if it cut back on entertainment and ramped up efforts to be more informative and analytical.

But there are serious risks involved. The magazine “competes directly for advertising with Time and other newsweeklies, as well as with the three national newspapers. They might file objections with the IRS.” Oh, and then there’s always this possibility:

And, of course, Newsweek may fail despite Harman’s best efforts.

Edmonds explicitly admits that he is just speculating and offering “food for thought” rather than a “firm prediction.” In doing so, he presents an interesting fate for the newsweekly that is struggling to keep from sinking. It is clear that Newsweek needs to find a functioning business model sooner than later. The numbers aren’t pretty:

The total debt is over $70 million.

Last year, the publication lost $28 million. And spent $222 million.

The magazine pays an “outlandish” $13 million a year in rent. That comes to “$158 per square foot,” which is “nearly four times the going rate for Manhattan office space of about $42 a foot.”

Harman has a tough job ahead, to say the very least.

Are you sitting down? Some people really trust Fox News. Other people, they don’t trust Fox News at all.

Out of all the questions (about new media, the Fairness Doctrine and more), the one that seems to be getting the most attention is the “trust” question. Fox News can steal CNN’s slogan as “the most trusted name in news,” since they were the clear favorite in the SHU survey. Actually, there’s probably some study somewhere that puts CNN at the top of the list. FNC came in with 30% of the vote, followed by CNN at 19.5%, NBC (7.5%) and ABC (7.5%).

And now for the organization people trusted least – another Fox News win. FNC had 26.2%, followed by NBC (9.9%), MSNBC (9.4%) and CNN (8.5%).

So what does this mean? Well first of all, more people picked FNC and CNN as most trustworthy than least trustworthy, which contrasts the response for NBC and MSNBC. But really, no one should be surprised by this. Fox News has their fans – a huge, ardent base – and they have their detractors – a smaller, but also ardent group. This is reflected very clearly in the results.

Another interesting stat comes when looking at most trusted anchor. Proving the continued power of evening newscasts, the top three were the anchors of each network’s broadcast. The retiring Charlie Gibson finished 1st (19.8%), Brian Williams was 2nd (17.3%) and Katie Couric a distant 3rd (9.9%). Right behind Couric was the cable news entry in the top six – Bill O’Reilly of Fox News (no surprise here either).

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