WaPo editorial ridden with mistakes

I have a lot of respect for the Washington Post and the work it produces. But this editorial published yesterday sounds like it was written by a freshman journalism student at Georgetown.

The editorial board makes no effort to explain the issue - a rather controversial one - from either side. The entire argument seems to be something like this: "Georgetown is awesome! Our neighbors are ungrateful for our presence!"

Meanwhile, the valid arguments against Georgetown expansion from city officials and neighbors are completely absent from the editorial. Combine the one-sidedness of the editorial with mistakes of accuracy (Foxhollow is not a neighborhood; it's called Foxhall) and omission of words ("It will up to the zoning commission) and this article qualifies as poor journalism.

Ridiculous looking graphic in the Post

When you know a little something about newspaper page layout, you notice things like this and snicker. The Washington Post published a photograph of a Facebook page and centered it quite obnoxiously in the text. Frankly, the white space and lack of color looks horrible. If I wanted to look at a website, I'd be on WashingtonPost.com anyway. The page came out this way because the page editor demanded a graphic for the story to take up space and so that the page wouldn't look boring. I'd argue that the photo makes the page even more boring.

Although I have to admit that I do love what screenshots reveal about people (or media organizations). For instance, the Post still uses IE as its browser. (A little behind the times?) Even more revealing, the "photographer" of this lovely piece of art seemed to have come across the page through a google search. Again, what is this photograph telling us that we readers couldn't just google ourselves?

Unnecessary use of social media: Occupy Wall Street = Good, "Likes" on a Post = Bad.

Do you like Facebook? Who doesn't?! But as much as news organizations are trying to incorporate social media into their practices to keep up with their readers and viewers, sometimes it can get obnoxious and unnecessary.

Let's take a look at the proper uses of social media in newspapers:

The Washington Post today offered an article about the local version of the Occupy Wall Street protests, called Stop The Machine. Like other recent articles about the movement, Facebook is mentioned as a tool for protestors used to organize the movement and rally support. Printing about Facebook is completely relevant and understandable in this context.

In example number two, however, it is not. Take a look:

The picture, found on Failbook.com offers a clear example on when NOT to include Facebook in an article.

How is the number of "likes" on a Facebook post AT ALL informative, relevant, and worthy of precious and expensive ink?! I'm guessing the paper recently forced its senior reporters to sit through a "social media training class" and this is what came out of it.

Newsweek's "He said, She Said"

The buzz this week in the media was Newsweek's big misstep in attributing a quote criticizing Obama to Nancy Pelosi. It turned out, she never said the quote - she wasn't even interviewed for the article! Fortunately enough, that didn't matter for Newsweek, who wrote most of a front-cover article about content surrounding the quote.

The quote was as follows (and has since been corrected online):

“I think you need to talk about how poorly they [the White House] do on message,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tells Newsweek’s Howard Kurtz. “They can’t see around corners; they anticipate nothing.”

It was perfect enough for Republican bloggers to jump on, laughing that even Obama's biggest supporters are now critical of his strategy. Of course, none of this was true at all.

This is another example of one of the most annoying characteristics of "reporting" today: basing an entire story off of a single non-meaningful or irrelevant (and in this case, false!) quote or fact. One single piece of news does not good journalism make. Real journalism should be about more than just filler or horse-race content, and should involve research and, it goes without saying, accurate quotes. This sort of "content" - and I use the term loosely - is mostly useless.