When it comes to whether a casino should be built in Columbus, it is pretty clear where the Dispatch stands: Against. But is this good journalism? More importantly, should newspapers take sides in a dispute?

It has always been a no-no for newspapers to step over the line and create news as well as cover it.  In the pre-Web era, it was much easier to say one thing and do another.  This is because readers had no way to check the facts. That, of course, has all changed with the evolution of digital media and search engines.  Readers can quickly check up on whether journalists are doing their job or if a particular publication has an axe to grind. This change has forced some journalists to cover their tracks, but old habits are hard to correct.  One newspaper that suffers from shortcomings is this department is the Columbus Dispatch and its patriarch John F. Wolfe.  John F., as he is known in Columbus, has long been known for meddling in local affairs and then assigning its reporters to cover it. The paper champions itself as being a beacon of truth and free from bias. But what has been going on lately is not anything Dispatch journalists should be proud of. The newspaper is using its influence to block a casino from being built in Columbus. Why? Owner John F. Wolfe is against the idea.

 This behavior isn’t something new for the Dispatch.  Although the newspaper Wolfe owns has moved more mainstream in the past decade, Wolfe has never been bashful about using the Dispatch Printing Co. to further his own business and political interests. Some might argue this is province of a newspaper publisher.  In fairness to John F.,  I am sure he believes he is only acting in the community’s best interests.  But this behavior poses a major conflict for the Dispatch. Let me explain. On one hand, Dispatch editors profess to be ethical and honest and present both sides of an issue. But how can the editors remain impartial if the publisher who owns the newspaper is a central figure in the dispute? The story that appears below is an excellent case study of how the Dispatch engages in questionable conduct by allowing its owner’s business interests influence the newspaper’s editorial content.  In the battle over construction of Columbus’ first casino, the Dispatch has purchased  land adjacent to the casino so it can object to its zoning with the hope of blocking construction.

Dispatch Editor Ben Marrison, no doubt, reluctantly published this story after it was going to become an embarrassment to the paper.  This editorial action was taken to defuse critics  who might claim the publisher wants the Dispatch’s involvement to be kept quite. Editors will now tell critics: We are covering that story. Of course, that argument totally ignores the issue of  having a newspaper’s owner wage a fight with another business and then using a newspaper (which is supposed to be impartial) to help wage that fight.  I am sure Penn National is not very happy with the way this issue is being handled or covered. Watch for Dispatch editors to rationalize this sort of conflict as being in the public interest in editorials and further news stories even if the slant of the coverage is more a personal selfish interest of John F. Wolfe’s than a public interest.- MT

A subsidiary of The Dispatch Printing Company is objecting to Penn National Gaming’s request that Franklin County issue a zoning certificate for the company’s casino site.

The county shouldn’t issue the zoning certificate because Penn National can’t show that it has sewer service for the casino, an attorney for the subsidiary wrote in objection. That’s a violation of the county’s health and plumbing codes, the objection says.

Just hours before the objection was filed yesterday, Penn National announced plans to break ground at the casino site at 11a.m. on Monday.

Capitol Square Ltd., the real-estate arm of the company that publishes The Dispatch, is now one of those neighbors because one of its subsidiaries purchased a vacant lot next to the casino site. That gives Capitol Square standing to object, Tigges said. The company bought the lot at 3839 Scales Dr. for $95,000 on March 28, county auditor records show.

Attorneys for Penn National said in their application for the zoning certificate that the Ohio Constitution says that zoning issues can’t be used to stop casinos. The constitutional amendment that allowed for four Ohio casinos does, however, allow communities to enforce health and building codes

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/04/22/casinos-sewer-zoning-disputed.html

THE TAKEOVER In Chicago on Dec. 20, 2007, Sam Zell discussed his purchase of the Tribune Company. David Hiller of The Los Angeles Times, left; Randy Michaels, a newly appointed corporate chief; and Scott Smith of The Chicago Tribune listened

David Carr’s devastating story about the Chicago Tribune offers interesting  insights into the troubles established media face as new ownership takes control. Often the new owners bought the property at fire-sale prices with tons of debt and the new owners have no idea what they are doing.  Making matters worse, the people running the place are barbarians as is the case here. – MT

NYT – In January 2008, soon after the venerable Tribune Company was sold for $8.2 billion, Randy Michaels, a new top executive, ran into several other senior colleagues at the InterContinental Hotel next to the Tribune Tower in Chicago.

Mr. Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey, had been handpicked by Sam Zell, a billionaire who was the new controlling shareholder, to run much of the media company’s vast collection of properties, including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, WGN America and The Chicago Cubs.

After Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, “watch this,” and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded.

“Here was this guy, who was responsible for all these people, getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew,” said one of the Tribune executives present, who declined to be identified because he had left the company and did not want to be quoted criticizing a former employer. “I have never seen anything like it.”

Mr. Michaels, who otherwise declined to be interviewed, said through a spokesman, “I never made the comment allegedly attributed to me in January 2008 to a waitress at the InterContinental Hotel, and anyone who said I did so is either lying or mistaken.”

It was a preview of what would become a rugged ride under the new ownership. Mr. Zell and Mr. Michaels, who was promoted to chief executive of the Tribune Company in December 2009, arrived with much fanfare, suggesting they were going to breathe innovation and reinvention into the conservative company.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/media/06tribune.html

The study compared major payments to consultants by orthopedic device companies with financial disclosures the consultants later made in medical journal articles, and found them lacking in public transparency.

“We found a massive, dramatic system failure,” said David J. Rothman, a professor and president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, who wrote the study with two other Columbia researchers, Susan Chimonas and Zachary Frosch.

The study, published on the Web site of The Archives of Internal Medicine, focused on 32 medical doctors and doctoral researchers who were each paid at least $1 million in 2007 and published one or more journal articles the next year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/business/14devices.html

WSJ – In this summer of moviegoer discontent—when 3-D and computer graphics seem to have trumped coherent storytelling, and when the megaplexes are filled with sequels, remakes and cheesy ’80s TV shows turned into thuggish action extravaganzas, where the ever-rising body count is what passes for character development—it seems like a reasonable question to ask: What happened to storytelling? What happened to Hollywood’s most enduring icon—the cowboy—the reluctant American hero who rides into town, cleans up the place, then rides out?

In Larry McMurtry’s wry and insightful “Hollywood: A Third Memoir,” the acclaimed novelist and Oscar-winning screenwriter hints at the answer, providing the kind of knowing, insider’s look at Hollywood movie-making that can only come from someone who’s been involved with such ground-breaking films as “Hud,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment” and “Brokeback Mountain.”

Like the best McMurtry fiction, “Hollywood” begins in Texas, in the early 1960s, where Mr. McMurtry was teaching world literature to “farm and oil patch kids” at Texas Christian University (where the grading for the more reluctant students involved their prowess at ping-pong). Then “a man in a pinstripe suit” comes to town, from Paramount Pictures. He’s there to scout locations for a film based on Mr. McMurtry’s “slight first novel,” “Horseman, Pass By.”

Mr. McMurtry expects the movie to change his life, and in no time at all he’s on the set of “Hud”—where he doesn’t meet Paul Newman, doesn’t meet Patricia Neal and doesn’t make a lot of money. But his cousin Alfred does clean up, by renting his land and his cattle to the production. Mr. McMurtry’s underwhelming introduction to the ways of Hollywood nonetheless marks the beginning of a half-century in the screen trade. He “knew nothing” about what he was doing at first, and he still seems slightly mystified by his good fortune—mostly, he says, he just seemed to have a knack for creating characters that movie stars wanted to play.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703977004575393230107695888.html?KEYWORDS=The+Past+Picture+Shows

NBC Universal's Jeff Zucker expanded the studio's animation arm and is funneling more funds into TV series.

WSJ – As NBC Universal prepares for a planned takeover by cable giant Comcast Corp., its chief executive, Jeff Zucker , may be auditioning for a big job: his own.

After years of slashing costs at NBC and saying broadcast television is broken, Mr. Zucker sees a brighter outlook. He’s pouring tens of millions of dollars into new TV series. He also funded a new animation arm at the Universal movie studio, which could be seeing the beginnings of a turnaround with its recent hit “Despicable Me.”

Those shifts could provide much-needed boosts for the broadcast and movie sides of NBC Universal. Since Mr. Zucker, 45 years old, took the reins of the television and movie company in 2007, its NBC network has seen its prime-time hours languish in fourth place and last year Universal stumbled after a strong run.

During his tenure, Mr. Zucker, who once ran NBC’s “Today” show, has also invested in NBCU’s stable of cable networks, including USA, CNBC and Bravo, where profit has consistently grown. Those networks were a big reason Comcast agreed to buy 51% control of NBC Universal from General Electric Co. Overall, NBCU earnings are showing signs of improvement, with second-quarter profit rising 13%

WSJ: How much TV programming should be available free on the Internet?

Mr. Zucker: We have to figure out how we are going to pay for this quality content. We used to be able to run our programs on the broadcast network [multiple times]. And that is how we would pay for it.

Today, in large part because of all of the new digital technology, including the Internet, we often get just one run out of those very same programs. So, I do not think that it is a foregone conclusion that content should be free on the Internet.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703787904575403211895349200.html?KEYWORDS=Free+Content

Sarah Brookover, left, a senior at Rutgers University in New Jersey, with Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic, a reference librarian.

NYT- At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying fromWikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html

NEWSWEEK's new owner, Sidney Harman.

Newsweek announced its own sale to Sidney Harman and said that Jon Meacham, the magazine’s editor for the past four years, was stepping down.

Harman, 91, the founder and chairman emeritus of Harman International, was one of several bidders for the magazine, according to sources familiar with the process, and the deal was not concluded until today, even as some of the interested parties upped their bids this morning. The bidders included businessman Fred Drasner, a former partner of Mort Zuckerman in running U.S. News & World Report and the New York Daily News; Marc Lasry’s Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund with a stake in America Media Inc., the publisher of The National Enquirer and Star magazine; and several unnamed American and foreign companies. A source close to the deal said the magazine will be purchased by the Harman family and it will not have an association with Harman International.

The terms of the deal were not announced, but sources close to the negotiations said Harman has agreed to pay a small amount in cash and to assume tens of millions of dollars in financial obligations. The Post Company, however, will retain the pension assets and liabilities and “certain employee obligations arising prior to the sale,” according to the company’s press release.

No decision on who will replace Meacham has been made, according to sources at the company. Tom Ascheim, NEWSWEEK’s current chief executive officer, will remain in that role under the new ownership. The deal is expected to be concluded by the end of this month or early September.

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/02/the-washington-post-company-agrees-to-sell-newsweek-to-sidney-harman.html

The agreement, announced on Monday, also lays the groundwork for online television viewing for Comcast subscribers through an authentication process sometimes called TV Everywhere. Rather than letting anyone watch TV episodes online, media companies want to allow access only to those people who already pay for cable or satellite service. The deal gives Comcast the latitude it needs to move forward.

The companies concluded separate deals for Showtime and two upstart cable channels, CBS College Sports and the Smithsonian Channel. The financial terms were not disclosed.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/cbs-makes-a-surprise-deal-with-comcast/

When Steve Jobs took the stage on Friday to defend the iPhone 4 against criticism that it had reception problems, he made his feelings about the press abundantly, peevishly clear.

“This has been blown so out of proportion that it’s incredible. It’s fun to have a story, but it’s not fun to be on the other side,” he told reporters.

Even as he apologized and acknowledged that there was indeed a problem, he was joined by Scott Forstall, a senior vice president at Apple, who attacked an article in The New York Times that blamed an interaction with the phone’s software as “patently false,” and then Mr. Jobs went on to call a Bloomberg article that suggested the company knew about the problem last year a “total crock.”

In general, he suggested that media organizations were just making blood sport of a company that had sold three million handsets in just three weeks: “I guess it’s just human nature, when you see someone get successful you just want to tear it down.”

The iPhone’s antenna problems might have remained a dust-up between Apple fanboys and skeptical bloggers except that Consumer Reports — that stolid, old-media tester of everything from flooring to steam mops for the last 74 years — came out with a report detailing the issue and concluding that “due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.”

How did Consumer Reports make Apple blink? In large measure, the article in Consumer Reports was devastating precisely because the magazine (and its Web site) are not part of the hotheaded digital press. Although Gizmodo and other techie blogs had reached the same conclusions earlier, Consumer Reports made a noise that was heard beyond the Valley because it has a widely respected protocol of testing and old-world credibility. Mr. Jobs acknowledged as much, saying, “We were stunned and upset and embarrassed by the Consumer Reports stuff, and the reason we didn’t say more is because we didn’t know enough.”

The organization — Consumer Reports is owned by the nonprofit Consumers Union — sells its subscribers dutiful research rather than pithy discourse, and it often goes unnoticed unless you are in the market for a new car or toaster. This time, its tests became an inflection point. (One that many tech reporters say Consumer Reports promoted endlessly, but who can blame them?)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/business/media/19carr.html

http://online.wsj.com/video/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-give-everybody-a-free-case/09768FB0-8327-4DA6-941F-FFB3E5D327BB.html