WEDNESDAY'S LINKS: CBSers on Journos Covering Their Own, News Orgs. Struggle to Find Reporters for Iraq

By: E&P Staff In today's edition, CBS staffers weigh on in covering the story of their dead and injured colleagues, Sen. Arlen Spector says that journalists need protection from prosecution, and a New York Observer piece about how big newspapers are having trouble finding reporters to repopulate their Iraq bureaus.


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Specter Says Journalists Need Protection From Prosecution
The Justice Department's threats to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information prompted a powerful senator to declare yesterday that Congress may need to pass legislation to address the issue. "I believe that's an invitation to the Congress to legislate on the subject because we do decide whether criminal prosecutions will be brought. That is clearly our authority and we're now on notice as to what we need to consider," the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Specter of Pennsylvania said during a hearing yesterday. "Clearly, the ball is in our court."


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CBS News Personnel Reflect On Covering Attack On Their Own
"I think the basic issue is finding the right balance between covering the incident which in essence happened to involve our people?and balancing that with the fact that there are a lot of other people who this has happened to," says CBS News Vice President Paul Friedman. CBS' coverage, says "Evening News" Executive Producer Rome Hartman, had to reflect the fact that "this is the kind of terrible news that thousands of families have received, and this time it was our family. It's no more serious or awful or tragic than what other families have experienced, but also no less so." He adds that when people at CBS first heard the news, "our first instinct was compassionate, not journalistic."


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'NY Times' Recruits Team For Baghdad Bureau: Its 'Volunteer Army'
Over Memorial Day weekend, New York Times metro reporter Paul von Zielbauer called his mother to tell her about his new assignment: Next month, he'll be going to the Baghdad bureau. "She freaked out and she hung up," Mr. von Zielbauer said, "and turned on the TV and saw what happened to the CBS News crew." The bombing that hit the CBS team -- killing cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, and leaving correspondent Kimberly Dozier in critical condition -- made Iraq the deadliest modern war for journalists, by the tally of the Committee to Protect Journalists. When The Times posted job openings in Baghdad in March, only five applicants came forward.


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Why Getting the User To Create Web Content Isn't Always Progress
"Most of us were taught that reading books is synonymous with being civilized," writes Lee Gomes. "But in certain tech circles, books have come to be regarded as akin to radios with vacuum tubes, a technology soon to make an unlamented journey into history's dustbin. The New York Times Magazine recently had a long essay on the future of books that gleefully predicted that bookshelves and libraries will cease to exist, to be supplanted by snippets of text linked to other snippets of text on computer hard drives. Comments from friends and others would be just as important as the original material being commented on; Keats, say."


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In Defense of Dan Rather
"My first thought when I read the NY Post's latest Page Six item on Dan Rather was that Dan must have missed a hush money payment or something," writes former CBS producer Mary Mapes. "Reading on, I realized this was actually an opening publicity volley for a new book, one that is probably guaranteed a small but ready readership. Hardcore conservatives will rush to buy it since it apparently echoes their deeply held biases about Dan. CBS employees will buy it, as well, just to see who is mad at whom. Of course, that is not necessarily great news for the author since so few people are still working at CBS News."


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David Von Drehle Is the Master of Disaster
"Some reporters blame deadline pressures and others the limited lexicon of disaster for their distater-story cliches," writes Jack Shafer. "Others plead ignorance: If a reporter has never covered an avalanche before or read enough bad avalanche stories, he might not know his story is rolling down a paved road rather than cutting a new path. But Miami Herald reporters, even the rookies, can't claim they don't know from a hurricane. Joel Achenbach, a former Herald reporter who now works at the Washington Post, says the Herald covers hurricanes the way the Post covers government or the Wall Street Journal covers stocks and bonds, and its best reporters study the form."


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Russian Mogul Goes From Riches to a Rag
Just over a year after he was controversially convicted of tax evasion and fraud, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man and the owner of the oil company Yukos, has been given a new job, as a reporter. Khodorkovsky, who is currently near the beginning of a seven-year-sentence in the Siberian penal colony YaG 14/10, "has been selected to serve as a volunteer reporter for Resonance, the official newspaper of the Federal Prison Service's branch in the Chita region."


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Programmer as Journalist
"J-schools need to get way more technical," writes award-winning journalist/programmer Adrian Holovaty. "A graduate of a journalism school should be a master of collecting data -- whether the old-fashioned way (by talking to humans) or through automated means. The closest thing journalism schools currently have (to my knowledge) is computer-assisted reporting classes. Those classes should be required, in my opinion, and even better would be for j-schools to partner with computer-science departments so that journalism students would get some experience coding."


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U.K.'s 'Guardian' Targets American Audience
The Guardian plans to expand its print and online presence in America as part of its ambition to become the biggest liberal voice in world media. "Our ambition is to be the leading global liberal voice," Carolyn McCall, the Guardian Newspapers Limited chief executive, told delegates at the the World Newspaper Congress in Moscow.