1990 Duration: 6.81 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and what does Editor and Publisher do.
1991 Duration: 20.45 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
Well I'm Greg Mitchell. I'm the editor of Editor and Publisher. Editor and Publisher is the bible of the newspaper industry. It's been around since 1884 and it continues to be the leading publication of the industry right now. It has a very active website and a monthly print edition.
1992 Duration: 19.39 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
So who is your viewership then? ...
1993 Duration: 30.33 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
Our audience is made up mainly of people in the newspaper industry: top editors, top publishers, reporters, business people, circulation advertising and so forth -- also includes many people in Universities -- both the faculty and students -- media critics, online bloggers, people at newspaper and other media websites -- Anyone who has anything to do with the newspaper business or is interested in press coverage.
1994 Duration: 44.68 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
Okay, and so could you give me kind of an overview of – kind of the food chain of who can make the decision that decides what's “news” and how that flows down? [What's -- you mean -- what's -- ?] -- Like for example, the New York Times, if they show something on the front page it may become more news all around versus, you know -- [You mean who makes the decision in the industry or at Editor and Publisher? ] -- No, within the industry, who are the most powerful editors and why? [You mean around the country or -- ?] Right -- In the United States.
1995 Duration: 10.18 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
Gee. I'm not quite sure how to answer that because -- I mean, there's many top newspapers around the country. Well, I'll try to answer it but it's certainly hard to--
1996 Duration: 18.15 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
Well there are many leading newspapers around the country. Probably the ones that are thought of as the most influential are the New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times. Then it drops down a bit to The Boston Globe, and San Francisco Chronicle, and Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald.
1997 Duration: 11.64 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
So the Editors of these publications have a great deal of power and a great deal of influence in how they play stories. But nowadays, unlike the old days, there's many other forces at work.
1998 Duration: 13.35 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
Of course, there's television and cable TV and radio, but also now there's the internet. Both internet news sites, such as CNN, MSNBC, USA Today, but also individual media sites.
1999 Duration: 19.95 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
So sometimes a story will be in a place like the New York Times or the Associated Press, maybe not get that that much attention, but then it starts to get picked up in internet sites and places like Editor and Publisher and then it takes on a life of its own. It gets picked up in many other web sites and then many other newspapers.
2000 Duration: 14.61 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
We've had many cases where we've done stories that have ended up on television that night strictly from the bottom up. So it's sort of like grassroots news coverage that then works its way up the food chain and ends up getting national attention.
2001 Duration: 12.18 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
Okay. So in a way a lot of the technology is kind of democratizing the -- breaking down a lot of the walls that were up there previously. [Right, I mean -- Okay --]
2002 Duration: 10.54 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
Some people run blogs which, you know, are personal websites. And even people like that sometimes cover stories that end up then getting national attention. So --
2003 Duration: 22.82 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
It's really quite a different system now than it used to be. In fact, Editor and Publisher, which has been around 120 years, I can honestly say has had more impact with its stories in the past year than it did in all those previous years. And the reason is that our website became phenomenally popular. It has a lot of respect.
2004 Duration: 8.31 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
And so we get links on many other websites, pick mentioned in USA Today, and you know, television.
2005 Duration: 9.78 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
So it's made what we write and what we do much more influential than it ever was. So it gives us a certain amount of power that we never had before.
2006 Duration: 13.08 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
And with respect to the lead-up of the War in Iraq coverage -- How has Editor and Publisher influenced that debate? For the -- What stories have you done?
2007 Duration: 25.26 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
Yeah. Well, we noticed in the months leading up to what became the invasion of Iraq that most newspapers were kind of going along quietly with the Bush administration claims. And we were quite alarmed with that and we speak to the entire newspaper industry. So we thought we had a real role in continually calling attention to the questions that the press was not asking.
2008 Duration: 25.79 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
In fact, we ran a cover story in January of 2003 -- more than two months before the invasion -- and the cover story was called "Unanswered Questions" and it had a picture of Bush. So we recognized early on that a lot of the assumptions and declarations of evidence from the administration were very weak and that the press was not pressing them hard enough.
2009 Duration: 7.37 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
And unfortunately we had to keep that up during the war -- after the war.
2010 Duration: 26.89 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
Unfortunately we've been proven correct on virtually everything that we were warning about because the weapons of mass destruction were not found, the links between Iraq and al Qaeda were not discovered, the fact that the war was gonna be incredibly more costly, there were going to be more casualties, it was gonna go on longer than anyone imagined. All these things that we were raising at the beginning of 2003 have all come to pass.
2012 Duration: 23.06 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
I mean, in some ways, it made us feel good because we got a lot of attention -- a lot of credit for doing that. We won a major award for our news coverage throughout the year. But on the other hand, it made us also feel a little helpless because we weren't able to swing the newspaper industry as a whole behind some of the alarms we were raising.
2014 Duration: 4.7 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
Unfortunately many of them ended up with egg on their face.
2015 Duration: 14.08 seconds
Greg Mitchell:
But nevertheless, we felt we did a real service in -- Eventually we've brought a lot of places around to admitting the failures, and hopefully doing a more of a watchdog approach in the future.
2016 Duration: 15.38 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
So leading up to the war in Iraq, you would say that -- You noticed that the media could have been doing more. What do you think they could have been doing more of? [Well, the -- Let me start over. ]
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