Jay Rosen, the media scholar at New York University, writes of the rise of a media state-within-a-state. With the recent departure of FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver from The New York Times to ESPN/ABC News/Disney, Rosen notes how there are personal franchises emerging in media. They reflect a shift in power within media, a domestication and application of voice across scale, and a clearer sense of the value of individual journalists due to better digital metrics.
Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of The New York Times, earlier this week summarized Silver's contributions and challenges in the Times newsroom. She said he was a valuable voice but an outsider who some traditionalists in the newsroom did not embrace. Ezra Klein explores Silver's talent further in a post for the Washington Post. He says others were able to successfully aggregate polling data to predict the 2012 presidential election, but Silver's talents as a journalist permitted him to tell the story every day in a different way to make it engaging for audiences.
India is perhaps on a path toward media regulation, but the country's chief justice believes self-regulation is the far better course. P Sathasivam, speaking at the annual journalism industry award ceremonies, said external regulation "may seem a dominant urge, but it is surely not the answer." Regulation "could result in a perilous departure from the cherished principle of the freedom of the press as the sine qua non of our democracy."
The readers' editor for Sabah, the Turkish daily, has been fired. Yavuz Baydar had been critical of media coverage and of government handling of the recent Gezi Park protests. His employer refused to print his most recent columns and terminated him Tuesday. The Organization of News Ombudsmen (full disclosure: I am its executive director) has denounced the firing and called for his reinstatement.