What exactly is a news ''consultant?'' You see them all the time on TV news, but what are they -- these ''consultants'' or ``analysts''?
MEDIA
Once, news was the hard currency people relied on to transact their broadest kind of community business -- the routine exchange of information and ideas about what is and what ought to be. Because the industry made its money by gathering large audiences with little in common except where they lived, journalism naturally sought out topics of wide interest and spoke with language and values that made some sense to everybody.
MEDIA
As traditional news outfits migrate online to become dot-coms, one of their biggest headaches is how to adapt to the sprawling new frontier of public comment.
MEDIA
The flap over the big New York Times story about Sen. John McCain's ties to lobbyists centers, understandably, on its most sensational allegation: That his dealings eight years ago with an attractive young woman, a lobbyist with blue-chip clients, were so frequent and so cordial -- at a time when his 2000 presidential campaign was revving up -- that aides got worried and warned him that people might suspect romance.
MEDIA
Beneath the somber tales of shrinking revenues and staff cuts is an even more somber reality about the news business: The nearly two-century-old marriage between consumer advertising and journalism is on the rocks.
For news media, the emergence of Bill Clinton as a key public player in the presidential campaign of his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, raises unusual coverage issues.
MEDIA
This country has never had a field of presidential contenders of such diversity -- not just Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton, a woman, and Barack Obama, an African American, but among the Republicans, ex-governor Mitt Romney, a Mormon, and ex-mayor Rudy Giuliani, an Italian-American Catholic. Meantime, Hispanic ex-governor Bill Richardson just dropped out of the running, and New York's Jewish Mayor Michael Bloomberg has let it be known he might drop in.
