Subject: Re: Message to Price ratio? From: cassidy@panix.com (Michael Cassidy) Date: Thu, 20 Apr 1995 15:11:00 +0100

Cc: "S. Finer" , online-news@marketplace.com
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At 5:53 AM 4/20/95, RASCHKE wrote:
>Mr. Cassidy, I am sympathetic with, and appreciate, your comments
>concerning the costs of feeding and keeping journalists.  In the academic
>business, where I hang my hat, we have the same problems with the feeding
>and keeping of certain "knowledge specialists", who also need to go to
>Paris and have someone to pay for their French wine while on assignment.
>I also understand that it will be difficult to pay the "overhead" for
>in-depth and "quality" reporting unless we can figure out ways to make
>all those netheads who are spoiled with a "Pleasure Island" carload of
>free information cough up more to finance our junkets abroad.
>I have a horrible thought that might make even fewer journalists and
>academics go into a profession where the perks are paltry.  But what if
>we didn't have to go to Paris to get our story.  What if we did it via
>sophisticated search mechanisms and information analysis - you know, like
>those guys in Langley do sometimes - using computers, networks of
>personal sources, etc.  We could even talk over the phone.
>
Well it does show that you are teacher, and not in the profession. Your
knowledge of how to cover a story seems abit slight. Junkets? Give me a
break! What great coverage of Vietnam we would have had if we did it by
telephone and no one actually went there to cover the story--McNamara and
Kissenger would have loved it. I guess we can review plays and movies and
books by telephone also. None of us need do any legwork; there are people
all over the world standing by telephone booths that know exactly what our
standards are, and will spend their own money just to inform us not to stay
at some hotel because the service sucks. Ah "personal sources" woo woo none
us have ever thought of that! Right, like you're the first to come up with
the idea of stringers; it may surprise you but even stringers need money to
stay at a hotel or eat at a restaurant; or in fact most stringers I know
expect to be paid if they are covering a story for a newspaper.  It may
surprise you, but if you're a writer and you've been given the assignment
to write about all the small hotels of London, it actually helps to have
stayed in them. Its a surprising concept I know; write about something from
first hand knowledge! Its like fighting a war; in the end us grunts have to
walk in and take the land no matter how sophisticated weapons there are;
George Bush forgot that in the Persian Gulf war, and we are still having to
deal with Iraq.

In the real world, if the netheads don't want to cough up money (in some
form or other)for my information I'll go broke and my someone else will
take my place. So far my magazine has been doing rather well, so someone
somewhere is willing to pay for this information. I guess you have been
working in academia so long where students are forced to take courses and
forced to swallow any information pushed at them that this concept has
forgotten by you. If you description of academia is correct why are you in
the field? Or maybe you're teaching at the wrong school. Most of the
instructors I had wokred pretty hard.


Mike Cassidy

           Pi/nta Guinness le d'thoil!!!  Go raibh maith agat.
                          cassidy@panix.com



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To: amandell , online-news@marketplace.com