Media Monitor: Photoshop, drop and roll

Image management: From doctored photos of Iranian missiles to cartoonists’ caricatures, image management is a huge topic these days. A quick rundown of recent reworkings: Local tech guy Aaron Landry reblogs on the mysterious case of the Photoshopped Iranian missile tests, while Vanity Fair turns the tables by subjecting Geraldo, Chris Wallace, Sean Hannity and others to the same kind of photo-tweaking Fox News recently used on "attack dogs" from the New York Times. Meanwhile, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer offers a shoe-on-the-other-foot take on the controversial Barack Osama New Yorker cover as Georgetown students find a cache of rejected New Yorker covers. 

Media shares tanking: Since the first of this month, newspaper shares have plummeted by $3.9 million. Alan Mutter puts that number in perspective: 10 major media companies have a combined value of only $3.6 billion. A big loser is McClatchy, former owner of the Star Tribune, which has seen its stocks drop 94 percent in value since December 2004. Then, it was worth $5.7 billion; today $387 million.

The comment conundrum: As we found out in one recent story, finding the balance between spirited dialogue and out-and-out hostility in the MnIndy comments can be a dicey thing. Naturally, the discussion about comment moderation is going on everywhere. The Star Tribune came up with a "featured comment" function, an apparently automated way of selecting comments to highlight in a small speech bubble; it’s a great way to promote comments, but it can yield less-than-flattering results. As WCCO’s Jason de Rusha has pointed out, it often ends up slamming columnists like C.J . Or, in this example, it touts the competition: A story about Minneapolis Mayor Rybak’s efforts to find a local option for converting gas-electric cars to plug-in hybrids now shows the comment, "Too bad MinnPost already covered this story." But there is a serious side. As Strib editor Nancy Barnes wrote on Sunday, after the paper opened commenting on local news stories, "ugly, racial hate-mongering comments aimed at a wide variety of minority and ethnic groups" poured in. The paper now won’t allow comments on stories about "crime and safety" — an understandable move, if you’ve ever read the comments at a prominent anti-Star Tribune blog in town.