Fox 19 on Nov. 9 apologized for an ignorant comment made by news anchor Tricia Macke on her personal Facebook page last month. Macke’s comment, “Rachel Maddow is such an angry young man,” sparked outrage among gay-rights organizations for its depiction of MSNBC’s openly gay broadcaster as a man. According to screen shots published by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Macke appeared to have missed the point when called out by a commenter for targeting Maddow’s sexual identity. Macke wrote, “you are right… I should have said antagonistic” but then told another commenter, “I knew what I was saying.” GLAAD wrote: “Tricia Macke undoubtedly tried to insult Maddow because of their political differences, rather than simply because Maddow is gay — but her comments went much further than insulting Maddow's political leanings, and took issue with Maddow's gender, revealing an anti-gay (or at least anti-gender-nonconforming?) bias underlying her political beliefs.” Fox 19 posted its apology along with a statement from Macke describing her comment as insensitive and inappropriate. Macke wrote: “I apologize to Ms. Maddow and any others who may have been offended by my comments, as they do not reflect my firm beliefs in individual and equal rights, and they certainly do not represent the opinions or position of my employer WXIX-TV." Maddow, an openly gay MSNBC political analyst, is one of America’s highest-profile news personalities. She’s also a Stanford graduate with a doctorate in political science from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

A deal is expected to be approved next week between E.W. Scripps Co. and Cincinnati could bring about $5.65 million in tax revenue to the city by 2018. It also means that Scripps — which was founded here in the 1800s — promises to expand and keep its corporate headquarters in Cincinnati for at least 10 more years. The media company currently resides in a downtown high-rise on Walnut Street, and the growth will be in cyber content as it morphs for the Internet Age. A City Hall document submitted to council in advance of next week’s meeting, says:“The expansion downtown will be from the Scripps digital group that is growing and gaining momentum with new product offerings, enhancements and technology. These products will be developed for smart phones, tablets and computers.  They will include applications that push content from Scripps’ chain of newspapers and TV stations and distribute new content to consumers in cities that Scripps does not serve. The new jobs will include skills in sales, design, marketing and journalism.”In all, the payroll is expected to reach $30 million when the 125 new jobs are added. The agreement says Scripps will make “good faith efforts to fill at least 75 percent of the new jobs created” with city residents. Scripps owns 19 television stations and 13 newspapers across the U.S. It used to publish the Cincinnati Post — the publication that started the entire Scripps company — but that daily newspaper was shuttered in 2007 because of sharp declines in readership. 

•  Enquirer prices are going up in a smart way.  The paper is embracing a computerized system which charges frequent users for its digital content. The more individuals read, the more they’ll be charged. Full access will mean just that and be available to home delivery and digital subscribers.
 However, the Enquirer will still limit unpaid access to its archives. That’s a cheapening disservice to readers who want to know more than one day’s or one week’s reporting.
 Infrequent/occasional readers still will be able to read up to 20 articles a month online content without paying. With new ways to get the news — smart phones, tablets, etc. — the Enquirer is adapting. As publisher Margaret Buchanan said in a note to readers and email, it’s better than following some other dailies by cutting print editions to three-a-week and charging for digital. 
For more than a decade, online versions of print content and unique online content have been free but that’s not a sustainable business policy. It’s also been trendy to ask why dailies gave away online what they charged for in print. One response involved the technological problems involved in charging for digital content. That apparently is largely resolved here and elsewhere but it’s taken years. Another response was that of papers including the New York Times: free online content except for “premium” offerings such as op-ed columnists. That failed. It irritated more people than it recruited. Meanwhile, we became accustomed to the journalistic equivalent of a free lunch. 
I say “we” because I quit reading any number of favorite publications when they threw up pay walls that did not include an occasional freebie. At the head of the pack were the Wall Street Journal and British dailies owned by Rupert Murdock. That included the London Times and Sunday Times. The cost was too great for what I largely could find elsewhere. I still turn to London’s Financial Times which allows me a few reads a month.
What publishers are learning to their glee is that readers are willing to pay for much of that now that they can get it on mobile devices. Surveys indicate that we have an insatiable appetite for news so long as we can get it anytime, any place we want it. That’s good news for all of us. Sustainable commercial news media remain vital to our form of self-government if only because they are everywhere and no other form of news media can do what they do.



  •  Maybe some of that new Enquirer income (above) will allow editor Carolyn Washburn to restore some traditional assignments that fell victim to years of staff purges. If anyone needed further proof that firing or retiring specialty beat reporters exacts a toll on credibility comes in a recent Enquirer Healthy Living section. The paper turned the entire cover page over to public relations people promoting their institutions in the guise of news. At least the Enquirer doesn’t pretend its reporters wrote those stories; UC Health and OSU got the bylines. With newsroom staff reductions, it’s open season on readers for public relations people. They increasingly operate without the scrutiny and possible intervention of a savvy reporter.

 •  There is nothing wrong with what UC Health and OSU public relations people do when they offer free content to the Enquirer. That’s their job; promote the best possible image for their institutions consistent with the facts. The problem is at the paper. This goes beyond the traditional back-scratching where reporters rewrite news releases. That makes it the paper’s product and gives reporters a chance to ask questions.  A lot of what dailies — whether the Enquirer or Wall Street Journal — publish begins with press releases.
 This symbiotic relationship can go too far. An Enquirer journalist once took a junket, came home and put his byline on the story prepared by the sponsor of the junket. When this ethical/professional travesty was noted, there was, to the paper’s shame, little or no condemnation. As one colleague put it, he thought it was uncommonly well written.
 Another time, an Enquirer journalist put her name on a news release and ran it as a story, then had the chutzpah to accept an award for that “reporting” from the group that sent her the original press release.

 •  The planned Enquirer switch to smaller, tabloid-like pages has been postponed until 2013; it was to start this Fall. The paper blames problems with the new format and new presses at the Columbus Dispatch which is to print both dailies. Meanwhile, Enquirer editor Carolyn Washburn continues to tell us that small is beautiful. Or will be.

 •  Channel 12 made the right decision in terms of audience numbers when they switched from the men’s final in the U.S. Open to an hour of Bengals chatter and then the game. However, viewers got an awful football game and missed what proved to be a riveting tennis match.


 •  It’s never too early for Harvard undergrads to learn the importance of fitting into the Establishment. Reporters of the daily Harvard Crimson, the cradle of untold New York Timesmen over the decades, have agreed to clear quotes with Harvard officials before publishing their stories. 
Jimromenesko.com reported this ethical blindness, saying, “Sometimes nothing is changed. But often, the quotations come back revised, to make the wording more erudite, the phrasing more direct, or the message more pointed. Sometimes the quotations are rejected outright or are rewritten to mean just the opposite of what the administrator said in the recorded interview.”
 Romenesko also quoted Crimson President (editor) Ben Samuels’ memo to his staff. It said, in part,  “(W)e’ve seen an increase over the past several years in sources, especially Harvard administrators, who insist on reviewing their quotes prior to publication. When those administrators read their quotes, even quotes that Crimson reporters have recorded, they frequently ask that these quotes be modified.

“ Some of Harvard’s highest officials — including the president of the University, the provost, and the deans of the College and of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — have agreed to interviews with The Crimson only on the condition that their quotes not be printed without their approval. As a result, their quotes have become less candid, less telling and less meaningful to our coverage . . . To increase our striving for frank and informative quotations, we add a new policy now. Effective immediately, no writer may agree to an interview on the terms that quotes cannot be published without the source’s approval without express permission of the Managing Editor or the (editor) President.”

 • CNN International (CNNi) is too close to repressive governments with which it has business deals, London’s Guardian says. “CNNi has aggressively pursued a business strategy of extensive, multifaceted financial arrangements between the network and several of the most repressive regimes around the world which the network purports to cover,” the liberal British paper says. “These arrangements extend far beyond standard sponsorship agreements for advertising of the type most major media outlets feature. CNNi produces . . . programs in an arrangement it describes as ‘in association with’ the government of a country, and offers regimes the ability to pay for specific programs about their country.” The Guardian says these programs are then featured as part of CNNi's so-called "Eye on" series ("Eye on Georgia", "Eye on the Philippines", "Eye on Poland"), or "Marketplace Middle East", all of which is designed to tout the positive economic, social and political features of that country.

 The Guardian says “the disclosure for such arrangements is often barely visible . . . To the average viewer unaware of these government sponsorships, it appears to be standard ‘reporting’ from the network.” The paper says that in some “Eye on” programs, no such disclaimer is provided. CNN's "sponsorship policy" says "'[P]arts of CNN's coverage beyond the daily news are produced as special reports, which attract sponsors who pay to associate their products or services with the editorial content,' but claims that 'at no stage do the sponsors have a say in which stories CNN covers.'"

 • Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the Democrats’ convention reminded me that “enormity” is a poor choice for something big enough to brag about. If the speaker means huge, he/she should stick to that 5 cent word and skip the 50 cent malaprop. Enormity describes something awful or outrageous, not just big or important, as in, the enormity of a famine or genocide. While they’re at it, speech writers should drop  “fraction” from texts they hand dimmer bosses and clients. A fraction is anything less than the whole: 99/100 of something is a large fraction. It’s not a synonym for small.

 • Sometimes, NPR reporters have me talking back and it’s not because it’s a “driveway moment,” when I won’t leave the car until the story is over. It’s usually because they’ve blown a story, not matter how balanced or detailed the broadcast. Repeated stories about the Chicago public school teachers’ strike left me wondering: 26,000 teachers for 350,000 students. I know that’s not really 13+ students per teacher in each classroom but the numbers still cry for explanation that in its he said/she said reporting, NPR failed to provide.

 • Here’s another approach to saving local journalism: invite the local daily and public radio station to campus and integrate them with journalism school. The New York Times devoted a major business story to this innovation by Mercer University in Macon, Ga. The story mentioned another innovation, this one in Ohio: TheNewsOutlet initiated by the daily Youngstown Vindicator and Youngstown State University. Now, it includes Kent State and Akron universities. Journalism students work as interns, providing news stories to any organization. That made news when ProPublica, the nonpartisan investigative website, joined forces with TheNewsOutlet. Youngstown State  journalism students initially will work on investigative stories guided by ProPublica editors. ProPublica also is an open source news organization.

 •  I’m willing to risk my perfect record at predicting Pulitzers: Tracey Shelton’s stunning photo of four Syrian rebels silhouetted by the flash of a tank shell that killed three of them in Aleppo. How Shelton escaped is unclear. She is close enough for the men to be individually recognizable. Her images are at GlobalPost.com: men sweeping a street, grabbing their weapons at the sight of an advancing Syrian Army tank, the explosion, the lone survivor running toward her through the smoke, and his lucky minor arm wound. My previous prediction: that the Pulitzer committee would change its rules to allow digital entries and honor the New Orleans Times-Picayune for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina that inundated its presses.

 •  Poynter Online reports further proof of the nation’s partisan divide: “In August, 31 percent of Democrats polled by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press reported hearing ‘mostly bad news’ about the economy. In September, only 15 percent characterized economic news as bad. Sixty percent of Republicans and 36 percent of independents polled said economic news was mostly bad. The poll’s authors found the gap striking: Differences in perceptions of economic news emerged after Barack Obama took office. But they never have been as great as they are today.”

 •  I was delighted to read and hear reporters challenge Romney’s falsification of the events in Cairo before the deadly riot in Benghazi. Romney berated Cairo embassy staff for its attempt to defuse rising Egyptian anger over the online short ridiculing and defaming Muhammed. The embassy issued a statement sympathizing with Muslim anger over the video. Romney damned the embassy staff and statement, saying it was the worst kind of appeasement after rioting in Cairo and Benghazi.  He had to know the statement preceded either riot. 

•  American news media were of two minds when offered a graphic photo of a shirtless Chris Stevens after the ambassador was killed in Libya. Some media used it in their primary news reports. Others didn’t use it on air or in print but offered it online to readers. I would have used it. He was not bloody or disfigured, he was not being dragged through the streets or otherwise abused. He was a murder victim, one of four Americans killed in the consulate that day, and we can handle these images and the clarity they bring to events. Our news media showed no such squeamishness when provided photos of bloody Qaddafi.

 •  Being a Royal Grandmother probably has always been tough, but Queen Elizabeth is having another annus terriblus: Prince Harry cavorts naked with tarts in Las Vegas and the seemingly perfect Kate is photographed topless on a vacation. Maybe the royals’ police protectors need remedial ed: cell phone cameras are everywhere and nothing goes unnoticed, especially if a royal prince is displaying his Crown Jewels, and paparazzi were sured to track William and Kate and to take off her bikini top on an outside balcony was unwittingly naive. Someone has to explain the facts of public life to these folks. They can’t depend on foreign news media being as deferential as those in the British Isles. Harry’s immodesty was published in Britain largely because it was universally available and seen online. Kate’s slip got plenty of online attention, too. British papers, of course, had to write about the future queen’s nipples without showing them. If there is an invasion of privacy suit in France where the photos were published, the photos will have to be introduced as evidence . . . and there we go again.

• A wet daily paper is near-useless. By the time the Enquirer and New York Times dry, my day is underway. I might get back to them after supper. However, we have a new delivery person who, unlike the woman she replaced, understands that double-bagging only helps if the bag openings are alternated and neither opening exposes the highly absorbent newsprint to rain or snow. • Poynter Online reports the growing number of news media hoping to profit from the Times-Picayune’s retreat from daily journalism in New Orleans. The Baton Rouge Advocate plans to produce a New Orleans edition in October, when the T-P plans to cut printed editions to three days a week.  Coincidentally, Poytner reported, four online news organizations in New Orleans said they’re forming an online news collective called the New Orleans Digital News Alliance. The four are The Lens, My Spilt Milk, NOLA Defender and Uptown Messenger. (All but the Lens are for-profit sites.) “The members will begin promoting each other’s work immediately through social media and other avenues, and closer cooperation is being developed,” their press release says. My Spilt Milk honcho Alex Rawls says in a post, “Our collective goal is to provide sustainable, up-to-the-minute, hyperlocal online journalism serving the New Orleans community.” That’s not the only online newsroom planting a flag in New Orleans local coverage, Poynter continued. Gambit Weekly Editor Kevin Allman says NOLA Beat, “a nonprofit startup planned in the mold of ProPublica or the Texas Tribune,” is planned to start up before the end of the year. Gambit is a New Orleans paper.  • Trust must exist between news media and audiences and journalists and their editors. No medium is immune. NPR recently had to retract a story after being alerted to a reporter’s plagiarism. Here’s the NPR editor’s note from July 9: “Earlier today, we published and distributed a story by Ahmad Shafi recounting his experience witnessing a public execution in Kabul in 1998. Since the story was published, it has come to our attention that portions of the piece were copied from a story by Jason Burke, published by the London Review of Books in March 2001. We have removed Shafi's story from our website.” • Journatic, a commercial attempt to provide hyper-local news to major newspapers is in trouble because of journalistic fraud, fabrication and plagiarism. The agent of its distress was a former Journatic employee who explained how low-paid writers in Asia provided the local U.S. stories under phony bylines to unsuspecting American dailies. The revelation came on public radio’s This American Life in early July.  Journatic seemed perfect in an era of corporate cost-saving at any cost, readers’ trust be damned. Cheap outsourced labor allowed Americans to be fired. Poynter Online said the Chicago Tribune, which invested in Journatic, laid off about 20 American journalists and reassigned another dozen who’d worked on Trib suburban papers and websites. Journatic stories made that possible.  Other papers that substituted Journatic stories for those that could have been done by local journalists included the Chicago Sun-Times, Houston and San Francisco Chronicles.  The Enquirer still struggles to provide the kind of hyperlocal or local-local news — “Local Youth Wins Trumpet Contest” — that executives believe readers want. It tried in print and online. It never found the right formula and gutting its reporting staff left it without people do it all.   Gannett helped by buying most of the Tristate weeklies. While not hyperlocal — you can’t cover two or more neighborhoods and be hyperlocal — this was a good idea. There is nothing second rate about community weekly journalism; it has some different news values and high credibility among readers and advertisers. Some of my former students have created productive jobs and careers on community weeklies. • Jimromenesko.com eports a fascinating poll result:  YouTube has become a major way to get news. Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism said YouTube poses “a signficant opportunity and also a challenge” for mainstream news media. Romenesko included these findings:  The most popular news videos tended to depict natural disasters or political upheaval-usually featuring intense visuals. News events are inherently more ephemeral than other kinds of information, but at any given moment news can outpace even the biggest entertainment videos. Citizens play a substantial role in supplying and producing footage. Citizens are also responsible for posting a good deal of the videos originally produced by news outlets. The most popular news videos are a mix of edited and raw footage. Pew added, “The report points out that viewership for TV news still easily outpaces those consuming news on YouTube — 22 million people on average still watch the evening news — but fast-growing YouTube is now the third most visited destination online, behind only Google and Facebook.” • Former Enquirer reporter Cam McWhirter and Wall Street Journal colleague Keach Hagey scooped NPR about NPR’s investment in a nonprofit startup in New Orleans called NewOrleansReporter.org. It’s the latest effort to complement the diminished New Orleans Times-Picayune, which is cutting back from daily to print editions three days a week. NPR’s partner will be University of New Orleans. Poynter Online says NPR could be chipping in an initial $250,000. NPR followed with its announcement, NPR issued a press release after the story, saying the new site will follow a ”public radio funding model” and will be open source, like ProPublica and The Texas Observer. NewOrleansReporter.org will be based in WWNO’s newsroom, and its general manager Paul Maassen will run both organizations. NPR, the release says, is “providing consultation to WWNO around technology infrastructure and online revenue generation as well as training to support the rapid deployment of a multimedia newsroom.” It also says NolaVie and The Lens are “content partners.” The Lens recently announced (above) it would also be part of an online news collective called the New Orleans Digital News Alliance.

Enquirer editor Carolyn Washburn’s recent note to readers assures us that the continually shrinking page will elicit readers’ joyous cries of “new and improved!” Don’t hold your breath. The 10-1/2 x 14-2/3 page — about the size of the Business Courier — will be printed in Columbus on the Dispatch’s new press. The tabloid should given designers greater freedom to fill the news hole with large photos, graphics and headlines. The local section is so small now that I’m almost inured to diminishing returns on my rising subscription rates. Page size isn’t the issue; what’s on them is what matters. I’ve worked on tabloid-format dailies in three countries. Today,  few papers are sold on the street and huge headlines to grab passersby are wasted space. “Headless Body in Topless Bar” and “Ford to City: Drop Dead” were perfect in New York but not here. We need smart, patient reporting. That requires space in the paper. Whether we get it has nothing to do with page size.  • Publisher Margaret Buchanan’s subsequent page 1 note to readers last Sunday was hardly reassuring. It repeats much of editor Carolyn Washburn’s memo (above) and reinforces my fears: “The pages will be organized with fewer jumps so you don’t have to turn pages to continue reading the same story. Headlines will be bolder. The print edition will be more colorful with larger photos and graphics to help tell the stories. Most importantly, we’ll continue to provide unique in-depth news stories ..." Buchanan comes from the advertising/business side of Gannett journalism, so maybe she isn’t troubled by the contradiction in her assurances: short stories burdened by big headlines, photos and graphics on tabloid pages can’t be “in-depth” unless they jump from page to page. And she’s promising “fewer jumps.” Is the next innovation with purpose a shift from “readers” to “viewers”?  • Does the Enquirer have a policy about naming juveniles accused of crimes or is it an adhocracy among editors? When Avondale kids wanted for shoplifting fled in a car, they were named in the first story. When a suburban high school student was accused of a central role in a major drug ring, the first story didn’t name him and said that discretion was Enquirer policy. “Avondale” long has been code for black at the paper. “Suburban” or identifying with a suburban high school means white even if that is no longer a reasonable assumption in many cases.  • Last Sunday, WVXU carried a fine conversation between Enquirer sports reporter and author John Erardi and WVXU politics reporter (and lifelong Reds fan) Howard Wilkinson. They talked about Barry Larkin and why he was being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. They know their stuff, they obviously enjoy each other’s company, not least because Wilkinson also spent decades at the Enquirer writing about politics and on rare occasion, Reds baseball. I enjoyed their insights and storytelling even though I’m not a baseball fan. I think I’ve been to three, maybe four Reds games in as many decades. Blame my parents. The Twins didn’t exist when I was a kid; it was Minneapolis Millers v. St. Paul Saints at Nicollet Park in Minneapolis and I don’t remember seeing them. We didn’t have modern Vikings either and the Lakers left town. No way to nurture a fan.  • I wish I wasn’t eating when I read Dan Horn’s recent encyclopedia update on water quality in the Ohio River. His Enquirer report was well done. The photos were marvelous. My upset was personal: memories.  When we moved to Cincinnati in 1967, we moored our boat at Elmer & Jenny’s Yacht Club downriver in Bromley, Ky. Wonderful people, but “yacht club”? I don’t think so.  I water-skied in the river, aware of its water quality but in denial; it’s hard to give up the one sport I enjoyed from childhood ... in Minnesota. I only swam in the Ohio to put on or retrieve skies or to drop the rope and wait for my wife to pick me up. I didn’t swallow.  I don’t remember infections or gastro-intestinal problems from Ohio River water. After all, I had skied for years in the St. Croix between Minnesota and Wisconsin, in  the industrial Upper Mississippi at the Twin Cities and downriver to the the two rivers merged. God knows what was in those pre-EPA waters then but maybe I brought immunities to the Ohio.  After three years, we left Elmer & Jenny’s Yacht Club for Rocky Fork Lake near Hillsboro in Highland County. We sought fresher breezes and a ski zone free of barge tows and increasingly wild, mindless boaters in the Ohio’s Cincinnati basin. Cleaner water was a bonus. I still didn’t swallow.   Recalling the Ohio River in the 1960s — aided by Horn’s detailed story — was the best appetite suppressant I’ve experienced in years.  • If you’re going to do gotcha journalism, do your homework. A conservative blogger challenged Cleveland columnist Connie Schultz, sure she was a liberal who gets too close to leftwing politicians she covers. “We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him. Care to comment?” Here’s part of Shultz’s response, courtesy of jimromenesko.com: “He’s really cute. He’s also my husband. You know that, right?” Shultz told her former employer, the Plain Dealer where she won a Pulitzer Prize, that she hadn’t named the blogger because she wants him to “pick better company and do better journalism.” Romensko said Schultz told him in a telephone interview, “I don’t want to be a bully. I can say he was working for one of the larger conservative blogs, but that his name is not in the staff directory. Maybe he’s an intern, maybe an editor was playing a joke on him or maybe he was trying to get a reaction out of me. But I just want him to stop hanging around with those people and learn something out of this.” • Jimromenesko.com (see above) also reports that elsewhere in northern Ohio, the Sandusky Register posted a voice mail message left by Erie County Tom Paul for reporter Andy Ouriel. Paul said there was a mistake in the previous day’s edition. Here is part of the relentlessly F-bombing message: “You don’t know your ass from a fucking hole in the ground. And you know what? — sorry about that but you make me mad. Give me a call back, 419-357-2985, ya shithead.”  • Louisville’s Courier-Journal chose discretion over valor by not naming two juveniles convicted of sexually assaulting 17-year-old Kentuckian Savannah Dietrich. Lots of people, however, already knew despite the judge’s gag order. She tweeted their names to protest over what she fears will be judicial slaps on their wrists. Dietrich told the Courier-Journal they assaulted her when she passed out after drinking at a party. The youths also shared digital images of the assault with others. After negotiations with prosecutors, the pair pled guilty to first-degree sexual abuse and misdemeanor voyeurism. Dietrich faces up to180 days in jail and a $500 fine if the judge convicts her of contempt.  • If you’ve followed news stories about the run-up to the London summer Olympics, you must know that security for the events and sites is a shambles, even by British standards of bumbling through. The firm that was paid to provide security failed in every way. The government minister responsible for domestic security failed to respond promptly or adequately. The badly stretched Army — already being dramatically reduced in strength and losing historic regiments — is filling roles designed for civilian rent-a-cops and ushers. One cartoon expressed its contempt for the organizers with soldiers being told they’ll be able to return to Afghanistan after the Olympics. Be grateful that Cincinnati’s bid for this colossal money pit was rejected.  • Here’s a question I haven’t seen asked by the national press: Do we want a president as detached as Romney says he was from his responsibilities as owner and CEO of Bain? He says he didn’t know if his subordinates were shipping jobs overseas. The screwed up Salt Lake City Olympics — which he did help save — were more important. I believe him. But how does that salvage his claim to being a keen businessman who can sort out our country’s economy?  • Get over it. With more than 300 million citizens and immigrants and almost as many firearms, Americans have nut jobs and a few will be violent. So I wouldn’t be unhappy if our mainstream news media suffered massacre fatigue. Maybe the latest Colorado shootings will speed that process. Similar fatigue already is evident in diminished foreign/war news. It isn’t a question of whether to focus on the victims or the shooter or a  search for “reasons.” You don’t ask mass killers for reasons. Given the utter inadequacy of mental health services and our easy access to firearms, our rational response is to accept the risk that someone else will die in irrational mass shootings. That’s a price the NRA and its pusillanimous  legislative allies find acceptable if the alternative is more effective firearm regulation.    A different rational response might be a news media campaign for a costly, annual federal tax stamp for every high-capacity magazine for every firearm to which they can be fitted. This wouldn’t disarm hunters in any way. Semi-automatic hunting rifles and shotguns don’t have or require 20 or 30 cartridges to put venison or duck on the table.  The tax would include the stick-like magazines for semi-automatic pistols and submachineguns and the familiar curved magazines for civilian versions of the AK47 and its kin. Drum magazines - like that found at the Aurora theater - can hold scores of rounds and be fitted to some military and military-style weapons as well as the Thompson submachinegun and its descendants. Drums would be covered, too.  This tax wouldn’t take away anyone’s firearm or testosterone-enhancing firepower. It doesn’t limit the number of rounds  shooters can load into their weapons the way the extinct Clinton-era 10-shot limit did. The sole function of high-capacity magazines is to make it easier to kill lots of people. That’s why real military weapons like the AK47, the M16 or even the World War II Browning Automatic Rifle — the famous BAR — had high-capacity clips.  The tax would not be a Second Amendment issue ... or shouldn’t be. It copies the longstanding $200 federal tax required for fully automatic weapons owned by civilians. Americans buy those firearms and pay the tax.  • Americans own more handguns, shotguns and rifles every year and reported violent crime has sharply declined. Coincidence? Absolutely. Second Amendment? When’s the last time you heard about someone with a licensed concealed firearm  and an extra-high-capacity magazine stopping a crazed gunman? Believe me, the news media would be full of such a story or NRA complaints about liberal suppression of a patriotic tale.  I’m talking about a news media campaign to make it harder to kill lots of people in a few seconds or minutes. However, that throws us into the confused world of acceptable risks. There isn’t a chance in Columbine of doing more than taxing high-capacity magazines when Americans also accept as normal the thousands of daily deaths from drug, tobacco and alcohol abuse, obesity, medical errors, etc.  • There’s still another related, rational response for the news media to the Batman killings: Give less prominence to nut cases worrying whether the Muslim Brotherhood has a sleeper agent at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s right elbow, or that less than a 20- or 30-round magazine will allow Mongolian mercenaries in UN blue helmets and black helicopters to enslave us to a world government. On the other hand, while the GOP and its crazier allies promote distrust, fear and hatred of government, don’t expect such courage from the news media. That could risk being seen as partisan.  CONTACT BEN KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com