This week, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual “State of the News Media” report, detailing the health, or in this case the frailty, of mainstream US media online and off. The report contained a litany of grim statistics about the consumption and economics of news. Bob talks to Pew Associate Director Mark Jurkowitz, who says the situation isn’t is bleak as it could be.

Beastie Boys - Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament

UPDATE: Gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna has conceded Washington's governor's race.

Last week, Bob spoke to Eli Sanders of The Stranger about the Seattle Times advertising on behalf of political campaigns.

This week, we received a letter from a Seattle Times subscriber and OTM listener named Diane Civic, which read:

I called today to cancel my [subscription] because of this ad and was told that a lot of people were calling and I could instead put my subscription on a "protest hold" which would send a message to the Ad Dept and editorial board about the impact of the ad. The Customer Service Dept did not appear to be happy about the decision. Might be interesting to investigate how many "protest holds" there were and the response of the editorial board.

The Seattle Times Company has undertaken an experiment it says will show newspapers deserve more political ad dollars: buying and publishing political ads on its own pages. Readers have seen full-page ads in favor of the Republican candidate for governor, as well as ads in support of a referendum that would legalize gay marriage. Bob Garfield speaks with Eli Sanders of Seattle's alt-weekly The Stranger, about why the ads have infuriated subscribers and the newspaper's staff, while leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

If you read the local paper in Boston, Denver, or Sacramento, soon you’re likely to see endorsements for candidates cropping up on the editorial page. But if you get your news in Atlanta, Chicago, or Tuscaloosa, you probably won’t. In recent years, papers in these cities have gotten out of the endorsement business. Bob talks to Kevin Riley, editor of Georgia's largest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about his paper's decision to end editorial endorsements.

Ahmad Jamal - Tranquility

This week, Sun Myung Moon, media tycoon and spiritual leader of the Unification Church, died at the age of 92. In this interview from 2008, Bob talks John Gorenfeld, author of Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right and Built an American Kingdom about Moon's newspaper The Washington Times.

Strange Names - Broken Mirror

Rather than just fixating on what went wrong for the press in 2011, we thought we'd look forward to what will most likely go wrong in 2012. Former newspaper editor and current blogger Alan Mutter tells Bob that for local legacy media companies, 2012 will be the year when the digital giants show up to take a much larger bite out of their market share.

New Country Rehab - Ramblin' Man

After a long court battle, Bloomberg.com has obtained crucial details about Federal Reserve lending during the financial crisis. We now know which banks got what amount of money. That's information lawmakers didn't have when they were crafting financial regulations. Brooke spoke with Bloomberg's Bob Ivry, who says that if law makers had known more - the financial regulations we have now might look very different. 

Stateless – Ariel

While studies have consistently shown TV news to be America’s number-one source of local information, a new Pew Study paints a far more nuanced picture of our local information ecosystem by breaking down local news into specific topics—from politics to restaurants. Brooke talks to Pew's Lee Rainie about what the study tells us.

This week WikiLeaks released the largest number of US diplomatic cables to date, but the release has been overshadowed by an unredacted leak of its entire cache of cables. Bob talks to Atlantic Wire writer Adam Clark Estes about who's blaming who for the leak at WikiLeaks and what this could mean for WikiLeaks in the future.

Song: Lead Us To The End

Artist: The Quantic Soul Orchestra

In January of 2010, facing declining subscriptions and ad revenue, the New York Times announced it would be implementing a paywall. Critics called the decision counter intuitive, saying it would be the undoing of the paper. Reporter Seth Mnookin wrote about the paywall for New York Magazine this week.  He tells Brooke that it's actually exceeded even The Times' own expectations.

Rupert Murdoch, his son James and others will field questions before parliament Tuesday about the mushrooming phone-hacking scandal at the now-shuttered News of the World tabloid.

It's the first time the pair has faced public questioning about the scandal that most recently resulted in the arrest of a former top-ranking Murdoch aide Rebekah Brooks and the resignations of London's police chief and assistant commissioner.

This weekend, we covered the News of the World phone hacking scandal on our show (for the second time). This story has been developing so quickly that it's been hard to keep up. Fortunately, in yesterday's New York Times, Sarah Lyall took a fascinating look at the tense relationship between British Parliament and the British Tabloids, explaining that recent criticisms of News of the World are certainly uncommon in the British Political firmament.

(The following article originally ran in today's Guardian. It has been re-posted here in full, with permission.)

Well, well, well. There's some crisis management for you.

The second most remarkable development in a remarkable week of revelation, revulsion and late-onset outrage was the shuttering of the News of the World. Even when the advertisers began to bail, I'm pretty sure no sentient being imagined Rupert Murdoch would close a profitable business. The conventional wisdom over the voicemail-hacking scandal was to expect a lot of apologising, some surgical scapegoating and a tissue of Nixonian lies.

But, no, the surgery turns out to be an amputation of a limb as financially healthy as it was morally moribund. Could this have been an act of conscience? Expiation? Self-sacrifice?

The satirical newspaper The Onion has yet to win the coveted Pulitzer Prize, despite its self-proclaimed status as “America’s finest news source.”  A new campaign launched by the non-profit organization Americans for Fairness in Awarding Journalism Prizes is lobbying the Pulitzer committee to recognize The Onion’s excellence in journalism, with testimonial videos from fans and celebrities alike. Onion Features editor Joe Garden sat down with Brooke to discuss the new campaign.

After the jump, take a look at our favorite celebrity Onion testimonial videos, including our very own Brooke Gladstone.

With plagiarism detection software, media organizations can check articles for stolen content before they get published. However, hardly any news organizations actually use the software. The Columbia Journalism Review's Craig Silverman says that it's time for organizations to start investing in these programs to ...

Last weekend, New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner revealed that his son had joined the Israel Defense Forces. Amid cries over a conflict of interest – including from the paper’s own ombudsman – Times executive editor Bill Keller insisted that, as far as ...

Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts surprised many in media and political circles. But surely the local press and pundits who followed the race closely for months saw it coming? Not so much. Boston Phoenix political reporter David Bernstein describes what he, and the ...

Last summer the Washington Post, in an attempt to increase revenue, planned a series of off-the-record salons whereby a sponsor could pay for the opportunity to meet with government officials, Post reporters, and others to discuss, say, health care. The man responsible for implementing and marketing the salons was media ...

Countless reporters in D.C. are accustomed to seeing Daniel Lippman's name in their in-boxes. The Associated Press's Ron Fournier says Lippman's emails are filled with helpful and polite corrections. And Lippman, who is 19 years old, explains why he's become a rogue copy editor.