Over at the University of Maryland, the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda have compiled a list of the most transparent newspapers in the world:

This study investigated 25 of the world’s top news sites to evaluate which of them open up their newsrooms to public scrutiny and comment:

1. Which outlets post corrections to their stories?
2. Which ones provide details about their owners and offer information about any other media and non-media holdings of those owners?
3. Which ones publish their internal guidelines for reporters (such as how potential conflicts of interest by reporters or editors are handled)?
4. Which ones publish their internal standards for stories (such as how anonymous sources are handled or how politicized language is identified)?
5. Which ones actively seek readers’ comments and complaints?

The New York Times comes in second, trailing behind the UK’s The Guardian.

Openness & Accountability: A Study of Transparency in Global Media Outlets [ICMPA]

I am sick and tired of people saying “this is about free speech and Don Imus has the same rights as any other American” etc. WRONG. It’s about money. Once the advertisers leave, you are toast.

David Carr wrote a great piece in The New York Times yesterday with his list of reasons why it was inevitable that Imus would be fired. And I couldn’t agree more:

OLD MEETS NEW Mr. Imus is an old-school radio guy caught in a very modern media paradigm. When he started 30 years ago, if he made the same kind of remark, it would have floated off into the ether — the Federal Communications Commission, if it received complaints, might have taken notice, but few others.

But radio is now visible — Mr. Imus’s show was simulcast on MSNBC, and more to the point, it is downloadable. By Friday, reporters and advocates could click up the remark on the Media Matters for America Web site, and later YouTube, and see a vicious racial insult that delighted him visibly as it rolled off his tongue. The ether now has a memory.

The media equation: Flying solo past the point of no return [The New York Times]