MERCIFULLY, THERE ARE SOME media outlets that don’t always, with big stories, merely plow on ahead heedlessly to the next big story.

These more thoughtful news organizations will moderate their innate devotion to utter novelty, and stay awhile with already familiar news … in order to analyze it, ponder it, and even more gratifyingly sometimes, dig deeper into it.

A REALLY ODD THING once happened to my journalism. And then, equally oddly or more so, it happened again.

I never really had anything like a real specialty as a reporter or as a TV producer – “Generalist!” was my proud boast. But suddenly back in the early 1980s I was unaccountably put in charge of network programs (for Britain’s commercial television service, ITV) that concentrated entirely on religion and ethics.    

ONE MEDIA RITUAL that’s a reliably renewable resource is the post-election poring over pollsters’ data.

Who got the results most right ahead of time naturally preoccupies the industry most of all, but so do more arcane, and often really quite useful analyses of detail. Like demographic breakdowns of the voting population … the chief motivating concerns of voters … relative turn-out by party, gender or age … and so on.    

IT’S VERY HARD TO BELIEVE. At least for me it is. I have been writing THE MEDIA BEAT for a full ten years.

It began in October 2004, in the midst of that year’s US Presidential campaign. I was assigned by the then-editor of the still fairly new, and free, New York paper AM New York, to provide a weekly critical commentary on the mass media.   

AS A MEDIA-GRABBING STORY, the surge of juvenile immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them unaccompanied as well as undocumented, seems to have gone off the boil.

We’re left with the ongoing, indeed saddeningly repetitive saga of undocumented adults making their desperate efforts to find a livelihood north of the border.

THE WORLD’S NEWEST COUNTRY, South Sudan, still struggles to end the internal conflicts that have marred its early life. This week, for instance, a deadline to reach agreement passed without success in peace talks between the warring factions.

THE UNASSUMING TOWN of Soma, in Turkey’s western Aegean region, was suddenly catapulted into the world’s media in May, with a shocking mining disaster.

Fire raged unstoppably through Soma’s aging coalmine after an electrical explosion. Rescuers made frantic efforts for four days to save hundreds of miners feared trapped underground. In the end, a total of 301 people lay dead, and many more were injured.

YOU WOULD THINK (always a risky beginning) that media commentators would welcome the Special Forces and FBI’s neat — and casualty-free — seizure of Ahmed Abu Khatalla off Tripoli’s streets and onto a U.S. Navy ship and then a plane bound for an American courtroom. No; actually you wouldn’t think that, not given the wholesale shift, even among the president’s once-innumerable media supporters, to Obama-bashing during this advanced stage of his second term.

MASS MEDIA CONSUMERS in America might be forgiven for forgetting this, but the purpose of Memorial Day is – obviously enough – to remember our troops, past and present, with gratitude for their service. But what are those service-members themselves remembering?

MEDIA PLANNERS just love anniversaries. But I’m wondering how many in the mass media will pick up on a confluence of two such commemorations this coming week – a 50th and a 20th – which mark different, equally salient, events in the long life of a recently departed global giant.

Dateline: Austin, TX — THE BIRD GETS A BUM RAP. As the always effervescent South By Southwest multimedia festivals explode here every year at this time, the thousands of visiting movie, web and music buffs will often complain about Austin’s ubiquitous black bird.

Dateline: Austin TX — WE CAME FROM ALL OVER the world to this three-sided, multimedia party known as the South By South West Festivals, celebrating film, music and internet culture. But death cast a pall over its later days.

THE TSUNAMI IS UPON US. With February marking fifty years since the original miracle happened, the media’s own backward-looking Beatlemania is now flooding unstoppably through every platform.

THIS HAS BEEN – OFFICIALLY AT LEAST – one of those quiet weeks for political reporters. The U.S. Congress doesn’t come back to work (silly word, I know) until Monday, January 27.

But members of both House and Senate are in this quiet time having to think hard — though not necessarily talk to the press — about the uncomfortably hot potato recently tossed into their laps by President Barack Obama.  

THE VERY FIRST REPORTING of Nelson Mandela‘s death sparked in me a sharp flash of disappointment with journalism, along with inevitable sadness over losing the great man himself.

The disappointing journalism was all the worse for coming from my own home-town paper, The New York Times, one of the finest news organizations in the world — most of the time.

IT’S A LONG MEDIA TRADITION, and not just among the BHLM (“bleeding-heart-liberal-media”), to mark Thanksgiving by paying some attention – be it sincere or merely dutiful – to those citizens who clearly don’t have a lot to be thankful for.

ACCORDING TO MEDIA LORE, thanks principally to the vintage series The Naked City on ABC television, “there are eight million stories” in New York.

But one of the great untold stories of this metropolis is the high-quality art on its walls. Not just hanging on them, but literally on them; and therefore a very part of those walls themselves.

HALF-CENTURY COMMEMORATIONS of major civil rights events are now studding the calendar of our nation’s media — inevitably, since 1963 was such a fateful year.

Last month the media rightly celebrated the March on Washington and Dr Martin Luther King Jr‘s resonant “I Have A Dream” speech — a broad wedge of an event that began to prise open overdue changes in our society. And now this week, by contrast, the media have had a poignantly sharp event on which to tightly focus — the Ku Klux Klansmen’s murder of four young girls by bombing Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15th. An event that lasted just a few, but interminable seconds.  

CABLE TV NEWS got its biggest enlivening jolt since the invention of CNN, enthusiasts are arguing, when the new channel Al Jazeera America (AJAM) was finally launched this week.

This newest service to emerge from the deep pockets of the Qatari royal family was also supposed to deliver a strong, hard news-based corrective to the partisan rhetoric that typifies Fox News and MSNBC. 

CASCADES OF COMMENTARY still course through the airwaves and cyberspace about the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin – a legal process that in its end last week achieved the very opposite of settling matters.