The list, care of the Atlantic. Happy reading.
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Friday, May 09, 2014
Peter Parker and Clark Kent: Unethical Journalists
They should just stick to their night jobs.
From a piece in the Atlantic...
However, spunky photojournalists/mild-mannered-reporters also have ethical obligations that should clash with supernatural crime fighting. The media is, in theory at least, supposed to be honest. Putting on a costume, coming up with a fake name, and lying to everyone about what you really do are the opposite of that.
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Monday, October 29, 2012
How Do They Fact-Check at the New Yorker?
The Columbia Journalism Review has the answer.
From the story...
Preventing errors from appearing in the magazine is not a simple process. For openers, you need to know that in addition to the basic reporting pieces, we also check “The Talk of the Town,” the critics, fiction, poetry, cartoons, art, captions, the table of contents, certain of the several-paragraph-long essays in the “Goings On” section. We also fact-check the contributors page, the cover wrap, the letters column, all the press releases, and a good deal of the recently mounted Web site.
To start checking a nonfiction piece, you begin by consulting the writer about how the piece was put together and using the writer’s sources as well as our own departmental sources. We then essentially take the piece apart and put it back together again. You make sure that the names and dates are right, but then if it is a John McPhee piece, you make sure that the USGS report that he read, he read correctly; or if it is a John le CarrĂ© piece, when he says his con man father ran for Parliament in 1950, you make sure that it wasn’t 1949 or 1951.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
The Severe Ethical Breaches of Superhero Journalists
The list, care of Discover Magazine.
From said list...
Clark Kent
When it comes to journalistic ethics, Mr Kent is not so super after all. He regularly reports about himself without disclosing as much. He deceives his employers by moonlighting during working hours as a doer of derring, leaping his contractual obligations in a single bound. Worst of all, he uses the privileged inside information that he gleans as a journalist for his own personal gain during his extracurricular activities. Here is a man who is faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, and about as transparent as either of those.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Sunday, July 01, 2012
Why Porn and Journalism Have the Same Big Problem
The problem? Why pay for something you can get for free?
From an article in the Atlantic...
Yikes. Comparing your business plan to Apple is pretty standard corporate trope these days, but in the case of porn, the iTunes analogy is hopelessly inapt. Here's the problem: Pornography is mostly a commodity product. Music is not. People have favorite bands and expect a certain level of production value in their music. Bruce Springsteen devotees aren't just as happy listening to Bob Seger or an a cappella rendition of "Born In the USA." It's at least a little rarer to have favorite porn stars. And the audiences aren't demonstrably sensitive to production values. Worse yet, the tools for do-it-yourself filming are improving every time Apple upgrades the iPhone's video camera.
In other words, convincing people to pay for to watch sex is a much taller task these days than getting them to pay for a song.
In fact, it's a bit like getting them to pay for a newspaper. Like the porn studios, big media companies have seen their own profits plummet in the face of free aggregators, amateur bloggers, and the nearly limitless competition supplied by the web. Unsurprisingly, micropayments have been a hot topic in the news industry over the past few years. But so far, they haven't really taken off.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
On Journalism #2
The typewriter installation «On Journalism #2 Typewriter» writes stories
about all journalist who have been killed worldwide between 1992 and
today. The individual stories are connected through common fields of
coverage, places, professions and many other aspects. Besides the text
the typewriter creates flags which are distorted the more journalists
got killed there.
On Journalism #2 Typewriter from julian on Vimeo.
On Journalism #2 Typewriter from julian on Vimeo.
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Mini E-Books Let Journalists Stretch Their Legs
What's the spot between a long magazine article and a short hardcover book? A Kindle Single.
From a piece in the New York Times...
Here’s what Kindle Singles actually are: probably the best reason to buy an e-reader in the first place. They’re works of long-form journalism that seek out that sweet spot between magazine articles and hardcover books. Amazon calls them “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.” If I didn’t loathe the word “compelling,” I’d think that wasn’t a half-bad slogan.
I recently sat down and read 15 of these boutique minibooks. Most are blah; a few are so subliterate they made my temples ache. But several — like John Hooper’s reportage on the Costa Concordia disaster, Jane Hirshfield on haiku and Jonathan Mahler on Joe Paterno — are so good they awaken you to the promise of what feels almost like a new genre: long enough for genuine complexity, short enough that you don’t need journalistic starches and fillers.
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Monday, March 05, 2012
Gender Bias in Books Journalism Acute
A study by Vida shows a great majority of quality-press reviews are still by and about male writers.
From a piece in the Guardian...
Vida, an American organisation supporting women in the literary arts, has compiled statistics on the gender split in books coverage at publications including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, each of which showed a substantial bias towards using male reviewers and covering male authors.
At the LRB last year 16% of reviewers were women (29 out of 184) and 26% of authors reviewed (58 out of 221); at the New York Review of Books 21% of 254 reviews were by women, 17 of 92 authors reviewed were female and 13% of 152 articles were by women. Of 1,163 reviews in the TLS in 2011, 30% were by women, and of 1,314 authors reviewed, 25% were women. Granta was the only publication to have more female contributors, at 53%, but much of this was down to its women-only feminism issue.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Friday, January 06, 2012
Are Bloggers Journalists?
This is the question explored recently by Forbes.
From the article...
On page 9 of a 13-page ruling, Judge Hernandez last month set out these requirements to qualify as a journalist:
Education in journalism.
Credentials or proof of affiliation with a recognized news entity
Proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest
Keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted
Mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources
Creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others
Contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story
‘Without evidence of this nature, defendant is not ‘media,” the ruling says. Obviously, the judge — an Obama appointee — doesn’t understand either media or the First Amendment. His ruling also went much farther than the case before him required. (Cox lost a $2.5 million verdict.)
Thursday, December 08, 2011
Did You Hear That, Like, Gossip is Everywhere in Journalism These Days?
Salacious reporting used to be the freak show of journalism. Now it's everywhere. How did this happen?
From a piece on Salon...
“Sometimes, there’s news in the gutter” was the condescending headline of the public editor’s piece on the New York Times’ failure to pick up the adultery story of John Edwards. I write “condescending” because, as anyone who reads the daily press and watches television cannot fail to recognize, journalism, electronic and print, is itself everywhere more and more in the gutter. The day on which I write this, the Times has a small item in its Arts section about the actor Richard Dreyfuss suing his father and uncle for return of an $870,000 loan he made them in 1984. Why is that, in a serious newspaper, news, and what does it have to do with the arts? Isn’t this a matter among Dreyfuss, his family and the law courts, and distinctly not that of the New York Times?
Apparently not, at least not so long as Richard Dreyfuss has achieved modest celebrity in his career as a movie actor. Because of the way we now live, Dreyfuss is probably better known to lots of Americans than people who live down the block from them in the suburbs or one floor below them in an urban high-rise. One of the dubious rewards of celebrity is that strangers become interested in aspects of your private life that, strictly speaking, are none of their business.
How this came about is a long and complicated story.
Friday, November 04, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
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