In the super-charged, heavily politicized climate change debate, we journalists often find ourselves getting scorched from all sides: We suck, we’re biased, we’re stupid, we’re clueless, we’re a pack of conflict junkies, a blob of false-balance jello. Yeah, we’ve heard it all. So what about it? It’s all true. But not all the time. Which…Continue Reading…
Now this is an interesting new job for the right kind of journalist. The idea behind it is expounded on here at Nieman Journalism Lab. I’ll be curious to see what news the Sense-Making Project will be tracking. Seems like you could do this sort of thing for many kinds of stories that receive sustained…Continue Reading…
I have a guest post up at Nature’s Climate Feedback, titled “Are climate scientists ignoring the lessons of climategate?”
Here’s another dispatch from a decades-old war, in which the policy and politics never change. You couldn’t read this kind of story in the country where the war is raging, because of a virtual news blackout, enforced by fear of vicious reprisal. So what does that mean for the people caught in the crossfire? As…Continue Reading…
That’s what three formerly reputable investigative journalists are saying here, in Howard Kurtz’s WaPo column, when they rationalize taking money from the Church of Scientology for a “study” on a Florida paper’s in-depth examination of the famously prickly and secretive self-help organization. From Kurtz, this you have to read to believe: Steve Weinberg, the former…Continue Reading…
I have no problem with a leading climate scientist taking issue with how the media portrays his profession. And if Gavin Schmidt would have kept his criticism of recent press coverage limited to the UK, he’d be on semi-solid ground. (He’d also be vulnerable to charges of mischaracterizing this coverage as one big “fact-free” monolith.)…Continue Reading…
Actually, it was yesterday, but I’m running behind. And Exum’s internal editor should have left it as this: Why You Should Not Write Newspaper Columns While High on Qat. Here’s hoping the mustache doesn’t return home with a bad case of the jitters.
In a recent post and comment elsewhere, I have suggested that better communication will not be enough to convince the masses to embrace climate change as an urgent concern. The philosopher Alain de Botton comes to the same conclusion is this elegant essay: The role of the commentator on the environment is at one level…Continue Reading…
The reinvention of journalism in the digital age is happening, let there be no mistake about that. Yet, despite the promise of crowdsourcing, hyperlocals and even the Huffington Poacher, it’s not as if anyone has figured out how to make newspaper reporting as we know it economically viable on the web. Hence the unending stream…Continue Reading…
The LA Times has an amusing profile on Arianna Huffington, in which she said this howler: Our site is not built around the freebie. In the next breath, she also said this, apparently with a straight face: Our site is built around very hard-working editors and reporters who do all the curating and aggregating and…Continue Reading…