There are two competing apocalypse narratives in the media today: one concerns global warming and the other journalism. I tend to shrug off the former (enough things about this world already bum me out and besides, plenty of people already carry that catastrophe torch), but I’m on board with the latter. So is Sy Hersh,…Continue Reading…
A journalist reflects on whether a story he wrote was influenced by his own biases and private advocacy.
So the battle is joined: “The complaint has no merit at all,” Jared Diamond tells Science magazine in an exclusive interview published today, referring to the $10 million lawsuit filed against him and The New Yorker, for his April 2008 piece on a blood feud in Papua New Guinea. The Science story is only available…Continue Reading…
Yesterday, this NYT magazine piece won a National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent to the Oscars. What timing.
I haven’t been able to shake this days-old post by Jeff Jarvis, journalism provocateur, bar none. I suspect he’s right about the only metric that counts in the new digital world. Here’s the essential graph: Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating,…Continue Reading…
What might a “taxonomy of new-media animals” look like after the great Darwinian shake out? Check out this forecast by Matt Pressman at Vanity Fair’s Politics & Power blog. No surprise: he gives the “Inky mammoth” species poor chances of survival.
The Washington Post talks with Jeff Jarvis, leading new media maven. Money quote: WP: In all the bad news for newspapers stories, there’s always a lot of nostalgia. JJ: Horses are very nice. Cars belch pollution and get us into the mess of the oil economy. But we’re not going back to horses.
I haven’t seen State of Play yet, but this review essay by Alyssa Rosenberg at the Atlantic makes some interesting observations about the journalistic enterprise. Two are worth highlighting. The first is on the humanness of reporters: In a climate in which reporters are expected to be as detached as jurors, and against the backdrop…Continue Reading…
Kos is kidding himself: In the unlikely and tragic event that every single newspaper went out of business today, we’d have little problem replacing them as a source of information. Sure you would. Here’s the problem with his metric: Just because a link from his survey didn’t lead to a documented primary or secondary newspaper…Continue Reading…
Attention all fellow bloggy bottom-feeders, Slate’s Jack Shafer has got your back: Borrowing, sponging, lifting, scrounging, leaching, pinching, and outright theft of other publications’ work is firmly in the American journalistic tradition.