Media
clock | June 21, 2009Interview by Ulrike Reinhard:
Also, if you have not done so yet, it is worth your time to listen to Rebooting The News podcasts in which Jay Rosen and Dave Winer discuss the current transformation of the news media. They are longish - almost an hour long each - but worth your while. Good idea is to listen to them in chronological order, though they are getting better and better (i.e., better organized, clearer, more succinct) every week.
clock | June 20, 2009Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion on Twitter with @jason_pontin (and a couple of others chimed in, e.g., @TomLevenson and @scootsmoon) about the role of quotes in journalism. Specifically, about the importance of providing a brief quote from sources interviewed for a piece. The difference in mindsets of Old vs. New journalism appeared in sharp relief.
I did not really think hard about this question until now, so this post is just my first provisional stream-of-thought about this and I welcome discussion in the comments.
So, let me try a mental experiment here. You are a journalist.…
clock | June 14, 2009Follow me on Twitter and you'll see this stream (to see more than one-sided conversation, search me there as well and check if there are comments on FriendFeed):
RT @ljthornton Students: Roughly 2 hours of tweets from "student living in Tehran," 22: http://bit.ly/wVpJl
#CNNFail: Twitterverse slams network's Iran absence. http://tr.im/osmp (via @jayrosen_nyu)
@HowardKurtz Hours and hours of ....talking to the camera revealing no useful information?
@HowardKurtz perhaps CNN and its audience have very different ideas of what is reporting, what is useful information, what is coverage.
@…
clock | June 13, 2009He is the BBC's latest star - the cab driver who a leading presenter believed was a world expert on the internet music business.
The man stepped unwittingly into the national spotlight when he was interviewed by mistake on the corporation's News 24 channel.
With the seconds ticking down to a studio discussion about a court case involving Apple Computer and The Beatles' record label, a floor manager had run to reception and grabbed the man, thinking he was Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, a specialist internet publication.
Actually, he was a minicab driver who had been waiting to drive…
clock | June 12, 2009Sorry, could not resist posting this:
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ddobbs | June 12, 2009
Jim Schnabel has an interesting story at Nature, free to all viewers, on the tetchy difficult of assessing how TV affects kids. I've often wondered whether the rise in ADHD diagnoses was due at least partly to TV. This story looks at a researcher who -- amazed at how riveted his infant son was by TV -- found this seems to be the case.
Christakis decided to try to address these questions with research. Together with several colleagues, he examined a database called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. After analysing some 1,300 children for whom the appropriate data were available, they…
pharyngula | June 8, 2009Minnesota has more than a few local conservative wingnuts; there are a few very popular blogs emanating from these parts to testify that, and in addition, the major metropolitan newspaper, the Star Tribune, has a shrill blitherer they regularly put front and center who has most of us scratching our heads in wonder that they keep such an incompetent hack on the staff. All the Minnesotan readers here know already who I'm talking about, and I don't even need to mention her name…but for all of you lucky out-of-staters, I'll fill you in: it's Katherine Kersten. "Who?", you all say, and that's…
revere | May 31, 2009We've had occasion to write about the endocrine noise-maker bisphenol-A (BPA) quote a few times (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here for starters). The word about BPA has gotten to consumers and they have fled BPA-containing products like they are swine flu carriers. Meanwhile the scientific evidence is piling up and what the market hasn't done will likely bring BPA into the cross-hairs of food safety regulations, if not via the FDA then by state and local governments, some of which have already acted.
So it looks like the writing is on the wall for BPA unless the food…
bioephemera | May 31, 2009If you've been following the Jared Diamond/New Yorker controversy, or my ongoing posts on journalism vs. blogging (here, here, here, here, here), you might be intrigued by this conversation about the culture of fact-checking in journalism, between journalism professor Jay Rosen and programmer Dave Winer, in their podcast series Rebooting the News. Consider this riddle: how is fact-checking in journalism like (or unlike) debugging a computer program?
Here's Rosen's take on it:
One of the features of a rebooted news system would actually be borrowed from the tech world. And it's the notion of…
clock | May 27, 2009There have been quite a few posts over the last few days about commenting, in particular about posting comments, notes and ratings on scientific papers. But this also related to commenting on blogs and social networks, commenting on newspaper online articles, the question of moderation vs. non-moderation, and the question of anonymity vs. pseudonymity vs. RL identity.
You may want to re-visit this old thread first, for introduction on commenting on blogs.
How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online by Robert Niles goes back into history to explain why the comments…
bioephemera | May 26, 2009
This would be funnier if it weren't so painfully true. Also see the sequel.
I didn't get to this for a few days because I was working too hard to blog last week. In the meantime, Language Log responded with an especially egregious example of this sort of oversimplification.
Cartoon by Jorge Cham, via Sheril at the Intersection.
bioephemera | May 25, 2009Just when I was wondering why there hasn't been more mainstream coverage of the Jared Diamond/New Yorker lawsuit I blogged about at the beginning of this month, Columbia Journalism Review has an update. And in a recent article in Science, Diamond commented, saying "The complaint has no merit at all."
Oddly, the Science article (which is unfortunately subscription-only) frames this whole situation as a conflict between different disciplines - mainly science and journalism.
Three worlds collide in this case. First is the world of science, specifically anthropology, which uses fieldwork and…
clock | May 22, 2009Some 47 million years ago, Ida suffocated in the volcanic ashes. I feel the same way at the end of this week - I need to get some air. And some sleep.
But watching the media and blog coverage of the fossil around the clock for a few days was actually quite interesting, almost exhilarating - and there are probably not as many people out there who, like me, read pretty much everything anyone said about it this week. Interestingly, my own feel of the coverage was different if I assumed an angle of a scientist, an angle of an interested student of the changes in the media ecosystem, and an angle…
clock | May 13, 2009You may have heard about a recent Wikipedia hoax:
A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.
The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.
It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers
Yup. Journalists check their sources carefully. Especially the despised untrustworthy Wikipedia, only a…
pharyngula | May 6, 2009As another sign of the ongoing decline of our traditional science media, Scientific American runs a superficial article on plastic surgery with a rather dubious source.
We spoke with osteopathic physician Lionel Bissoon to help us get to the bottom (so to speak) of some of the cellulite hoopla. Bissoon runs a clinic for mesotherapy (injections of homeopathic extracts, vitamins and/or medicine designed to reduce the appearance of cellulite) in New York City, and is the author of the book The Cellulite Cure published in 2006.
Why, SciAm, why?
Also, I had to gag on the guys analysis of…
ddobbs | May 6, 2009
While I'm at it, here are a few other recent posts about modulating our thinking about the swine flu outbreak that is a) so far less horrid than our worst fears and b) still working its way around the globe, as it may well be doing for some time to come.
Greg Laden notes that nothing has changed.
The Avian Flu Diary first considers, in the wonderfully titled post, "Before We Ride Down and Shoot the Survivors," the editorializing about "panic" ; and then ponders what might change as/if this flu works its work in the southern hemisphere over the coming months.
Peter Palese writes on why…
pharyngula | May 5, 2009Chris Matthews ask Representative Mike Pence a simple question — "Do you believe in evolution?" — and Pence spends 5 minutes squirming avoiding giving an answer. He changes the subject repeatedly, to global warming and stem cells, and tries to pretend that the Republican party doesn't have a serious problem with an anti-science agenda, which he himself is demonstrating.
I have to commend Matthews, too: he bulldogs that question and won't let it go. Let's see more of that from our media, please.
clock | May 5, 2009
Discussion with David Cohn, Mathew Ingram, Amber MacArthur, Sarah Milstein and Jay Rosen.
A good conversation for those interested in Twitter and the current journalistic revolution, calm-headed and smart.
Steve Paikin, who did the interview, was sometimes a little hazy about what journalism is, mixing up breaking news with news analysis with investigative journalism - I wish he has read my little classification effort - but the others corrected him politely. Worth 38 minutes of your time.