Media
clock | March 14, 2009Timothy Burke: Journalism, Civil Society and 21st Century Reportage:
As the failure of many newspapers looms and public radio cuts its journalistic offerings, the complaint against new media by established journalists gets sharper and sharper. The key rallying cry is that new media can't provide investigative reporting, that it can only piggyback on the work of the mainstream print and radio media, and that when the newspapers go, there goes investigative work and all the civic value it provided.
As a starting point in a conversation about the future, this complaint is much more promising…
clock | March 12, 2009Joshua Davis wrote an amazing article for Wired - The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist - about the biggest successful bank robbery in history: how was it accomplished, why the perpetrators got caught in the end, and how come nobody still knows all the details (including the Big Question: where on Earth is all that loot today?). He interviews some of the key people in the story as well, with proper caveats about their trustworthiness. A masterful example of good journalism and a riveting read. The Obligatory Reading Of The Day.
clock | March 12, 2009On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting:
Even a few years ago the word "blog" inspired that peculiar mix of derision and dismissal that seems to haunt new media innovations long after they're proven. A blogger was a lonely, pajama-clad person in a dark room, typing out banal musings he mistook for interesting ones, to be read by a handful of friends or strangers if they were read at all.
That blogs have now become a fixture of media and culture might, you'd think, give critics pause before indulging in another round of new media ridicule. But it ain't so.
Twitter, the micro-messaging…
clock | March 11, 2009Check out the SEEDMAGAZINE.COM. W00t! Looks nifty!
What they say:
Our online magazine team has been hard at work creating a new look for SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, the magazine's homepage. As you'll see, it has a ton of new features and pretty new colors.
The content of the site is now divided into four departments with subcategories in each, which makes for a total of 11 areas of coverage. The departments are: World (politics, development and environment), Ideas (findings and theory), Innovation (technology, design and business) and Culture (books, art and events). You can go straight to one…
clock | March 11, 2009Corporate journalists are, apparently, constitutionally incapable of escaping the 'false balance', i.e., "he said, she said" mode of writing. So they are trying mightily to equate Obama with Bush in any way they can. It doesn't matter if one is a pragmatic who is trying to do the best he can, is being honest and open, while the other was a lunatic who got us into this mess in the first place.
So, they say that both of them treat the press corps the same!?!
Or that both use signing statements the same!?!
Or ignoring the people who predicted the economic calamity!?!
Dan Froomkin analyzes this…
clock | March 10, 2009Dave Winer interviews Jay Rosen about "curmudgeons, then on to rebooting journalism, Meet The Press, the broken government, and everything related...."
Listen to the podcast here
clock | March 10, 2009Because they write lies?
Bill Clinton actually used signing documents way more than George W. Bush. But No. 42 is a Democrat and his wife currently works for Obama. So No. 44 is on a big tear right now to distance himself instead from No. 43, the Republican, who's back in Texas and doesn't care but just hearing his name trashed makes Democrats feel good. (See, also more Bush distancing in The Ticket on today's stem cell changes here.)
B-b-b-b-ut!!!!???
Bush challenges hundreds of laws:
President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office…
clock | March 10, 2009Five tips for citizen journalism from ProPublica's new "crowdsorcerer":
On Thursday, the non-profit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica named Amanda Michel its first "editor of distributed reporting." Her title alone suggests the future of news gathering, and so does her background: Michel was director of The Huffington Post's citizen-journalism effort, Off the Bus, which enlisted 12,000 volunteers to cover the 2008 presidential campaign.
Michel wrote a must-read account of the project for Columbia Journalism Review, and she expounded on the experience in an hour-long interview with me…
clock | March 10, 2009Joe Scarborough Is An Idiot and this explains why, but most importantly defines the best what Jon Stewart and The Daily Show are really all about:
First and foremost, the show is a critique of the media. It is not "fake news." It is not "funny riffs on the headlines," a la "Weekend Update." It is a lampoon of media excess. As any veteran watcher can tell you, it has ALWAYS been "attacking people like [Cramer]." George W. Bush was just value-added content.
Howard Kurtz goes further:
If you think Jon Stewart is merely funny, you're missing the point.
The Comedy Central guy is one of the…
clock | March 10, 2009NY Times and 'Serious' Journalism:
Also in the Sunday edition, however, was the paper's long-demanded interview with Obama, which the Times somewhat arrogantly considers its birthright with every new president. The reporters used the opportunity to learn a few things about Obama's work and goals. But in the process one reporter, Peter Baker, asked one of the most idiotic questions I've ever heard from a reputable news organization. He asked if Obama was a socialist, and then, when Obama said no, followed up with, "Is there anything wrong with saying yes?" Obama, for his part, called the paper…
clock | March 10, 2009Still recovering. Flights were smooth. I finally finished Jennifer Rohn's book on the airplane. I hated my Chapel Hill neighbors, lounging at the pool in 78F, as I was leaving for the cold, snowy Boston. But now I'm back.
The first night, a bunch of us went to the Science Cafe and discussed the possibility of intelligent life in the Universe and methods to find them if they are out there.
And had some dinner as well...
On Monday, we gathered at WGBH station, in a nice, modern, green building, and about 20 of us discussed the PRI/BBC/NOVA/SigmaXi/WGBH/World project: how to build an online…
pharyngula | March 3, 2009They even titled the announcement "And now for something completely different…". I'm going to be doing a new monthly science column for the Guardian, so once again, I have blithely stacked another deadline on top of the groaning pile already on my desk. This should be fun, though, and one must constantly be building beachheads on other continents if one hopes to take over the world. Besides, I've also been promoted to "leading American evolutionary biologist", which will surprise leading American evolutionary biologist everywhere, but which will look wonderfully pretentious on my CV.
It's…
clock | March 2, 2009Jay Rosen, on Twitter:
"Hey @Boraz: Scientists (mainly, me) are close to announcing a branching off from the curmudgeons, a new species, almost. The Replacements."
My response on Twitter:
@jayrosen_nyu I am all ears! The Replacements! Sounds like a superhero comic strip, a movie one day!
Jay, on FriendFeed:
The Replacements are those who mistakenly believe that crowing for the 1,000 time that bloggers cannot replace journalists is an important and insightful act. Identifying feature: they make a show of disagreeing with the hordes of writers who think bloggers CAN replace (newspaper)…
clock | February 28, 2009Actually, Journalists do take some of the blame for the death of newspapers:
But why is the business model dying?
Competition is a factor, and blogs are obviously part of that mix. But again, if I'd started a business and someone else opened up down the street and offered a more appealing product, and I lost customers, would it be fair to blame the other guy alone for my problems?
In a free market, we have competition. Yes, it can suck when you're not on the winning side. But there's nothing saying that you can't start a new business, or reform your existing one to compete.
Newspapers remain…
rskloot | February 28, 2009
London (and much of the U.S.) is currently obsessed with Jade Goody, who is dying of stage 4 cervical cancer at the age of 27 in a very public way: On television. One thing I find amazing is that, in the mountain of media coverage on this (including articles in the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC, etc), I'm not seeing reporters mentioning one very important fact: According to one story (no longer online, but quoted in this interesting post at TBTAM), Goody had multiple abnormal pap smears in her teens. She went in for a few treatments to have the abnormal cells removed, then ignored…
clock | February 28, 2009Because they are more realistic than the MSM - this clip is even more relevant today than it was when first released:
pharyngula | February 28, 2009The blogs have talked about Bobby Jindal's credentials as an exorcist for some time, and now, finally, after Jindal's comical performance on national TV the other night, the mainstream media is taking notice. His dalliance with exorcism gets a write-up in the NY Times, where one of the more depressing questions I've run across is asked.
"That's incredible. But is it politically problematic?"
It's discouraging that we even need to ask this. A potential presidential candidate believes that a woman grappling with cancer and depression might have been literally possessed by a demon, and that…
clock | February 26, 2009I'll be in Boston in about 10 days from now. On March 8th, I'll go to the Science Cafe - the website is not updated yet so I don't know what the topic is yet, but it's going to be fun for sure: science+pizza+beer, who can ask for more? So, if you come to that, try to spot me in the crowd and say Hello.
The next day, on Monday, March 9, 2009 at 6:00pm, we'll meet at Casablanca Restaurant which is at 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA. If you are a scientist, blogger, reader, come and let's eat and drink together. If you are on Facebook, I have made an Event page so you can get all the…
pharyngula | February 25, 2009I know! It's shocking! But then I knew all along that he was smarter than his flirtation with the abhorrent insanity of Nisbetian framing would suggest. He has an article summarizing the George Will nonsense — where Will promoted outright falsehoods in support of his global warming denialism — and Mooney states something in his summary that I agree with entirely. Well, almost entirely.
In this sense, I view the George Will affair with sadness. Sure, I share in the temporary glee of the bloggers. But at the same time, I know there are many kinds of journalism, particularly about science, that…
revere | February 25, 2009A just released report on world wide vaccine production capacity says . . . if you don't have access to the report (and I don't, as yet), what it says depends on which news source you want to read. For example you can read Reuters (the glass half full wire service stroy) or Agence France Presse (the glass half empty wire service study). Here are the ledes in each:
Reuters:
Drug companies have increased their capacity to make bird flu vaccines by 300% in the past two years but will still need four years to meet global demand in the event of a pandemic, a study says.
It also said doses of…