Journalism

Relaunching Watching the Watchers

I recently relaunched Watching the Watchers as an Utne Reader-style digest of interesting political news and commentary published on sites that permit redistribution. In the first phase, most of the content is coming from Daily Kos, which has the following license: Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified. Hundreds of diary entries roll through Daily Kos every day, and a lot of interesting stuff falls through the cracks. I only consider Kos ... (read more)

2009/06/16

The Case of Ann Landers' Box and the Naked Man

A question this week from Annie's Mailbox, the advice column written by the editors of Ann Landers: Dear Annie: I am 23 years old and a virgin. I have never seen a naked man in my life because I believe virginity should be kept until marriage. The other day I went with my sister to watch my nephew's baseball game. He plays on a field that is uphill, so you can see the backyards of some of the houses across the street. My nephew had heard from his friends that one of the men in those yards sits ... (read more)

2009/05/24

Currency Exchange is a Nickel and Dime Business

Neil Steinberg's column today in the Chicago Sun-Times has a surprising ending. He writes about an interesting Chicago character, Arnie Berezin, who has run a small currency exchange business for years: Neva Evans has spent most of the last decade in a Jewel shopping bag tucked away in the cluttered back room at the Ashland-Diversey Currency Exchange. Or at least her earthly remains have, ashes in a funerary jar with a mother-of-pearl finish. "Good morning, Neva," the owner of the currency ... (read more)

2009/03/11

Times Gives Aaron Swartz Props for RSS

In a discussion about journalism on venture capitalist Fred Wilson's blog, Dave Winer writes: ... professionals make plenty of these kinds of mistakes. For example last week the esteemed NY Times said RSS was software and that it was co-written by a 14-year old on a mail list. It is neither of those things. They never called me to check it out. The 14-year-old he references is Aaron Swartz, who got some nice press recently from the Times for an incredibly ballsy stunt he pulled to promote ... (read more)

2009/03/04

Newspapers Have Been Dying Since the '50s

Debra J. Saunders has an impassioned rant in today's San Francisco Chronicle about how we'll all be sorry when newspapers are dead: News stories do not sprout up like Jack's bean stalk on the Internet. To produce news, you need professionals who understand the standards needed to research, report and write on what happened. If newspapers die, reliable information dries up. ... I wonder who will be around in five years to cover stories. Or what talk radio will talk about when hosts can't ... (read more)

2009/02/26

How Bloggers Fared at the Newseum

While on a trip to Washington D.C. last weekend I made my first visit to the Newseum, the museum of journalism that moved to Pennsylvania Avenue in 2008 after an extensive $450 million upgrade. The museum's $20 ticket is a lot when you can walk across the street to visit the Smithsonian for free, but as a J-school grad I spent around five hours engrossed in the six-story facility. Highlights include an emotional Pulitzer Prize photography exhibit, an exhibit on the Berlin Wall that features ... (read more)

2009/02/16

World's Oldest Person Dies (Again)

One of the best jobs I ever had was working weekends on the state desk at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram during the late '80s. I took calls from correspondents across North Texas, wrote spot-news stories and spent the other 98 percent of my time reading everything on the news wire. That job had a lot in common with publishing the Drudge Retort today, with the notable exception that you once needed a journalism job to gorge on an all-you-can-eat buffet of wire stories. When you read news for too ... (read more)

2008/11/28

Mike Masnick: Newspapers Have Become Souvenirs

The morning after Election Day, I had to make four stops before I found a store that still had a copy of the New York Times, beating a spry older woman by seconds. She was not happy, but her plaintive "I was going to buy that" fell on deaf ears. The unifying spirit of the moment did not mean I was handing over the last copy of the paper of record. Hit the bricks, grandma! Like some newspaper editors I saw quoted in the media, I took heart in the mad dash for papers taking place all over the ... (read more)

2008/11/12

Ron Paul Absent from Financial Crisis Coverage

I found myself wondering today why Ron Paul has been completely absent from media coverage of the Merrill Lynch sale and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Paul, more than any other candidate for president this year, made an issue of the government's management of the economy and how he believes we're being led off a cliff. He would no doubt have a lot to say, given his remarks in May against proposed House bills to bail out mortgage lenders: It is neither morally right nor fiscally wise to socialize ... (read more)

2008/09/16

ABC News Can't Be Bothered with Iraq

Here's a nice example of the thimble-deep thinking that passes for political journalism in the mainstream media these days. On ABC News, journalists Jake Tapper and Matt Jaffe mock Joe Biden for giving a substantive answer to a reporter's question about whether he still supports a tripartite solution to divide Iraq into separate Kurd, Shia and Sunni areas. Tapper and Jaffe count the time he took to answer the reporter -- "13 minutes, 20 seconds" -- but they don't offer a single word of ... (read more)

2008/09/10

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