Journalism

Highway Deaths Amuse Justin Timberlake

The San Francisco Chronicle is running a story on a terrible highway accident in Indiana that killed seven people in a minivan Thursday night. A tractor trailer slammed into the van, possibly after it hit a deer and slowed down or stopped, and only three of the 10 passengers in the van survived the crash. The story is illustrated by a photo of Justin Timberlake and host Matt Lauer laughing it up on the Today Show: As you might expect, commenters aren't happy that Timberlake and Lauer find the ... (read more)

2011/10/28

Full Disclosure: TechCrunch is Screwed

"We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch." -- AOL chief executive officer Tim Armstrong Around five years ago, Microsoft fueled a controversy by giving $4,000 Acer Ferrari 1000 laptop computers running Windows Vista Ultimate to some popular tech bloggers. A lot of bloggers -- particularly those who did not receive incredibly overpriced luxury branded laptops -- raised such a ruckus that Microsoft eventually asked for them back. Bloggers who ... (read more)

2011/09/06

Andrew Breitbart Was Right About Weiner

Today, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) admitted that he sent a picture of his bulging crotch over Twitter to a female college student in Seattle and accidentally made it public. Obviously, my earlier post was completely wrong. This is my correction. At the outset, I'd like to make it clear that I have made terrible mistakes that have hurt the people I care about the most, and I'm deeply sorry. I'm deeply ashamed of my terrible judgment and actions. I am deeply sorry for the pain this has caused ... (read more)

2011/06/06

Ladies, You Need to Look Good for Your Man

I'm reading Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life, a biography of the sorely missed Texas liberal columnist by Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith. When Molly was eight months old, her father Jim Ivins was serving on the USS Gallup in the Coast Guard during World War II. He wrote this in a letter home to his wife Margaret: I think your new stationary is solid, but how about a picture of you lately? I think you have a complex about your looks. When you put your mind on it you are one hell of an attractive ... (read more)

2011/06/06

Calling the Itamar Attacker a 'Terrorist'

I'm getting some pushback on the Drudge Retort to how I presented the Itamar attack story: Intruder Kills Israeli Settler Family In the West Bank settlement of Itamar, five members of an Israeli family were killed Friday night by an intruder who broke into their home and stabbed them to death. The suspect stabbed the mother, father and children aged 11, three and three months old. Two children, aged 2 and 4, were not harmed in the attack. The attacker has not been caught. The media is calling ... (read more)

2011/03/14

Huffington Post is a Content Cesspool

A lot of the commentary about AOL's purchase of Huffington Post is coming from people who don't appear to have ever visited the site. Huffington Post is not a liberal news and opinion site, though that was founder Arianna Huffington's stated goal when it began in 2005. It's a massive search engine optimized pile of junk content with a little original news and commentary sprinkled in -- and most of that was written for free with no editorial oversight or quality control. On Saturday, an unnamed ... (read more)

2011/02/09

The Best Way to Deal with Rev. Fred Phelps

During sports broadcasts in the U.S., there are moments where the cameras abruptly stop showing the game, turning instead to show the crowd or the announcing booth. A telltale roar reveals the reason: an idiot has run onto the field and interrupted play. The drama of a field crasher would make excellent television. Most of the time, it's just a drunk, an attention-seeker or a drunken attention seeker, but sometimes things take a more newsworthy turn. A teen was tasered by cops at a Philadelphia ... (read more)

2011/01/11

Mayhill Fowler Breaks Free of Huffington Post

When I visited the Newseum in Washington last year, I had a pang of journalistic envy over a display honoring Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who broke the "clinging to guns and religion" story about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. Fowler was one of the Huffington Post's legion of unpaid citizen journalists, covering the race like a swarm of locusts. Fowler burned her bridges at Huffington this week, writing a public resignation letter after she couldn't convince the site's ... (read more)

2010/09/28

The Destruction of Andrew Breitbart

We here at Studio B did not run the video and did not reference the story in any way for many reasons, among them: we didn't know who shot it, we didn't know when it was shot, we didn't know the context of the statement, and because of the history of the videos on the site where it was posted, in short we do not and did not trust the source. -- Fox News anchor Shepard Smith on Andrew Breitbart By virtue of publishing the Drudge Retort, I've been following the career of Andrew Breitbart for ... (read more)

2010/07/22

Modern Journalism is a Serious Pickle

The recent firings of Dave Weigel by the Washington Post and Octavia Nasr by CNN show that mainstream journalists, who are expected to display some personality and attitude on social media to better connect to the audience, will be fired the minute they make an important group mad. I don't envy the job of a reporter at a major media outlet pressed into blogging or tweeting for the company. Conservative journalist James Poulos sums up the predicament well: Writers now have competing pressures -- ... (read more)

2010/07/10

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