Posts tagged journalism
media girl
Capturing bits & pieces on media, politics, culture & daily life
As journalists, I believe, we explore what might be called the Periodic Table of Human Nature. Every life, whether celebrated or obscure, contains the same fundamental emotions, love or hate, ambition or indolence, exhilaration or despair. We just need to drill down deeply enough to discover them.
Samuel G. Freedman, Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, in his book Letters to a Young Journalist. (It is absolutely worth a read.)
Related: Maria Popova’s recent review of The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning. Though it’s not quite about journalism, it is very much about storytelling, curiosity, and the discovery of humanity, which are fundamental to journalism.
She writes,
The book, which passes the skepticism radar even of someone as non-religious as myself, is really about cultivating our capacity for uncertainty, for mystery, for having the right questions rather than the right answers.
FJP: I often wonder about what spirituality and journalism might have in common, one answer to which is that they allow us to foster a similar sort of emotional fortitude.
Popova exercepts the book:
Spirituality is discovered in that space between paradox’s extremes, for there we confront our helplessness and powerlessness, our woundedness. In seeking to understand our limitations, we seek not only an easing of our pain but an understanding of what it means to hurt and what it means to be healed. Spirituality begins with the acceptance that our fractured being, our imperfection, simply is: There is no one to ‘blame’ for our errors — neither ourselves nor anyone nor anything else. Spirituality helps us first to see, and then to understand, and eventually to accept the imperfection that lies at the very core of our human be-ing.
To the cynic, that might sound a bit self-helpish but now see this, another favorite excerpt from Freedman:
To be witness, observer, and storyteller, and to develop and refine the skills of each, is to accept the burden of independent thought. It is to reject the easy comforts of our conventional wisdom or popular dogma. It is to welcome the dissonance of human events and render that dissonance with coherence and style. All of these exercises stretch the brain and all of them elevate the spirit.
I relate the two thoughts because I think welcoming the dissonance of human events requires us to welcome a fractured self first, which might help us to ask “spiritual questions.” Popova offers another excerpt:
Listening to stories and telling them helped our ancestors to live humanly — to be human. But somewhere along the way our ability to tell (and to listen to) stories was lost. As life speeded up, as the possibility of both communication and annihilation became ever more instantaneous, people came to have less tolerance for that which comes only over time. The demand for perfection and the craving for ever more control over a world that paradoxically seemed ever more out of control eventually bred impatience with story. As time went by, the art of storytelling fell by the wayside, and those who went before us gradually lost part of what had been the human heritage— the ability to ask the most basic questions, the spiritual questions.
That’s a little Monday morning food for thought, and an insight into what’s drawn me to journalism—a space it seems, that allows for a very continuous, multihued deepening of one’s humanity. —Jihii
Bonus: If you didn’t check out our #whyJournalism survey results from a while back, you can do so here.
(via futurejournalismproject)
Journalism took a break in Greece today — many media outlets are on strike, in protest of wage cuts.
Journalists in crisis-hit Greece have gone on strike to protest pay cuts, rising unemployment, and to press for the signing of new collective wage contracts.
The 24-hour strike stopped all TV and radio news broadcasts Monday, while most internet news portals were not updating their content. No newspapers will be published Tuesday.
Could you imagine if the news just … stopped one day? Not just one newspaper — but nearly all of them? Pretty crazy. Best of luck to the journalists who put themselves on the line today.
Infographic: How Social Media is Replacing Traditional Journalism for Breaking News
via Bill Moyers:
As of 2012, online news revenue has surpassed print news revenue, and more people are using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter for news than ever before. This infographic shows that nearly half of all Americans get their news from online sources at least three times a week. Learn more about how social media is supplanting traditional media in today’s smart chart.
H/T: Schools.com
This American Life retracts ‘Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory’
Ira Glass writes: We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China - which we broadcast in January - contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth, and this weekend’s episode of our show will explain the errors in the story. Details on our blog.
Data and Journalism
Around the globe, the bond between data and journalism is growing stronger. In an age of big data, the growing importance of data journalism lies in the ability of its practitioners to provide context, clarity and, perhaps most important, find truth in the expanding amount of digital content in the world.
…
While the tools are improving, there are still immense challenges ahead, from the technology itself to education to resources in newsrooms. There’s also the matter of improving the level of fundamental numeracy in the media. “This is going to sound basic, but there are still far too many journalists around the world who cannot open an Excel spreadsheet, sort the values or write an equation to determine percentage change,” said Anthony DeBarros, the senior database editor at USA Today. And that includes a large number of the college interns I see year after year, which really scares me. Journalism programs need to step up and understand that we live in a data-rich society, and math skills and basic data analysis skills are highly relevant to journalism.
“We’re living in a data-driven culture,” said DeBarros. “A data-savvy journalist can use the Twitter API or a spreadsheet to find news as readily as he or she can use the telephone to call a source. Not only that, we serve many readers who are accustomed to dealing with data every day — accountants, educators, researchers, marketers. If we’re going to capture their attention, we need to speak the language of data with authority. And they are smart enough to know whether we’ve done our research correctly or not.”
— In the age of big data, data journalism has profound importance for society
The lonely life of the lowly copy editor
The newsroom is a highly romanticized work environment. Reporters banging away at their keyboards, BlackBerrys buzzing with insider tips from networks of secret sources. Editors huddled in conference rooms, debating what news is important enough to make the paper. You can see why this setting has been idealized by Hollywood - and, for that matter, by most of the people who work there.
But there is one aspect of the newsroom for which there is no romantic vision, a job that devalues ingenuity and invention in favour of emotionless, robotic consistency. This position is never mentioned in pop culture re-creations of the newsroom because it belies the assumed high-mindedness of newsmaking. It is the role of the copy editor.
- The lonely life of the lowly copy editor
Andy Carvin on how NPR uses Facebook. “We use the lens: Will our friends want to talk about this?” Via: This article on how NPR is experimenting with member station content on Facebook.
Interesting. Hope to see this experiment expanded to other member stations.
(Source: futurejournalismproject, via onaissues)
If there can be book trailers and album trailers, why not magazine story trailers? Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab looks at whether Esquire’s recent trailer worked and why.
After journalist arrests at Occupy Wall Street, US drops 27 spots on global press freedom index. Now ranked 47th in the world.
List of countries ahead of US on the Reporters Without Borders global press freedom index:
Finland, Norway, Estonia, Netherlands, Austria, Iceland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Cape Verde, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Ireland, Cyprus, Jamaica, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Namibia, Japan, Surinam, Poland, Mali, OECS, Slovakia, United Kingdom, Niger, Australia, Lithuania, Uruguay, Portugal, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, Slovenia, El Salvador, France, Spain, Hungary, Ghana, South Africa, Botswana, South Korea, Comoros, Taiwan…
Then the United States of America at #47.
Source: Reporters Without Borders global press freedom index, released today.
The U.S. falls on the Global Press Freedom Index thanks in part to Occupy. Fascinating.
(via shortformblog)
Stieg Larsson’s Posthumous Gift to Journalism
In CJR, Eric Alterman writes: “The late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest—have already sold upward of fifty million copies worldwide, and spawned three pretty decent Swedish films… What make[s] the trilogy so valuable to the cause of journalism are the things it gets right. Over the course of more than 1,750 pages, its author captures a remarkable number of the challenges that doing honest journalism involves, as well as the reasons it matters whether people keep doing it. This is significant, given the profession’s apparent inability to make a compelling case for itself, at least in the eyes of the readers, viewers, and listeners who do not appear to be concerning themselves terribly much with its rapid disappearance.”
‘The Elements of Style’ rap video. Good stuff.
ProPropublica Builds Transparency Layer into its Articles
ProPublica, the nonprofit, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative startup has introduced a tool to let readers explore source material used in their reporting.
In the image above, I’ve selected a highlighted phrase from an article by Marshall Allen about a woman’s fight for information about her husband’s death at a Texas hospital. Once selected, a windoid appears containing source material pulled from DocumentCloud.
ProPublica calls this “Explore Sources”.
Via ProPublica:
In the course of reporting the piece, Marshall made over 500 annotations in 64 documents he uploaded to DocumentCloud, many of which were sources of facts in his story. We thought readers would find these annotations useful, and may even use them to explore the documents on their own. However, we didn’t want to show them in a separate graphic or interactive feature, but rather sprinkled throughout the story itself.
So we made a special feature we’re calling Explore Sources. To try it, click the “ON” button next to “Explore Sources” at the beginning of the article. Words and phrases throughout the piece will turn yellow. Click these yellow highlights to see the portion of the source document from which Marshall got that fact. Once the annotation is visible, click the document image inside of the popup to go to the full document in DocumentCloud, or anywhere else to dismiss it.
Read on to learn how ProPublica then created a little app that the reporter can use to connect to specific DocumentCloud snippets when authoring into the organization’s CMS.
Love this.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
![pantslessprogressive:
Journalist tested for HIV without knowledge as he moved to Qatar
The man, who has not been identified, agreed to undergo medical tests at the request of [al Jazeera] when he moved to the Gulf state to take up an editor’s post at the Qatari broadcaster’s English channel in October 2010.
A month later, he was summoned to a meeting in the offices of al Jazeera where he was told his visa application had been denied and he was being deported. No reason was given.
The man, an experienced journalist who moved to the country alone, was taken by car to Doha Prison where he was put in a crowded cell and subjected to a full-body medical examination in front of other detainees.
When he was released after nearly a day’s detention, he was told that his al Jazeera contract had been terminated and he should leave Qatar within 48 hours or face arrest.
When the man returned to South Africa, he underwent further medical tests and found out that he was HIV positive.
Qatar is one of five countries that restricts people living with HIV/Aids from its residency rules.
The man said he was demanding his job back without success. “I have not been contacted by anyone in management from al Jazeera since I was deported,” he said. “I really simply want my job back, a job I can actually do from the Johannesburg offices of al-Jazeera.” [read more]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvnucguMMp1qzr73ro1_500.jpg)
Journalist tested for HIV without knowledge as he moved to Qatar
The man, who has not been identified, agreed to undergo medical tests at the request of [al Jazeera] when he moved to the Gulf state to take up an editor’s post at the Qatari broadcaster’s English channel in October 2010.
A month later, he was summoned to a meeting in the offices of al Jazeera where he was told his visa application had been denied and he was being deported. No reason was given.
The man, an experienced journalist who moved to the country alone, was taken by car to Doha Prison where he was put in a crowded cell and subjected to a full-body medical examination in front of other detainees.
When he was released after nearly a day’s detention, he was told that his al Jazeera contract had been terminated and he should leave Qatar within 48 hours or face arrest.
When the man returned to South Africa, he underwent further medical tests and found out that he was HIV positive.
Qatar is one of five countries that restricts people living with HIV/Aids from its residency rules.
The man said he was demanding his job back without success. “I have not been contacted by anyone in management from al Jazeera since I was deported,” he said. “I really simply want my job back, a job I can actually do from the Johannesburg offices of al-Jazeera.” [read more]
RIP Louis Silverstein, the guy who gave The New York Times its shine
An unsung journalistic hero: Before Louis Silverstein, newspaper design was a trade, not a profession. With the many changes he made as art director of the Times in the 1960s and 1970s, he helped change that. White space? More ambitious typefaces? Larger fonts? Abstract illustrations? Those were all his doing. Many of the conventions that modern newspapers now take advantage of came (in part) from Silverstein’s work. It took a lot of pushing, but Silverstein sold editors on these ideas. As a result, the Gray Lady is (and many other papers are) a lot less gray. And graphic design and news aren’t separate entities. Silverstein died Thursday at 92. (Also worth a read:The Society for News Design has a lot of anecdotes about an important figure in visual journalism.) source
(Source: shortformblog)
Stephen Colbert on CNN’s firing of approximately 50 journalists after the network completed a study on the quality of user generated content it was receiving via platforms such as iReport.
Colbert nails it. You savvy kids and your social tumblin’ are gonna be the death of us all.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
