That's No Space Station

Showing 19 posts tagged journalism

tech, humor, and nuance by David Chartier—tech distiller, freelance writer, Macworld contributor, wrangler of Finer Things in Tech

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At News Conference, Reporters Skip Past Gun Control and Face Instant Criticism - NYTimes.com

[Obama’s] words, after five days of extensive news coverage and national debate, were intensely focused on gun violence. He addressed no other topics. Yet judging by the questions that followed his address, most of the members of the Washington press corps had other things on their minds.

After his conference, mainstream journalists went on for 15 minutes about the fiscal cliff and other unrelated topics. Ridiculous.

Newtown to the media: You're making this nightmare worse - The Denver Post

The parents of a little boy who darted past the shooter just before his teacher and classmates were slaughtered put up a sign asking people not to ring their doorbell, CNN reported. Every time it rang, they said, their six-year-old son thought the gunman had found him.

Blogging sure hasn’t done any favors to journalistic ethics. But the mainstream media seems delighted to shoot itself in the foot with a sawed off shotgun.

“Shouting sells. We’ve known this for a long time. If companies are daft enough to let their ad buyers talk them into spending money on those who shout the most, then publishers would be reckless to leave money on the table. Some publishers say they would like to steer their publications away from yellow journalism, but in a compensation system based solely on pageviews and clicks, they are beholden to a Romneyesque principle: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

CounterNotions: Shouting

“Henry Blodget and the Business Insider editorial team aren’t the ones responsible for the poor state of journalism today,” Foremski says, “they are merely the expression of what’s currently possible given the means available - which isn’t much, a whole lot of nothing much (about 250 news stories a day at Business Insider).” Foremski suggests the current model of advertising — obsessed with pageviews over quality — is the problem.”

ShortFormBlog

I have to respectfully disagree with ZDNet’s Tom Foremski and ShortFormBlog. You can get pageviews with original reporting and good analysis, or you can succumb to the temptations of dreck, linkbait, and drama. Every publication has the same choice to make, Business Insider just chose dreck.

You can also choose to not play the pageview game and look for advertisers and revenue models that are more conducive to operating like a respectable publication.

The problem with the current state of journalism is that publications like Business Insider—and plenty others like it, such as Gawker—are allowed to operate without mediation, conscience, training, and, perhaps most importantly, consequence.

NPR Tries to Get its Pressthink Right » Pressthink

Jay Rosen on the revamp NPR did to its journalism ethics guidelines:

With these words, NPR commits itself as an organization to avoid the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth,” which as we know is not always evenly distributed among the sides in a public dispute.

Maintaining the “appearance of balance” isn’t good enough, NPR says. “If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side…” we have to say so. When we are spun, we don’t just report it. “We tell our audience…” This is spin!

via ShortFormBlog