Entries associated with the tag "Journalism":

From the Daily Bellwether: "Somehow, the Ohio General Assembly has gotten into the act with a law that limits access to certain public records about people who have gun permits to journalists. Big News and its industry lobbyists and editors helped craft the law. Meanwhile, [the word] novelist has not been hijacked. It means someone who is writing a novel. Author still means writer. Poet means someone who works in verse. Diarist is someone who keeps a diary. Many bloggers publish web logs, which is a recent arrival in the digital-era lexicon that describes an electronic journal. But journalists -- writers who record daily events, who journalize -- apparently can work only in journalism, which has come to be defined by the big media as the big media." (H/t Munir Urami at The Blogging Journalist.)

Quite aside from the personal interest of those of us who lack any credential other than experience, should the government even be in the business of certifying those who can get information or ask questions? Too much like judging its own case.

And it's not as though the credentialed have distinguished themselves. Environmental Journalism Now rips Time a new one for photofaking.

According to its Web site, the Society of Environmental Journalists "is not a public relations or an environmental advocacy organization," and you can't even be a member if you or your employer lobby or do PR work on environmental issues. (I was a member for a year and recall how careful they are about that.) So I was unpleasantly surprised to read Katie Coleman's gripe about some sessions of the group's last two conferences. She's at Michigan State University's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism and posted on the conference blog.

She recalled a panel held last year on climate change:

"One of the panelists was a former Bush advisor; he was obviously intelligent, articulate, and motivated by forces other than those that inspire most SEJ members. On a subject on which we all most decidedly agree, his candor in representing the 'other' viewpoint was what made the panel interesting, informative, and unique. But somewhat unfortunately, what sticks out most in my mind from this event was the embarrassing behavior of some of our fellow SEJ members and journalists.

• When bad theology meets bad biology. PZ Myers retells the story: "A woman donates one of her kidneys to another woman in need. Later, the recipient leaves the Christian faith. Now the donor wants her organ back. 'Smith [the donor] was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks [the recipient] to reconvert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses. "I feel helpless," she says. "Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who's going to hell."'" Myers probes the layers of idiocy here, and in the process reveals the denominational choices of several of his own organs.  [UPDATE AND APOLOGY:  THIS STORY IS BOGUS.  The fact that PZ and many others were also taken in doesn't make me feel any better.]

• "Appearances are not deceptive; it only seems as if they are." Considered by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber.

• A female science prof is married but doesn't wear a ring -- and many people in her life object. "I keep thinking that eventually some of my relatives might change their mind about the significance of a wedding ring, as my husband and I remain happily married and my ring-wearing siblings/cousins and others divorce, but it hasn't happened yet."

• What is the most absurd thing you believe? Some answers here and a few more here. Not sure I'd want to have lunch with these people, though. (Note: Not quite the same as the book What We Believe But Cannot Prove.)

• What would A. A. Dornfeld think?  The Beachwood Reporter isn't alone in being fed up with the Sun-Times's local-journalism-as-stenography these days. It is alone in finding the best put-down: "This is Chicago: If your mother says she loves you, you ask a few officials if it's true and then print it."

• Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy puts his last nickel into a rigged slot machine when he calls the following item from Time magazine "intriguing": "Previewing the final quarter of Bush's presidency, [administration] officials disclosed to Time that the administration is formulating a huge energy initiative designed to 'change the whole nature of the discussion' and challenge the G.O.P., Democrats, the oil and electricity industries, and environmentalists. An adviser said Bush's views about global warming have evolved. 'Only Nixon could go to China, and only Bush and Cheney--two oilmen--can bring all these parties kicking and screaming to the table,' the adviser said." For pity's sake, just admit the guy is a loser and go home. He hasn't evolved since the Devonian Era. Besides, you'd need an extra universe full of electrons to list all the Nixon-goes-to-China moments Bush has blown.

• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution nails Blurb.com, a self-publishing enterprise soliciting vain bloggers to compile their posts into books: "Translating good blog ideas into book format is best done by people who . . . have experience writing books, or who have journalistic experience, not by people who have large staplers."

• Brendan Nyhan's mental health is better for not knowing that the Chicago Tribune still uses ink on Charles Krauthammer. Here Nyhan finds that Krauthammer has invoked not merely the Munich analogy but the exact same quotation with regard to China in 1989, North Korea in 1994, Russia in 1994, and Iran last month. (Of course the analogy is sometimes appropriate--even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then.)

• Ed Brayton calls attention to a Toledo Blade story about a proposal that originated in the Catholic Church and was furthered by Ohio's Republican attorney general: "An Ohio legislative panel yesterday rubber-stamped an unprecedented process that would allow sex offenders to be publicly identified and tracked even if they've never been charged with a crime." Anybody can be so labeled without any smidgen of due process. You know what everybody thinks of when you say "Salem, Massachusetts," even after 300 years? Try saying "Ohio" in 2306.

• So many ways to demotivate, so little time. Posters and paraphernalia to culture-jam any imaginable corporate propaganda.

• Brian Dillon at frieze: An established magazine has to "keep reminding your readers of that first flirtatious thrill, even as you settle into something like domestic routine with your faithful subscribers. At which point, in a sense, you’re already sunk: you’ve begun to second-guess your readers’ motives--or worse, to service their whims: their sensible preference for information over style, their taste for gossip, their impatience with illegible typefaces." (Hat tip to kottke.)

• Of 12 things Guy Kawasaki wishes he'd learned in school, one is how to give good voicemail: "First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people play back your message to get your phone number. . . . Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an e-mail that says, 'Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.' Just say, 'Tuesday, 10:00 AM, at your office.'" (Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who also quotes a list of 10 things never to buy new.)

• Forty-six kinds of male privilege, including item number 2: "I can be confident that my coworkers won’t think I got my job because of my sex--even though that might be true." Unlike most employers, symphony orchestras now have blind auditions, in which hiring decisions are made without knowledge of the applicant's sex. In a 1997 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse gathered data from audition records and found that blind auditioning “increases by 50 percent” a woman’s odds of getting past preliminary auditions, and increases by several times the chance that a woman will win the final round of auditions.

• Chartreuse intervenes on behalf of those born after 1982: "The only thing your parents got right was multiculturalism. Everything else is questionable. . . . I know we’re at war but the world is flat. A Jew hating redneck who lives next door is just that, a Jew hating redneck who lives next door. You probably have more in common with a skateboard-riding, hip-hop-listening kid who lives in India. It’s the values that are important, not the land." (Hat tip to Abstract Nonsense.)

The MSM and blogs are coevolving into . . . who knows what. I'll leave the details for the techies to sort out in the future, but right now no one with even a passing interest in politics can keep up with the conversation without reading certain blogs--or talking to someone who does.

• In Illinois, Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and its cousin Illinoize--a metablog incorporating many points of view--are the best. This morning Miller drew on Tribune reporting to make clear the fact that Gov. Blagojevich's administration is setting up the same defense that Mayor Daley patronage chief Robert Sorich tried. Sorich claimed he only made "recommendations." That defense didn't save him, and Miller thinks it's unlikely to work for Blago.

• In the U.S., Brad De Long's Semi-Daily Journal is a gateway drug. Thursday morning he drew on New York Times analysis and other sources to explain why the upset of incumbent Senator Joseph Lieberman in the Connecticut primary was an uprising of "irate moderates." In the process he pulverized what little is left of Washington Post columnist David Broder's reputation.

• For those who'd rather think about politics than commit it, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has a splendid post ("The Libertarian Vice") explaining how libertarians often beg the question: "The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed. . . . But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government. The Finnish government has supported superb architecture. The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state. The interstate highway system in the U.S. was a high-return investment. In the area of foreign policy, we have done a good job juggling the China-Taiwan relationship. . . . It is possible to agree with the positive claims of libertarians about the virtues of markets but still think that improving the quality of government is the central task before us. One could love markets yet be some version of a modern liberal rather than a classical liberal. This possibility makes libertarians nervous, thus their desire to fix the quality of government in advance of making an argument."  Oh, just read the whole thing.  (FYI:  He links to his May 2, 2005, post on the characteristic vice of liberalism:  "The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of.")

A few years ago, I had to subscribe to multiple magazines--and wait up to a month--to find this much great reading. Now all this and more is at our fingertips every day.

To paraphrase your grandmother: if you can't say anything new, don't say anything at all.

So says Steven Berlin Johnson, who has wasted more time on yet another article (this one in the New Yorker) about the blogosphere vs. regular journalism. He proposes "five things all sane people agree about" on this subject, and asks all those who are just repeating them to please STFU:

• Blogs aren't historically unique. (I am legally required to agree with this point, as it's the basis of the Reader's claim to have been performing bloglike functions in print since August 1985.)

• Most bloggers are all about themselves and are uninterested in news or politics.

• The remaining minority will continue improving their coverage and analysis.

• Mainstream journalism isn't going away anytime soon.

• Mainstream journalism will continue to have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than most blogging.

Three out of five ain't bad--I want to cross off, or at least scribble over, the last two points. If this be insanity, make the most of it.

Coming from what used to be called the alternative press, I was dubious of the mainstream media long before most bloggers were born. The signal-to-noise ratio in the mainstream media is unacceptably high because mainstream reporters have no straightforward way to explain that they have been lied to by government officials, other than to repeat the lies and (long after the jump) perhaps acknowledge that some people think otherwise.

Nor do the MSM have good ways to report on scientific issues where they need to distinguish between real scientific controversies (like just how birds are descended from dinosaurs) and bogus controversies ginned up by dogmatic special pleaders (like whether evolution ever happens). In such cases you often get he-said-she-said stories, a format that frequently ends up causing a measurable decline in the sum total of human knowledge.

Those are structural problems. In practice, conditions aren't even that good, because mainstream reporters fail to follow their own best standards (or real-world expertise) even when their conventions allow it. Economists Dean Baker and Brad DeLong regularly pulverize the acts of journalism committed by the Washington Post and New York Times. The best recent example is here. 

. . . but this time he's on to something. He writes,

"my own experience with this blog has only hardened my belief in the intrinsically derivative nature of blogging. As those of you who read the New Yorker know, I wrote a review of the book Wages of Wins this spring, and then blogged about it. The review and my posts prompted a good deal of comments, both on this site and on other blogs. But when I did a search, I was unable to find anyone, among the many who commented on my comments on Wages of Wins, who had actually read the book itself. That’s weird, I mean, it’s a short book. And it's really not that expensive. But nobody—even those who were in highest dudgeon about the book’s conclusions—seemed to want to do more than comment on those who had already commented. Isn’t that the very definition of derivative?"

Indeed. Earlier in his post he makes a different argument that's kind of dubious. There he defends traditional media on the grounds that bloggers very often play off them and link to them--hence blogs are not the future.  "Newspapers continue to perform an incredibly important function as informational gatekeepers—a function, as far as I can tell, that grows more important with time, not less."

Well, not so much. Blogs are having some success at doing what the alternative press has long tried to do--keeping the institutional gatekeepers honest, through commentary and independent reporting. How the media and the blogs will function together remains to be seen, but their relation is already symbiotic.

About books, Gladwell's making a different argument--not that bloggers are derivative but that they often don't take the time to know what they're being derivative of. On that point, he's surely on target. We bloggers are in a hurry to be first. This blog will be a month old tomorrow, and by my rough count I've had ten posts that were primarily about particular books. In two cases I had read the book from cover to cover. Just because 20 percent is better than average doesn't make it a passing grade, especially if I was unfair to the rest. 

Following the corruption convictions of four mayoral aides, Friday’s Tribune listed Mayor Richard M. Daley’s “five certifiable successes” to contrast with his failure to clean up city government. (I believe it was Don Rose who described Daley’s tenure as state’s attorney in the Reader--quoting from memory--to the effect that he promised to look for corruption in high places but wasn’t tall enough to find any.) At the Beachwood Reporter, Rhodes annihilates the Trib’s conventional wisdoms like a master chef filleting and dicing without seeming to move or breaking a sweat. One of the five:

Oh, but he fixed the Chicago Housing Authority, didn’t he?

“No one opposed tearing down the towers--if a workable plan for where those residents would go was in place. It wasn't. Just as the critics predicted, most former CHA residents are not returning to affordable, mixed-income neighborhoods promised by the city. Instead, they have largely resegregated in worse conditions than where they started. The point of public housing reform wasn't a beautification plan to remove the eyesores, but to provide a decent place for people in need to live.”

Leave this blog and go read the whole thing. (It’s quick.) Then put TBR on your RSS feed.

Tom Stites wasn’t surprised when the Pew Center recently unearthed numbers showing that newspaper readership has plummeted almost exclusively among those earning less than $50,000 a year.

“When I was breaking in as a reporter, I ran the police beat for the Kansas City Times. The managing editor, a crusty old guy named John Chandley, explained that he wanted me to provide at least a short item about every siren heard each night in all parts of the city, so our readers would know what had happened. And he meant all parts of the city, rich and poor. This kept me hustling, and to this day I remember the lesson: The newspaper I worked for wanted to sell papers to every household in the area.  They wanted 100 percent market penetration, or as close as they could come to 100 per cent. In 1962 and 63, when I was a police reporter, dailies everywhere wanted 100 percent market penetration. Newsday, where I worked in the 1970s, approached 85 percent penetration at its peak, the record for American newspapers. Now it's about 40 percent . . . .

“Now fast-forward to the late 1980s. By this time I was associate managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, and all the talk among the news management was about editing the paper for the top two quintiles of the income distribution. That means that 40 percent market penetration is the goal, not 100 percent, and that the Trib cares little about 60 percent of the people who might be its readers. And these people are the men and women in the bowling alley. Why doesn't the Trib care? Because these days non-affluent people shop at Wal-Mart, and advertisers like Lord & Taylor and stores that sell fancy wines don't want to pay for circulation among people who can't afford their wares. It's as simple as that.”

Read the whole thing, complete with dingbats, here.

(Hat tip to Undernews.)
 

Those who don’t read blogs tend to think that they’re extremist and weird. And those who pontificate on them are often staggeringly ill-informed. Alexander Cockburn, writing in CounterPunch, appears to think that moveon.org is a blog, and claims that the medium ruins writers:  

“Talented people feel they have to produce 400 words of commentary every day and you can see the lethal consequences on their minds and style, both of which turn rapidly to slush," Cockburn writes. "They glance at the New York Times and rush to their laptops to rewrite what they just read. Hawsers to reality soon fray and they float off, drifting zeppelins of inanity.”

Huh? What's up with those slushy zeppelins? I’ll just refer him to Whiskey Bar and be done with it.  

The egregious Lee Siegel of the flailing New Republic calls lefty bloggers “fascistic forces.” Even in today’s degraded and degrading media environment, this is silly. But Juan Cole thinks at least some antiblog nonsense has roots deeper than ignorance:

“For all the talk about freedom of speech and individual freedom in the United States, ours is actually a hierarchical society in which most people cannot afford to speak out unless they are themselves independently wealthy. . . . The very wealthy [not excluding the owner of the New Republic] are used to getting their way in U.S. politics and to dominating public discourse, since so much can be controlled at choke points. Journalists can just be fired, editors and other movers and shakers bought or intimidated. Look what happened to MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, who dared complain about the propaganda in the U.S. news media around the Iraq War. Phil Donohue, who presided over MSNBC's most popular talk show, was apparently fired before the war because General Electric and Microsoft knew he would be critical of it, and did not want to take the heat. Politicians who step out of line can just be unseated by giving their opponents funding (the Supreme Court just made it harder to restrict this sort of thing).

“A grassroots communication system such as cyberspace poses a profound challenge to the forces of hierarchy and hegemony in American society. . . . Kos and his community, in short, are at the center of a discourse revolution. Now persons making a few tens of thousands of dollars a year can be read by hundreds of thousands of readers with no mediation from media moguls. . . . The lack of choke points in cyberspace means that people like Kos can't just be fired. How then to shut them up? Why, you attempt to ruin their reputation, as a way of scaring off readers and supporters.”

This is clearly not the whole story, since none of the above deign to notice that there are plenty of conservative, libertarian, reactionary, and entirely apolitical blogs.  If you've seen some intelligent commentary on the subject, link it up!

A nice addendum to this, from Scott McLemee: "There is still a tendency to think of bloggers, podcasters, etc as some distinct group that operates apart from the worlds of academia, publishing, or offline culture. To treat them, in effect, as ham-radio operators--people who possess a certain technical know-how, and who talk mainly to each other. The reality is very different." Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia says that blogs combine "text, images, and links."  By that standard, the Reader has had one since August 16, 1985, when the ink for "The City File" first hit the back pages of the paper. (Check out an image of that column below.)

Of course, back then we had neither the word "blog" nor hyperlink technology. "Google" was just a way to misspell a very large number, and any reader who questioned the information in an item had to make phone calls and/or visit a public library.  But a bloggy substance was already there in that first column--short snips that referred to original sources and occasionally provoked conversation.  
 
In that first blog entry I noted that local entrepreneurs had to find venture capital in Minneapolis; today Marshall Field's is set to become Macy's, dancing to a tune played at regional headquarters in--Minneapolis. Other items back then chronicled drug-war insanity and racism in schools and public housing, and one quoted now-famous new urbanist Peter Calthorpe's case that city dwellers are doing the environment a favor just by . . . being city dwellers.  

The medium has changed, but the stroboscopic alternation of insight and idiocy goes on.