Charles Seife on journalism, news pegs and polls in Proofiness: The dark arts of mathematical deception: Most journalists are primarily event-gatherers, picking and packing the choicest and freshest events to present to their audiences. Every time there is a sufficiently interesting or important event of some sort—a plane crash, say, or an earthquake—journalists rush in [...]
Writing about Survival News yesterday, it behooves me to quote from Francine Adkins-Alexander’s “Progressive media’s wrong turn: Adversaries vs. Advocates”: It would seem progressive media has missed a tremendous opportunity by taking up the adversarial format. Even though individual programs have enjoyed great success and have succeeded to a large extent in countering much of [...]
This is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s primary run in West Virginia, where a large focus of his time was spent responding to fears over his Catholicism. This is from remarks titled “The Religion Issue in American Politics” that JFK made at the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, DC, April 21, 1960: What, [...]
I was really proud of myself last week when I made what I felt was a valid and illuminating numerical comparison: I wrote that the amount of Broadband Stimulus money requested for projects within the state of Alaska—projects serving rural and underserved communities—was on a per-capita basis about equal to the federal poverty level for [...]
A brief history of the United State’s subsidies to journalism and the press, from The Nation’s “How to Save Journalism” by John Nichols and Robert McChesney: Even those sympathetic to subsidies do not grasp just how prevalent they have been in American history. From the days of Washington, Jefferson and Madison through those of Andrew [...]
This lede is the baseline from which I think any discussion of contemporary journalism should begin: There have been various proposals to “save journalism” from the crisis brought on by digitalization. But by and large these ideas have less to do with meeting the information needs of a democratic society than with preserving the profit [...]
In the story writing process, I find creating lead-ins to be simplest, while crafting an actual story around it to be a difficult task. This morning I came up with the following, but was disappointed to find that the AP had done me one better: bq. Jerrod Rines is a pickup owning, Mexican stomping, full-blooded [...]
