Saudi journalist Hamza Kashgari was arrested in Kuala Lumpur and deported to Saudi Arabia for at the
behest of Interpol. Mr. Kashgari faces the death penalty in Saudi Arabia for a series of tweets insulting the prophet Muhammad, including 'I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don't understand about you I will not pray for you.' (
BBC,
Al Jazeera)
[more inside]
posted by jeffburdges
on Feb 12, 2012 -
55 comments
On the other side of the flimsy fence separating them from his neighbor Terry Thompson's property, Kopchak noticed that Thompson's horses seemed even more agitated. They were circling, and in the center of their troubled orbit there was some kind of dark shape. Only when the shape broke out of the circle could Kopchak see that it was a black bear.
Yesterday,
Esquire and
GQ each published lengthy pieces on the suicide of Terry Thompson and the crisis at his exotic animal zoo in Zanesville, OH. (
Previously)
[more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Feb 7, 2012 -
35 comments
"To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female. … Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and
Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. … Ultimately
Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore."
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Jan 11, 2012 -
45 comments
10b Photography has established itself as one of the world’s leading digital darkrooms, handling post-production for scores of award-winning photojournalists who trust that the company knows where to draw the line between processing and manipulation. [...] 10b is quick to point out that it is not a retouching firm. The term is often associated with Photoshop experts, who are hired to alter the look and shape of fashion icons, for example. So when it comes to defining Palmisano's role, it can get tricky. Post-processing in the digital age.
posted by shakespeherian
on Dec 21, 2011 -
28 comments
In this time of corrupt politics, police brutality, media dereliction, and increasingly vicious culture wars, there's perhaps no graphic novel more relevant today than the brilliant and blackly funny
Transmetropolitan.
Created by Warren Ellis back in 1997 and inspired by prescient sci fi novel
Bug Jack Barron, the series covers the work of
gonzo journalist, vulgar misanthrope, and all-around magnificent bastard
Spider Jerusalem in a
sprawling futuristic vision of New York so chaotically advanced that humans splice genes with alien refugees, matter decompilers are as common as microwaves, and a new religion is invented every hour.
As a callous Nixonian thug nicknamed
The Beast prepares for his re-election to the presidency, a primary battle heats up between a virulent racist and a charismatic senator whose
rictus grin masks some disturbing realities. When Jerusalem delves into
the machinations of the race, he breaks into a web of conspiracies that threaten the future of the country -- a problem only he, his
"filthy assistants," and the power of
intrepid journalism can defeat.
More: Read the first issue (or
three) -
browse images from
the new artbook -
Tor's read-along blog (
another) - Jerusalem's
touching report on cryogenic "Revivals" -
dozens of original sketches and
sample pages -
timeline -
quotes
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 17, 2011 -
55 comments
We got through the basics—how I’d arrived in Libya, why I was there—in civil tones. Then the Inspector asked, “If you were a professor at Harvard, why did you quit your job to come risk your life in Libya?” I explained as best I could that I had not been a professor but a graduate student, and part of my training was teaching undergraduates. The academic job market was tough and demoralizing, and the rigidity of the academic lifestyle had never appealed to me that much anyway. I had suspected for a few years that I’d be temperamentally better suited to working as a reporter. “Why you work journalist? You don’t study journalism, you study history!”
—
What I Lost in Libya by Clare Morgana Gillis, a journalist who was captured by Gadhafi forces.
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 6, 2011 -
12 comments
Women journalists confront harassment, sexism when using social media You come to expect it, as a woman writer, particularly if you’re political. You come to expect the vitriol, the insults, the death threats. After a while, the emails and tweets and comments containing graphic fantasies of how and where and with what kitchen implements certain pseudonymous people would like to rape you cease to be shocking, and become merely a daily or weekly annoyance, something to phone your girlfriends about, seeking safety in hollow laughter.
posted by modernnomad
on Nov 22, 2011 -
39 comments
Many listeners have written to us since our episode about Georgia Judge Amanda Williams, asking what ever happened to her. Did she face any consequences for the things we documented on our program? Yesterday, Georgia’s Judicial Qualifications Commission filed formal charges [PDF]
against her. The twelve counts include a number of things reported in our episode: sending away inmates for indefinite detention, jailing Charlie McCullough for 14 days for exercising his right to contest a drug screen, and using “rude, abusive, or insulting language” with individuals appearing before her. Local reporting from the
Altanta Journal-Constitution. Previously.
posted by gerryblog
on Nov 10, 2011 -
43 comments
The American Journalism Review asks,
is automotive journalism fundamentally corrupt? Car manufacturers pay for lavish trips and grant extensive seat time in their most desirable cars – in exchange for good reviews. Journalists who write critical reviews are blacklisted. Among the worst offenders is Porsche, who
blacklisted journalist Jack Baruth after lukewarm (or simply balanced)
print and
video reviews of the Porsche Panamera in 2009. Since then, Baruth, who owns three Porsches, has taken to compiling lists of Porsche’s deadly sins (
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6, but
not 7),
fabricating Porsche test drives,
bashing fellow automotive journalists who he sees as being
too soft on Porsche, and
borrowing privately-owned cars in order to write reviews. Baruth writes mostly for
The Truth About Cars, which guards the independence of its writers so fiercely that its reviews of the Prius, for instance, ranged from the
unremittingly hostile to
defensively positive to
relatively balanced. But what about journalistic independence in mainstream outlets, which often rely on freelancers who simply don't have the funds to be functionally independent of car manufacturers, and which don't want to displease advertisers?
posted by Dasein
on Oct 3, 2011 -
85 comments
A year ago this August, 72 migrant workers -- 58 men and 14 women -- 'were on their way to the US border when they were
murdered by a drug gang at a ranch in northern Mexico, in circumstances that remain unexplained. Since then, a group of Mexican journalists and writers have created' a "Day of the Dead-style Virtual Altar" Spanish-language website,
72migrantes.com, to commemorate each of the victims, some of whom have never been identified. The New York Review of Books has
English translations of five of their profiles. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 7, 2011 -
7 comments
"I can’t imagine a nonfiction writer who wasn’t influenced by the fiction he or she had read. But the “thriller-like pacing” you find in my writing may come more from my own beat than from thrillers. I walk fast and am impatient. I get bored easily—no less with my own ideas than with those of others. Writing for me is a process of constantly throwing out stuff that doesn’t seem interesting enough. I grew up in a family of big interrupters."
Janet Malcolm interviewed by Katie Roiphe in The Paris Review.
posted by escabeche
on Jul 25, 2011 -
6 comments
Could Rupert Murdoch really not have known about phone-hacking? Veteran Canadian journalist and TV producer Howard Bernstein thinks it’s possible, because something almost as bad happened at CTV News, which “produced a story on Chinese students keeping Canadians out of Canadian universities. It was a crock, fabricated by a senior producer on the show.... I am certain [the] then-president of CTV had absolutely no idea.... So why is it so hard to believe that Rupert and son didn’t know about the telephone hacking?”
posted by joeclark
on Jul 21, 2011 -
84 comments
ALEC Exposed is a wiki site set up by The Center for Media and Democracy which posts and chronicles leaked documents including more than 800 model bills drafted and approved by corporations during ALEC meetings. The documents have been analyzed and
marked-up for clarity. Journalists along with the general public are invited to
download the documents and sift through the
bills in order to help map the connections back to their own state legislation and legislators.
[more inside]
posted by stagewhisper
on Jul 14, 2011 -
22 comments
PR Industry Fills Vacuum Left by Shrinking Newsrooms - "You would go into these hearings and there would be more PR people representing these big players than there were reporters, sometimes by a factor of two or three" ..it's getting tougher to know when a storyline originates with a self-interested party producing its own story.
posted by thisisdrew
on Jul 12, 2011 -
43 comments
Threats, blackmail, bribery and illegal bugging all in the name of journalism?
Jack Anderson, the bombastic muckraker who broke some of the biggest political stories of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, would have felt right at home at the
News of the World. A
devout Mormon, Anderson was "
part circus huckster, part guerrilla fighter, part righteous rogue," a crusading journalist who believed that God was behind his work, no matter how he went about it.
[more inside]
posted by not_the_water
on Jul 7, 2011 -
15 comments
