Crap Detection 101 Howard Rheingold offers a fairly in-depth primer on media and internet BS detection. Lots of links to resources for enabling critical analysis of various information sources included.
posted by telstar on Jun 30, 2009 - 17 comments

Greil Marcus writes Real Life Top Ten for the Believer Magazine, in which he lists "anything that remotely has to do with music, a dress Bette Midler wore at an awards show or a great guitar solo in the middle of a song that otherwise wasn't very interesting." But he's been writing this column online for just about 10 years. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue on Jun 25, 2009 - 4 comments

Steven Wells, the ranting music journalist known as Swells during his time excoriating indie bands on the NME, has died of cancer. [more inside]
posted by mippy on Jun 25, 2009 - 40 comments

As turmoil continues in Iran, with protesters and members of the opposition party empowered by Twitter and camera-equipped cell phones, Clay Shirky gives a TED Talk on the emerging global era of bottom-up journalism, including the phenomenon of the transfer of social technology patterns from the second and third world to the first. Previously
posted by macross city flaneur on Jun 16, 2009 - 48 comments

The Medill School of Journalism's Washington Program revealed its Pentagon Travel project last week (multimedia). Most privately paid for travel was found to be within the bounds of federal law, but some still show a clear conflict of interest. Key findings: From 1998 through 2007, sources outside the federal government paid for more than 22,000 trips worth at least $26 million. The medical industry paid for more travel than any other outside interest — more than $10 million for some 8,700 trips, or about 40 percent of all outside sponsored travel. Among the targets: military pharmacists, doctors, and others who administer the Pentagon’s $6 billion-plus annual budget for prescription drugs. Medill acquired 10 years worth of trip data and partnered with the Center for Public Integrity to form a searchable database which includes destination, date, sponsor, sponsor nationality, cost of trip or agency.
posted by Smedleyman on Jun 16, 2009 - 3 comments

When authors and poets write the news "It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz (scroll down and select June 10th) editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news. Read articles on integration at the giraffe enclosure, love in the cancer ward, mosaics in Tel Aviv, addicts at the Jerusalem rehab centre, and a visit to the grave of a holy man, among others. [via]
posted by dhruva on Jun 12, 2009 - 10 comments

Lens is the new photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it will draw on The Times' own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century. Features in their first week include: Essay: Slow Photography in an Instantaneous Age, about what it means to shoot on large-format film in the digital age; Showcase: A Prom Divided, a multimedia feature about a segregated prom in 2009 south-central Georgia.
posted by netbros on May 22, 2009 - 9 comments

Excerpt 1: More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq. Excerpt 2: More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq. Can you tell which is Josh Marshall writing on Talking Points Memo on May 14 and which is Maureen Dowd writing in The New York Times on May 16?
posted by Joe Beese on May 18, 2009 - 138 comments

The Carolina Photojournalism Workshop was founded in 2004. Each year a small group of UNC multimedia students travel to a different part of the state to produce a web documentary. 2008: Cape Fear to Down Here, 2007: Smoky Mountain Stories, 2006: Stories from the Crystal Coast, 2005: Highlands, NC, 2004: Changing Wetlands Changing Ways.
posted by netbros on May 8, 2009 - 3 comments

Help, I'm a prisoner in brain fiction factory [more inside]
posted by fcummins on May 7, 2009 - 24 comments

Steve Coll [pdf], Marissa Mayer [pdf], and Arianna Huffington [pdf] testified today at the Senate Commerce Commitee's hearing on The Future of Journalism, but clearly the main attraction was David Simon [pdf].
posted by Jeff_Larson on May 6, 2009 - 22 comments

My gut reaction was that the story--although a legitimate consumer complaint—seemed to reinforce a cultural stereotype about Black people and chicken. I know for a fact that no one on our staff meant for that to be the point of the story, but the fear that we would be accused of this sounded an alarm to me. It’s sad that I even had to worry about this.

The death of SciAm. It's no secret that print media is getting hit pretty hard, but the butchering of Scientific American seems particularly brutal. [more inside]
posted by rosswald on Apr 23, 2009 - 50 comments

Bill Moyers Journal, April 17, 2009 From crime beat reporter for the BALTIMORE SUN to award-winning screenwriter of HBO's critically-acclaimed The Wire, David Simon talks with Bill Moyers about inner-city crime and politics, storytelling and the future of journalism today. Sorry for the one link post.
posted by dougzilla on Apr 21, 2009 - 23 comments

Child labor in Bangladesh
posted by Joe Beese on Apr 15, 2009 - 28 comments

Adam Curtis on the rise of "Oh Dearism" in television news. [SLYT, Via]
posted by homunculus on Apr 9, 2009 - 41 comments

The New York Evening Graphic was published by Bernarr Macfadden, body builder, health crusader, and prolific author (Strong Eyes [1901], How Success is Won [1904], and Brain Energy [1906] to name a few of his hundred titles). [more inside]
posted by starman on Apr 8, 2009 - 5 comments

The Huffington Post just announced that it is launching a new initiative to produce a wide range of investigative journalism — The Huffington Post Investigative Fund. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue on Mar 30, 2009 - 27 comments

Newspapers might be dying, but does it matter? Here's what journalism 2.0 looks like: Spot.us is crowd-funded news for the masses, ReportingOn is Twitter for journalists, Everyblock is ultra-hyperlocal and Connectifyed tells us it'll analyze our social networks.
posted by nospecialfx on Mar 16, 2009 - 41 comments

Somewhat quietly within the past couple weeks, two major newspapers, on each side of the Atlantic, have opened up their data and content APIs. Last month, on their Open blog, the New York Times introduced their Developer Network. Then just yesterday, on their DataBlog and OpenPlatformBlog, the Guardian launched Open Platform. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Mar 10, 2009 - 18 comments

They call themselves Visual Journalists. Prime among them is the Bombay Flying Club, a group of photo-journalists who are using the latest web and flash technologies to frame their online news gathering and documentary storytelling. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Mar 1, 2009 - 19 comments

Is the police blotter dying? Not so. In other parts of the world, the blotters are a little weird and violent. (nsfw)
posted by Xurando on Feb 19, 2009 - 36 comments

Nardwuar the Human Serviette is an interesting, abrasive and knowledgeable music journalist. Many of his interviews are on film and posted to youtube. Previously on metafilter. Warning: single link to a youtube user. [more inside]
posted by christhelongtimelurker on Feb 18, 2009 - 20 comments

The death of the news.

What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting -- on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who know the subject, have developed sources on all sides, strive for objectivity and are working with editors who check their facts, steer them in the right direction and are a further check against unwarranted assumptions, sloppy thinking and reporting, and conscious or unconscious bias.

In 1998, a journalist at The New Republic named Stephen Glass wrote a compelling piece in the influential magazine entitled 'Hack Heaven'. It told the story of how Glass witnessed a 15 year old hacker named Ian Restil being hired by a large Californian computer company named Jukt Micronics at a hacker convention as a security analyst after Restil hacked Jukt's website. But the entire story was, in fact, entirely fictional. [more inside]
posted by Effigy2000 on Feb 14, 2009 - 46 comments

Journalism may be going through a painful period but thanks to the web the once lowly information graphic is finally growing up to be all it never could on paper. Especially the New York Times seems to currently stand out in how frequently and quickly they build amazingly detailed and insightful interactive features. Consider the tracking of US Airways Flight 1549 or the piece on raising its engine from the Hudson. Other recent highlights: 9,955,441 parking tickets issues in NYC mapped by street, The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 — 2008, Ansel Adams's Yosemite, the view from the 10-meter platform explained, A look at the language of presidential inaugural addresses 1789 to the Present, A Map of the number of medals that countries won in summer Olympic Games, Going to the End of the Line, The 44 Places to go in 2009, an explanation of how the Pentagon responded to criticism of then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, The Soyuz Spacecraft, How the Towers Stood and Fell and many, many, more. [more inside]
posted by krautland on Feb 14, 2009 - 16 comments

The Canadian Journalism Project (CJP) and its websites, J-Source.ca (English) and ProjetJ.ca (French), provides a source for news, research, commentary, advice, discussion and resources about the achievement of, and challenges to, excellence in Canadian journalism.
posted by netbros on Feb 2, 2009 - 5 comments

Lunatic Magazine is a bi-annual online photo magazine presenting new work of photographers from around the world. Lunatic offers the opportunity to photographers to promote original stories, images, and photojournalism. (Issue1, Issue2, Issue3)
posted by netbros on Jan 28, 2009 - 7 comments

The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age. At Harvard they are working with the Business School on new business models, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society on understanding online life, and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations on one potential path for news organizations.
posted by netbros on Jan 22, 2009 - 11 comments

Journalism and complex public issues - a British newspaper editor's travails
posted by Gyan on Jan 17, 2009 - 8 comments

Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print—the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. Most of these scenarios assume a gradual crossing-over, almost like the migration of dunes, as behaviors change, paradigms shift, and the digital future heaves fully into view. But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May? [more inside]
posted by netbros on Jan 6, 2009 - 62 comments

Of all the offshoots of the "Stuff White People Like" meme, my favorite is Stuff Journalists Like. From Free Food to Press Passes to Exclusives, this blog is covering everything in the ink-stained-wretch's lifestyle, including some things they really just barely tolerate. For a more serious look at the Journalistic Profession during this time of Transition/Crisis/Insanity, there's always Jay Rosen, whose PressThink blog has been previously seen here and is getting more attention than ever via (shudder) Twitter. Or, for something more in-between... 10,000 Words uses a bright, shiny bunch of tag clouds, maps and other visual aids (plus fun with typography) to tell the journos how it should be done while doing it.
posted by wendell on Jan 2, 2009 - 20 comments

We should have known it was inevitable. Your local newspaper being written in India. Get ready for the outsourcing of journalism. Maureen Dowd doesn't like it.
posted by Xurando on Nov 30, 2008 - 57 comments

When I heard NPR's remembrance of Tom Gish yesterday, I figured someone would beat me to posting about him here on the Blue for sure, but apparently not. Gish, who died last week at 82, was the editor and publisher of The Mountain Eagle, a rural Kentucky newspaper. While still covering typical small-town happenings over the last 50+ years, he and his wife Pat (and eventually their kids) brought to light myriad injustices, from political corruption to poverty, safety violations in local mines to illiteracy. I found this appreciation, with bottom line proof of the Gish's popularity and influence, despite the death threats, firebombing, boycotts, and other hardships they endured:

"The population of Letcher is less than half what it was when they moved up here," said Ben Gish, editor of The Mountain Eagle and the couple's son. "But circulation has more than tripled."
posted by yiftach on Nov 25, 2008 - 6 comments

"Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal." [Via]
posted by homunculus on Nov 24, 2008 - 14 comments

Can nonprofit news models save journalism? The advertising-supported, for-profit institutional model of journalism (skip this ad) is on the wane. Except for a few large and successful outlets, investment in comprehensive reporting has suffered from a shrinking bottom line, even as the hoped-for development of citizen journalism has been generally underwhelming. But some see a solution taking shape in not-for-profit, independent, citizen-supported online news organizations that would employ skilled professional journalists. Pointing to the encouraging recent growth of NPR and PBS as news outlets, many industry thinkers are starting to agree that "The only way to save journalism is to develop a new model that finds profit in truth, vigilance, and social responsibility." Editors are beginning to experiment with models like that of Paul Stieger's ProPublica (a sort of reporting clearinghouse), Geoff Dougherty's ChiTown Daily News, The NYC Center for an Urban Future's City Limits, and Scott Lewis' Voice of San Diego. Great idea - will it work?
posted by Miko on Nov 23, 2008 - 35 comments

New friendly fire coverup: Army shreds files on dead soldiers. "Hours after Salon revealed evidence that two Americans were killed by a U.S. tank, not enemy fire, military officials destroyed papers on the men."
posted by homunculus on Nov 19, 2008 - 46 comments

The WSJ Photo Journal - The Boston Globe's Big Picture has company. [previously]
posted by kliuless on Nov 13, 2008 - 9 comments

Newsfilter: "After a century of continuous publication, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its weekday print edition and appear online only, its publisher announced Tuesday." [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole on Oct 28, 2008 - 35 comments

The Daily Beast is the latest venture from Tina Brown. (mis)Named after the newspaper in Evelyn Waugh's (awesome) novel Scoop, the site is a mixture of original journalism and curated links from around the web, and of middle and low brow. Already it's attracted attention for both a (previously spiked) feature on Jennifer Lopez and for its logo, which some allege is remarkably familar. Reviews have been so so, but its stated aim to "sift, sort, and curate" finally allows us to get the best of the web...
posted by Hartster on Oct 13, 2008 - 47 comments

…if you are the single newspaper in San Francisco or Kansas City or St. Louis, you are just highly constrained about how rigorous you can be in the accuracy of your reporting. Because the whole model is: You are appealing to everybody. Because the whole model is: You are appealing to everybody. … That's why the existence of an independent media sector is so important.

Fun lovin' prankster and b3ta user godspants edited the wikipedia page on Cypriot soccer team AC Omonia to include the "facts" that the fans are referred to as "the zany ones", wear hats made of shoes and sing a song about a little potato. Yesterday there was a match between Omonia and British club Manchester City. British Tabloid the Daily Mirror used the wikipedia "facts" in their build-up article. Daily Mirror obviously doesn't realise their journalist has been guilty of incredibly lazy research, despite the prankster emailing them, and the Mirror refers to the "Zany ones" in their post-match article the next day.
posted by hnnrs on Sep 19, 2008 - 43 comments

When Prague Spring Gave Way to Winter. [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Sep 17, 2008 - 12 comments

Have the wheels come off the straight talk express? At least one sleeping giant woke up today: the NYT finally gives Sarah Palin a thorough vetting and the results aren't pretty. The McCain campaign's aggressive - and many say dishonest - tactics in promoting Palin may have sparked the beginnings of a media backlash. Camp McCain's reaction: We don't care and intend to stay on offense. And about that offense, they will soon have some help: Group With Swift Boat Alumni Readies Ads Attacking Obama. How low will things go? At this week's Values Voters Summit, 'Obama Waffles' with racial stereotypes were all the rage.
posted by madamjujujive on Sep 14, 2008 - 1755 comments

WireFilter: David Simon speaks at USC Law on journalism and The Wire. (Youtube - 1:22:50; a few mic/sound problems in the first few minutes)
posted by fearfulsymmetry on Sep 12, 2008 - 16 comments

Nazis in the military is dedicated to the investigative project undertaken by journalist Matthew Kennard while studying for a MS in Investigative Journalism at Columbia University in New York. It was completed over six months and explores the increasingly liberal attitude of the U.S. military to neo-Nazis and white supremacists serving in the armed forces. via [more inside]
posted by hortense on Sep 6, 2008 - 81 comments

Storyboard is an almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature. The Birth of Storyboard is a (minimally edited) video of the conversation that spawned the project. The feature—that will be published in November—is about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. In the past he has woven the process of creating his work into the work itself, so Wired writer Jason Tanz thought it would make sense to do the same. Looking to promote his directorial debut, Kaufman has agreed to take part in the project.
posted by defenestration on Sep 3, 2008 - 6 comments

An Iraqi national with a fascinating background, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has been documenting the situation in Iraq. His video report is in three parts on YouTube (1, 2, 3). Of particular note is the cemetery on the outskirts of Sadr City (at 2:13 of segment 2), which is disturbing beyond words.
posted by dbiedny on Aug 18, 2008 - 14 comments

Journalist Leroy Sievers has lost his fight with cancer. He passed away Friday night. He was 53. His blog, My Cancer, and his commentaries on NPR, documented the progression of his disease while creating a community of those touched by cancer themselves.
posted by Toekneesan on Aug 18, 2008 - 19 comments

Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting supports journalists covering dangerous areas and underreported issues on all continents except Antartica, as is shown by this handy Google map showing all 45 projects. Among the projects are Caucasus, focusing on the easternmost part of Europe where just today conflict broke out, Scars and Stripes: Liberian Youth After the War, The Soybean Wars, about the booming demand for soybeans in South America, Alaska, global warming and its effects on Alaskan glaciers, Understanding Iran looks at ordinary Iranians, and Iraq: Death of a Nation? (Revisited). Links to stories are generally in sidebars on the left and right. The Pulitzer Center also has a blog called Untold Stroies which is frequently updated and keeps tabs on all 45 projects as well as related events, such as the recent TED Talk by PRI CEO Alisa Miller on the paltry reporting of international issues in American media with arresting graphs and visuals, which serves to place the mission of the Pulitzer Center in context.
posted by Kattullus on Aug 8, 2008 - 5 comments