Asia Snapshots "is a blog that examines topics in Asia through the perspectives of interesting people interviewed by a group of bloggers in Mainland China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and more." Meet
Gao Qingrong and family, who along with seven other households are part of
an organic farm co-op in Anlong Village, Sichuan. Or there's
the tale of how one of the bloggers met Jun Jun, a male prostitute in Beijing; an encounter with
Silang Laji, a road maintenance worker in Kham, a Tibetan region of China; and
Gege, an enterprising journalist in Chengdu.
Via
posted by Abiezer
on Feb 28, 2010 -
4 comments
Looking for something to read? Check out the
best journalism Conor Friedersdorf encountered in 2009. And in
2008. He also updates a
twitter feed with pieces he comes across that he either missed or that might make onto a 2010 list.
posted by AceRock
on Feb 25, 2010 -
16 comments
"..when a victorious chief minister openly
admits that he himself approached the leading newspaper of his state with money for “positive stories” after learning that the newspaper had signed a “package deal” with his rivals to print
negative stories, you had better sit up and take
urgent notice"
posted by Gyan
on Feb 12, 2010 -
4 comments
"The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility."
"The Creed of Objectivity Killed the News" by Chris Hedges.
posted by AugieAugustus
on Feb 2, 2010 -
51 comments
Crime: A Tale of Two Cities. When "The Wire" gained popularity in Great Britain, we were contacted by a London-based journalist who proposed a job swap. Mark Hughes, a crime reporter with The Independent, a national newspaper in the United Kingdom, wanted to come to Baltimore to see if the city’s police officers, drug dealers, prosecutors and politicians bore any resemblance to those on show. We agreed to complete the exchange by sending our police reporter, Justin Fenton, to London to compare crime trends. [more inside]
posted by HumanComplex
on Nov 12, 2009 -
30 comments
Satire has long been part of discourse, with
written records going back to the Ramesside Period of Ancient Egypt, and two primary classifications of satire
originate with the Roman satirists Horace and Juvenal. Other notable
historic figures have also been authors of significant satire, but
not always with much appreciation.
News satire furthers the awkward stance with public, as
the public may read satire as an outrageous truth, and be angered instead of amused. The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart in specific, ranks well in
the fractured world of current news programming, and the show was noted in the New York Times as "
a genuine cultural and political force"
(previously), but you don't have take their word for it.
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism studied the content of The Daily Show for an entire year (2007), providing interesting (if slightly dated) details on the show. That year included their
much-viewed coverage fo the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. And in
poll results published July 24, 2009,
Jon Stewart was voted America's most trusted newscaster, apparently filling the position
previously held by Walter Cronkite. But is it because Stewart is
one of the few journalists willing to ask the hard questions or
has America been won over by "cheap laughs"?
posted by filthy light thief
on Nov 6, 2009 -
54 comments
The Price of Sex: Women Speak Since the collapse of communism in 1989, millions of former Soviet bloc residents have migrated abroad, looking for opportunities. These waves of migration breathed life into one of the oldest yet darkest criminal enterprises--the trafficking of human beings into sexual slavery. Hundreds of thousands of Eastern European women have been sold into prostitution. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, a Bulgarian who immigrated to the United States in 1990, has documented their journeys from villages in Moldova to the streets of Turkey and nightclubs in Dubai--where prostitution is an equation of supply, demand and desperation.
posted by autoclavicle
on Nov 4, 2009 -
70 comments
The Downie/Schudson Report, as it's widely called, is cautiously optimistic that journalism will survive, but doesn't beat around the bush. It urges a number of fairly radical, controversial suggestions on how to reinvent the news media without killing "accountability journalism," that critical, dirt-digging, power-questioning but expensive journalism America is famous for.
posted by jason's_planet
on Oct 29, 2009 -
27 comments
How To Save Media Jason Ponti from Technology Review offers some suggestions as to how traditional print publishers might save themselves from becoming irrelevant.
posted by reenum
on Oct 12, 2009 -
30 comments
Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a
talk at the Newspaper Association of America convention on April 9, 2009 in San Diego. He speaks about how Google and newspapers might co-exist in the future.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Oct 4, 2009 -
78 comments
One hamburger sent a 23 year-old woman into a coma for nine weeks. When she awoke, she could no longer walk. A
lengthy expose in the NYTimes follows the secretive chain of events bringing E. coli into her life. Contemporary carnivores read at your own risk...
[more inside]
posted by pjenks
on Oct 4, 2009 -
157 comments
John McPhee writes about
basketball,
headmasters,
oranges,
tennis,
hybrid airships,
nuclear weapons,
bark canoes,
Alaska,
the Swiss Army,
the merchant marines,
dissident Soviet artists,
shad,
long-distance trucking, and - Pulitzer Prize-winningly -
geology (282kb PDF). He discusses his work
here.
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Sep 30, 2009 -
32 comments
