Recently in Journalism Category
I've Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust. | The Free Press
NPR editor Uri Berliner warns about the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR: "In February, our audience insights team sent an email proudly announcing that we had a higher trustworthy score than CNN or The New York Times. But the research from Harris Poll is hardly reassuring. It found that "3-in-10 audience members familiar with NPR said they associate NPR with the characteristic 'trustworthy.'?" Only in a world where media credibility has completely imploded would a 3-in-10 trustworthy score be something to boast about."
Hyphens and Dashes: A Refresher - CMOS Shop Talk
The different types of dashes and hyphens and their appropriate uses, from the Chicago Manual of Style. There's the hyphen-minus you get when you press the key to the right of the 0, which is different from an en-dash - or an em-dash -- and is also different from a minus which is designed to align horizontally with the crossbar of a +. There are 2-em dashes used as a placeholder for illegible or expurgated text and 3-em dashes as a placeholder for a repeated author name in bibliographies. There's also a different Unicode hyphen character which looks the same as the hyphen-minus but doesn't match in text searches, a non-breaking hyphen, a figure dash (same width as a numeral in a fixed-width font), a horizontal bar, and a swung dash (a centered tilde that stands in for the headword in a dictionary entry, as different inflections of the word and idioms using that word are discussed.
Over a thousand false convictions, with owners of contract post offices blamed and charged criminally for errors caused by faulty software mandated by the UK Post Office. A complete failure of journalism and parliamentary oversight, resulting in bankruptcy, imprisonment, and suicide.
"I spoke to all the major media outlets. I briefed journalists at the BBC, Sky News, Channel 4 and ITV as well as all the national newspapers that I had all the proof that the Horizon scandal was the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history. Journalists were keen and excited, but none were allowed by their editors or executives above them to run the story.
"That it's been left to ITV to mine it for dramatic purposes - presumably with the aim of turning a profit - using the wrecked lives that its editors and journalists deliberately ignored for years, I find particularly foul. Some of these sub-postmasters killed themselves."
Kari Lake Fox 10 - Top rated Arizona news anchor resigns - YouTube
Kari Lake: "Sadly, journalism has changed a lot since I first stepped into a newsroom, and -- I'll be honest -- I don't like the direction it's going. The media needs more balance in coverage and a wider range of viewpoints represented in every newsroom at every level and in each position. In the past few years, I haven't felt proud to be a member of the media. I'm sure there are other journalists out there who feel the same way. I found myself reading news copy that I didn't believe was fully truthful, or only told part of the story, and I began to feel that I was contributing to the fear and division in this country by continuing on in this profession. It's been a serious struggle for me, and I no longer want to do this job any more."
Ken Fuson Obituary - Des Moines Register
Reporter writes his own obituary.
"In his newspaper work, Ken won several national feature-writing awards, including the Ernie Pyle Award, ASNE Distinguished Writing Award, National Headliner Award, Missouri Award (twice) and Distinguished Writing Award in the Best of Gannett contest (five times, but who's counting?). No, he didn't win a Pulitzer Prize, but he's dead now, so get off his back. There are those who would suggest that becoming a free-lance writer in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression was not a wise choice, but Ken was never one to be guided by wisdom....
"For most of his life, Ken suffered from a compulsive gambling addiction that nearly destroyed him. But his church friends, and the loving people at Gamblers Anonymous, never gave up on him. Ken last placed a bet on Sept. 5, 2009. He died clean. He hopes that anyone who needs help will seek it, which is hard, and accept it, which is even harder. Miracles abound. Ken's pastor says God can work miracles for you and through you. Skepticism may be cool, and for too many years Ken embraced it, but it was faith in Jesus Christ that transformed his life. That was the one thing he never regretted. It changed everything."
Why You Should Stop Reading News: Farnam Street
Shane Parrish writes:
"The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless. It's not important to your life. It's not going to help you make better decisions. It's not going to help you understand the world. It's not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you. The only thing it's really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior.
"The hotels, transportation, and ticketing systems in Disney World are all designed to keep you within the theme park rather than sightseeing elsewhere in Orlando. Similarly, once you're on Facebook, it does everything possible, short of taking over your computer, to prevent you from leaving. But while platforms like Facebook play a role in our excessive media consumption, we are not innocent. Far from it. We want to be well informed. (More accurately, we want to appear to be well informed.) And this is the very weakness that gets manipulated....
"Being well informed isn't regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year-old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be. Your first thought on something is usually not yours but someone else's. When all you do is consume, you are not only letting someone else hijack and direct your attention; you are also letting them think for you.
"Avoid the noise because it messes with the signal. Your attention is valuable, so why spend so much time on stuff that will be irrelevant in a few days? Read what stands the test of time. Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add more value than they consume. Read what prompts you to think for yourself. Read fewer articles and more books. Read books that have stood the test of time, those that are still in print after 20 years or so."
Media Miscues in the Covington Narrative | City Journal
"Reporters have always made errors, but mistakes should occur independent of ideology. What we're seeing instead is a pattern--media miscues always occur in the same direction, in favor of the liberal perspective. Over the last two years, countless "bombshell" reports have signaled grave danger for the Trump presidency, up to and including impeachment or resignation. Trump's son got an early look at the Wikileaks pages; Anthony Scaramucci was tied to a dodgy Russian hedge fund; Michael Cohen met Russians in Prague; Paul Manafort met Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; James Comey would testify that Trump was under investigation; and so on. As outrage ebbs from each discredited story, it is relegated to the memory hole in time for the next one to emerge....
"Ever since Trump's arrival on the national stage, the media have devoted themselves to destroying him, and, by extension, the ideologies that supposedly account for his popularity--white supremacy and toxic masculinity. Major media outlets have shed any pretense to rigor or probity, even as they make ostentatious shows of 'fact-checking' the president's statements.
"Obsession with white privilege focuses maximal scrutiny on any incident that tracks with the right narrative. Over the last year, we've seen a spate of cellphone videos capturing petty disputes amplified across social media and reported in the national media--as long as the footage depicts a white person complaining to or about a black person doing something relatively minor. Whether the incidents in question have anything to do with race is unimportant. Pushing the narrative that Trump has ignited a firestorm of white racism across the country requires a continual flow of stories making that point, regardless of accuracy or context. The relentless search for Trumpian villainy has precast the meaning of every story. All that remains is to fill in the blanks."
Heads Should Roll at National Review -- Jack Cashill
Jack Cashill writes about NR's lust for respectability, as demonstrated by the pains they took to distance themselves from his investigative work on TWA Flight 800 and Bill Ayers' role in the authorship of Dreams from My Father, and most recently demonstrated in their knee-jerk response to the Covington Catholic video:
"In truth, National Review editors have been dancing to the left's tune since its founding in 1955. To justify its condemnation of the John Birch Society in the early 1960s, one of its editors gave away the game, writing, 'We can't afford to jeopardize the grudging status we've earned in the Liberal community.'
"For all of founder William Buckley's virtues, he overly worried about the 'status' the liberal community begrudged him. As Lowry once noted, 'Mr. Buckley's first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks.'
"Over dinner with Lowry [in 2001] and just one other person, I talked about the documentary I was working on at the time. The subject was TWA Flight 800. He gave me the look I would come to recognize from my conservative betters. It was the "kook" look. He showed zero interest in the subject.
"In September 2008, I introduced the theory, for which the evidence was overwhelming, that Bill Ayers had a major role in the writing of Obama's memoir 'Dreams from My Father.'
"At 'The Corner,' on National Review Online, Andy McCarthy called my analysis 'thorough, thoughtful, and alarming--particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama's memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers' memoir....'
"...I am told that McCarthy caught a lot of heat internally for jeopardizing National Review's 'grudging status' among liberals. What I know for sure is that the link from Coates' article to McCarthy's goes nowhere.
"I suspect McCarthy's review was scrubbed almost as quickly as Frankovich's. I was unaware of it until I read Remnick's attack on it two years later."
Russell Baker: 'When Writing Is Fun, It's Not Very Good' - The Atlantic
"What I find about reporting now is you don't know what you don't know, because there aren't reporters there anymore. There's nobody covering closely the things they used to. The real valuable reporter is the guy who goes to the beat every day.
"That's the only way to do it. It's the guy who goes every day and says 'Hi,' talks to the secretaries, bumps into people in the corridors, urinates beside them in the men's room, they wash their hands together. And pretty soon he knows. You want to know what's going on in City Hall? We don't have many of those guys anymore. They're the people who have taken the buyout. We have too many stars now. I was aware of that when I started doing the [New York Times] column. I had to give up reporting and I hated it. I loved reporting. I just loved bumming around the Senate and talking to those people."
Satellite Image Guide for Journalists and Media - Pierre Markuse
"So you would like to use a satellite image in your article and you would like to explain it to your viewers? Here is a short guide covering some of the most frequently asked questions and giving some general explanations on satellite images."
Article covers image resolution, benefits of infrared and false-color images, using the Sentinel Earth Observation Browser to find an image, using open-source tools like GIMP to enhance or annotate an image and GIS tools like QGIS to overlay boundaries and other map features.
