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Some old-fashioned blogging in the link-and-comment style
Bring back the fun. Scott Rosenberg — who literally wrote the book on it — says blogging is enjoying something of a revival lately. Nicholas Carr senses a mood of exhaustion with what he calls Big...
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“Talk to the critics…” The Chuck Todd plan to restore trust in Meet the Press.
A disgusted viewer and longtime critic of the Sunday shows — that would be me — interviews NBC’s Chuck Todd about his attempt to remake the most famous of those shows. 1. PressThink: You told Breitbart...
View ArticleFirst Look Media: a personal update
In November of last year, I said that I was joining First Look Media, Pierre Omidyar’s start-up, as a (paid) advisor. Today, I am announcing that I am no longer involved in First Look. There is no...
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Why do they give us tenure?
That’s what I asked Jeff Hancock, the Cornell University professor who collaborated with Facebook on its ‘emotional contagion’ study, which subtly manipulated the news feeds of users to see if happier...
View ArticleFacebook’s phony claim that “you’re in charge.”
It simply isn’t true that an algorithmic filter can be designed to remove the designers from the equation. That assertion melts on contact, and a New York Times reporter who receives such a claim from...
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Chris Quinn, vice president for content at the Northeast Ohio Media Group…...
There is something going on at the news organization formerly known as the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the world should know about. It’s not hard to describe but it is hard to explain, especially...
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How to be literate in what’s changing journalism
In my ‘digital thinking’ class, the goal is for students to emerge fully literate in the changes affecting journalism. Here are the main currents and trends that I expect them to master by the close of...
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“Republicans have to show they can govern.” No, they don’t. Please stop...
A reporter’s wish masquerading as an accepted fact. NPR’s Congressional reporter, Ailsa Chang, did it Wednesday morning. About Mitch McConnell, soon to be Senate leader, she said: If he wants to see...
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“I had just arrived in the Chicago bureau and I needed a story…”
Many years ago I was sitting around in a hotel bar with some journalists who were telling tales, and one of them started an anecdote this way: “I had just arrived in the Chicago bureau and I needed a...
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When to quit your journalism job
When the sales people are happy to sell what the newsroom is happy to make, there you have a well-run editorial company. So measure your own newsroom’s misery by its distance from that (ideal) state....
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A (brief) banking theory of newsroom trust.
The less help you give me in the tricky act of extending my trust to you, the more likely you are to wind up with a negative balance. In this short post I want to clear something up about how trust...
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A brief sketch of the “full stack” (intellectually speaking…) news and...
Meaning: it has its own way of doing things, its own ideas about what is worth doing, and it implements them from end to end. I was talking to a media executive the other day and he mentioned his...
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Brian Williams has not led. What’s an anchor for?
Why wasn’t Williams the one interviewing the military veterans who could help him correct his faulty account? That’s what a leader of a news division would do— I mean, if he is really a leader. I...
View ArticleThe “conflation” that Brian Williams confessed to began in 2003
Other NBC people were involved from the beginning. In his weekly column David Carr of the New York Times wrote this about NBC’s Brian Williams troubled tale of getting shot at in a helicopter over Iraq...
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Bill O’Reilly is a performance artist, and his genre is “resentment news.”
Sunday I appeared on CNN, trying, along with ‘Reliable Sources’ host Brian Stelter, to describe what’s different about Fox News— and to explain why Bill O’Reilly isn’t in trouble with his bosses for...
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NBC would be insane to let Brian Williams return
“Put yourself in Steve Burke’s chair. You have learned that the guy to whom your company gave the top job doesn’t really desire it…” Brian Stelter of CNN recently reported that Lester Holt, filling in...
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Full stack credibility
There are benefits to operating a news site that not only publishes journalism you can trust, but extends trust production all the way through the start-up “stack.” Last week Jim Brady, founder and...
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Journalists have to decide what to do about candidates who are climate change...
Claims that climate science is a hoax, that human action is not a factor: these are not defensible positions in a normal debate. They are ways of saying — and saying to the press — hey, the evidence...
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Rolling Stone’s ‘A Rape on Campus.’ Notes and comment on Columbia J-school’s...
The key decision Rolling Stone made was made at the beginning: to settle on a narrative — indifference to campus rape — and then go off in search of the story that would work just right for that...
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Good Old Fashioned Shoe Leather Reporting
“The scenes in All the President’s Men that show Woodward and Bernstein crisscrossing Washington on foot or ringing doorbells at night are shoe leather mythology in its most concentrated form. Making...
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