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Letter to My Network: Join The Correspondent
This is for everyone who follows me on social media, or who has read my press criticism. All my former students. Fans of this blog, PressThink. Anyone who owns my book. Anyone who’s heard me speak. It...
View ArticleYep. The Correspondent screwed up in its communications with members. Here’s...
By request, here’s my post explaining how I view The Correspondent’s decision not to have its headquarters in New York or the US, and to base the English-language operation in Amsterdam. (I am an...
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Hating on journalists the way Trump and his core supporters do is not an act...
“Hate movements” are the mobilization of resentment against a particular group of people for political purposes. When journalists are the group targeted, those of us who believe in a free press have a...
View ArticleA current list of my top problems in pressthink, April 2019
1. Absent some kind of creative intervention, 2020 campaign coverage looks like it will be the same as it ever was. Who’s ahead? What’s it gonna take to win? The debacle in 2016 has not brought forth...
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Key steps in the citizens agenda style of campaign coverage
Part of a call to action for an alternative direction in election coverage, originated by the newsroom improvement company, Hearken, and the research project that I direct, Membership Puzzle Project....
View ArticleA current list of my top problems in pressthink, August 2019
1. The entire system for covering the Trump presidency is wrongly conceived. It needs to be rebuilt, faulty premise by faulty premise. But there has never been such a rebuild while the story is running...
View ArticleBad headline, small changes at the New York Times
Knowing the characters involved — columnist Joan Walsh and the New York Times — this announcement last week caught my eye: I canceled my subscription. I know a lot of folks will tell me I’m wrong. I...
View ArticleThe Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd
‘Round midnight on Christmas eve, Rolling Stone posted a short interview with Chuck Todd, host of “the longest running show on television,” NBC’s Meet the Press. Its contents were explosive,...
View ArticleResponsible parties at the New York Times explain to the country what went...
The New York Times has a franchise product in podcasting, The Daily with host Michael Barbaro. Last week it sent out to two million listeners a 50-minute interview with the executive editor of the...
View ArticleResponsible parties at the New York Times explain to the country what went...
This is part two. Part one is here. On January 31, 2020, The Daily with host Michael Barbaro sent out to its two million listeners a 50-minute interview with the executive editor of the New York Times,...
View ArticleToday we are switching our coverage of Donald Trump to an emergency setting
Even this far into his term, it is still a bit of a shock to be reminded that the single most potent force for misinforming the American public is the current president of the United States. For three...
View ArticleThe All Media Daily Briefing: A short concept sketch
A few days ago I was contacted by Canadian editor and journalist David Thomas with an idea. Why don’t all the major media companies collaborate in producing an independent daily briefing on the...
View ArticleWhy don’t they just walk out?
Last week Maggie Haberman of the New York Times observed about Donald Trump’s daily briefings, “As long as he’s fighting with reporters, he can attempt to shift focus from where the government has...
View ArticleFive improvements in the design of coronavirus coverage
One: End duplication, work together, publish at the same time. This idea comes from my friend Dan Gillmor in his March 8 Medium post. His complaint is about the division of labor in journalism. When...
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A current list of my top problems in pressthink, April 2020
1. The manufacture of confusion. The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the American economy, and killed more than 50,000 people— in an election year. After this was published, Nate Silver said he...
View ArticleThe plan is to have no plan
In this space I am parking my short description of the de facto plan the Trump government has for getting the United States out of the public health emergency caused by the spread of the SARS-CoV-2...
View ArticleYou cannot keep from getting swept up in Trump’s agenda without a firm grasp...
Not sure how long I’m going to be doing this. By “this” I mean critiquing the American press as it reports on national politics, and trying to get journalists to adopt better practices when they are...
View ArticleBattleship Newspaper
It was 2005 when Bob Sipchen, then an editor at the Los Angeles Times, said at a public forum about bloggers and journalists that he had always thought of the LA Times as “a heavy battleship under...
View ArticleFrom emergency to active threat: We have again switched settings in our...
On March 19 of this year we alerted readers to a shift in our coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency. We said then that we were moving to an “emergency” setting, which had these consequences for how we...
View ArticleThe big national news providers need threat modeling teams
As voters, as journalists, as citizens, and as writers, as participants alive in what was once considered a secure democracy, we are today living through what Masha Gessen (following Bálint Magyar)...
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