Behind the News
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November 06, 2009 04:57 PM
The Dangers of Disaster Reporting
A job that's fraught with professional and emotional pitfalls
By now, members of the national press have descended on Fort Hood, Texas to tell the story of the worst soldier-on-soldier massacre in U.S. military history.
Their job will be fraught with professional and emotional pitfalls. One of the biggest, and the one that poses the greatest potential danger at this point, concerns the “why” of the rampage that left...
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November 06, 2009 11:14 AM
Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists
In the aftermath of violence, lists suggest the benefits of collaboration
Journalism and curation—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine where the one ends and the other begins. The chicken/egg relationship between the two solidified into conventional wisdom during the aftermath of the Iranian election this summer, when journalists—mostly barred from shoe-leather reporting and other, more traditional methods of newsgathering—were forced to play the role of social-media editors. In the...
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November 04, 2009 09:22 AM
Contra Iran
Looking back at media coverage of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, thirty years later
Thirty years ago today, Iranian students invaded the United States embassy in Tehran and captured seventy-one American diplomats, keeping fifty-three of them hostage for 444 days. The Iranian hostage crisis, as it came to be known, was a watershed moment in U.S. history. All at once, it symbolized the haplessness of the Carter administration; the hostility to the U.S. in...
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October 29, 2009 04:14 PM
FCC Taps Waldman to Study “State of the Media”
Beliefnet founder to make policy recommendations to ensure "a vibrant media landscape"
Steven Waldman, veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet, has been tapped by the FCC to lead an agency-wide initiative designed "to assess the state of media in these challenging economic times and make recommendations designed to ensure a vibrant media landscape."
Waldman announced the move to his readers in a Beliefnet blog entry yesterday afternoon....
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October 28, 2009 10:56 AM
“Not Here This Year”
Despite numerous setbacks, National Conference of Editorial Writers goes on
The sixty-third annual convention of editorial writers could hardly have met at a worse time.
Only a few days earlier, many of the papers represented carried stories saying that despite some positive signs in the rest of the economy, the downturn for newspapers had yet to hit bottom. The Pew Research Center for People and the Press had released...
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October 27, 2009 01:31 PM
Man About Town
Meet Kery Murakami, founder of the Seattle PostGlobe
Kery Murakami, reluctant news entrepreneur, is the founder of the Seattle PostGlobe, a nonprofit Web startup that provides reported news for the Seattle area. He is also the site’s primary reporter, editor, art director, accountant, copy chief, IT troubleshooter, and press agent. “Six months ago I never thought I’d be here,” he says, somewhat wearily. “But this could...
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October 22, 2009 09:18 AM
Howard Kurtz, Missing in Action
Fox vs. the White House: Where's Howie?
Howard Kurtz scored a coup on his CNN show “Reliable Sources” two Sundays ago when White House communications director Anita Dunn came on to knuckle-rap Fox News, saying that the network
often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party....That’s fine, but let’s not pretend they’re a news network the...
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October 19, 2009 08:51 AM
‘Salon’ Saga Continues at the Post
If you’ve been enjoying a weekend-induced news hiatus, you’ve missed some strange developments in the Washington Post “salon” story. Here’s what happened over the last two days:
On Saturday, The New York Times published an odd “postscript” to its reporting noting that Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor, had known the proposed dinners were being promoted as “off...
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October 16, 2009 05:03 PM
Balloon Boy Takes Flight
Some magazine covers that will soon be among us
So the bizarre, twist-and-turn-laden balloon "flight" of six-year-old Falcon Heene yesterday Captivated The Nation…by which we mean, of course, that it Captivated The Nation’s Media. The Balloon Boy story, with its irresistible mix of human drama and utter strangeness, will surely continue to enthrall us until some other bright, shiny thing takes our attention—and not only on the nation’s cable...
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October 16, 2009 08:39 AM
The AP: Intimations of Politico
The news cooperative declares its new focus on news that gets used
Every other year, The Associated Press holds a summit to analyze pressing issues facing the company—culminating in an executive strategy session in Lake Placid, N.Y. The most recent Lake Placid process focused on, per AP managing editor Kristin Gazlay, “two planks of enormous import to AP journalists—how our content gets used (and, painfully, does NOT get used), and how the... Continue reading -
October 15, 2009 06:42 PM
Postcard from Chitrakoot
In a remote part of India, female reporters crusade for rural journalism
On a scorching afternoon in Chitrakoot, a woman named Tabassum walks into a small, sticky government hospital and sits poised with her notebook listening to the doctor. A reporter for Khabar Lahariya, a weekly rural newspaper that reaches 400 villages, Tabassum is investigating a story based on reports that villagers suffering from tuberculosis are not being treated. “We don’t send...
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October 14, 2009 01:05 PM
Iraq’s Missing Iraqis
A good book's great flaw
David Finkel’s book The Good Soldiers, about the experiences of a US Army battalion during the surge in Iraq, is getting standout reviews. The Good Soldiers "captures the surreal horror of war,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times last week, comparing the book to Michael Herr's Dispatches. Finkel, she added, “does a vivid job of conveying...
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October 12, 2009 11:39 AM
SEJ Accused of Protecting Gore
Filmmaker’s criticism is self-serving and wrong, however
An independent filmmaker accused the Society of Environmental Journalists of “protecting” Al Gore on Friday after the filmmaker’s mic was cut while challenging the former vice president to acknowledge alleged errors in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
Phelim McAleer, the co-director/producer of an independent film entitled Not Evil, Just Wrong, which purports to...
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October 09, 2009 10:58 AM
The New Great American Pastime
It’s fact checking
Fact checking, along with its kissing cousin “calling bullshit,” is becoming one of the great American pastimes of the Internet age.
We are in the midst of a blossoming of new forms of fact checking, particularly those that rely on crowdsourcing. This is a crucial addition to the discipline, because the traditional form of fact checking, which was primarily developed...
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Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
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