Behind the News
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November 30, 2012 03:29 PM
NY community papers struggle post-Sandy
Small papers were washed away when their readers most needed them, and they're still recovering
The Wave offices, post-Hurricane Sandy. Photo credit: Henry Gass
During Hurricane Sandy, the offices of The Wave, a community newspaper in the Rockaways, Queens, got hit by a five-foot tidal surge.
Now the paper’s general manager, Sanford Bernstein, is figuring out how to publish his weekly newspaper with half the equipment, a bare-bones staff, and almost no advertising to...
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November 27, 2012 10:21 AM
Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present
A report by Emily Bell, CW Anderson, and Clay Shirky has just been released
Today we publish our report, “Post Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present” from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School. We hope you will read it and let us know what you think.
The report came out of conversations provoked by Columbia j-school Dean Nicholas Lemann and builds on the work we have done in...
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November 21, 2012 06:50 AM
Translating America, into Wolof
How a radio host explains US politics to Senegalese listeners in New York and Africa
At about 7:30 p.m. on election day, as Dame Babou waited for the returns at Londel’s Restaurant in Harlem, he bristled. A disc jockey bumped Make it Funky, by James Brown, competing with ABC’s pundits, talking about the early results on wall-mounted flat screens. Women in business suits and men in Yankees caps chomped on yams and drinkers clinked their...
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November 20, 2012 03:30 PM
Martin Baron’s plans for WaPo
Will he bring the Globe's double-site strategy to the Post?
Boston Globe editor Martin Baron will be The Washington Post's new executive editor come January 2013, replacing Marcus Brauchli. Three days after his first visit to WaPo’s newsroom to meet his future colleagues, I asked Baron what strategies he planned to take from the Globe to his new job.
Last year, Baron told CJR about the Globe's then-new creation of...
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November 20, 2012 02:21 PM
Stories I’d like to see
Ad technolology that may threaten newspapers; winners and losers of the fiscal cliff
In his weekly “Stories I’d like to see” column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com.
1. Another threat to newspapers’ business models?
This article in The New York Times last Friday and this one in the National Journal pinpoint two important developments in...
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November 19, 2012 02:40 PM
A reporter is fired; colleagues quit in protest
The Hudson Register-Star reporter refused to include information in his story
On November 8, Tom Casey, a reporter at the Hudson Register-Star, a community paper in upstate New York, wrote an article about a city budget meeting. The next day, he was fired. The week after that, nearly half of the newsroom resigned.
The story that Casey, 24, wrote contained a lot of interesting information—the proposed budget for 2013 ($11.9 million),...
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November 19, 2012 11:00 AM
Israeli airstrikes hit Gazan media facilities
At least six employees were wounded
On Sunday morning, Israel’s warplanes attacked two media centers as part of its current military offensive against Gaza. The first of the two strikes hit a building where I worked for three months in 2010, and where my former colleagues at the Palestinian news agency Maan still work.
The first strike, at around 1:30 a.m. local time, hit the Shawa...
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November 19, 2012 06:50 AM
Buzzfeed president talks branded content
The future of media revenue has its roots in the past
The Columbia Spectator, The Blue & White, and the Columbia InterPublications Association hosted the Columbia Media Conference last weekend. The daylong event consisted of four panels covering mostly future of media industry issues with an impressive roster of panelists (keynote speakers included Mother Jones founder Jeffrey Klein and ProPublica president, CEO, and editor in chief Paul Steiger; New York Times...
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November 16, 2012 06:50 AM
An Occupy Sandy photo faux pas
A storm relief image that went viral with incorrect context serves as a social media lesson
A photo depicting a cluster of men in military uniform listening attentively to a woman with a plastic “OCCUPY” armband shot around the twittersphere this past weekend, cited as evidence of something pretty unusual: Occupy Sandy training the National Guard in relief work.
A sample of tweets:
Continue readingNational Guard receiving training from @occupysandy ow.ly/i/17cGF #sandy #volunteersandy
— Occupy Wall... -
November 15, 2012 03:30 PM
What’s the MATTER?
A Kickstarter-funded longform narrative science journalism site launches
MATTER, a Kickstarter-funded longform science journalism project, launched on Wednesday with its first article, written by prominent science writer Anil Ananthaswamy. Just shy of 7,800 words, it tells the story of a man, "David," and his struggle with Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Basically, David desperately wants to cut one of his legs off. He's helped on his quest by a...
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November 15, 2012 03:00 PM
Letter from a Londoner
The BBC is in crisis. Should you care?
This week, the BBC celebrates its 90th birthday. As birthdays go, it’s a rather unhappy one. In the last month, reports of scandal wracking the BBC have appeared in publications across the globe, each struggling to distill the absurdities of a historical culture of pedophilia and abuse that infiltrated Britain’s treasured public broadcaster. (Emily Bell has one of the best...
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November 13, 2012 11:00 AM
Stories I’d like to see
The clown-show economics of storm-hit utilities, and in search of open primaries
In his weekly “Stories I’d like to see” column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com.
1. My Alaska-Hawaii electricity repair team:
It’s 10 o’clock and the lights are out. Do you know where your local utility actually lives?
I have already written that...
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November 11, 2012 12:09 PM
What’s happening at the BBC
The Corporation is facing a serious challenge to its future and to its independence
“To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” —Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
A very British crisis needs a very British epigraph. The BBC has lost not one, but two directors general in the space of three months. The first, Mark Thompson, left the Corporation under what seemed like...
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November 9, 2012 03:00 PM
Now This News launches an app to grow its global audience
A new mobile and social news service for millennials is evolving
Things have been going well for Now This News since a spate of stories in September announced that the video news service was creeping onto the scene with some impressive hires. The mobile and social-focused startup, founded by Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer with former HuffPo CEO Eric Hippeau and Bedrocket’s Brian Bedol, rolled out its app, targeted at 18-34...
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