Why I spoofed science journalism | Martin Robbins | Science. Bizarrely, the most read article on the Guardian website last week wasn't about Ed Miliband or the Labour party conference, but a quirky special-interest piece spoofing science journalism which I assumed only about three people would get. Apparently I hit a nerve, but why? What's wrong with science journalism? How did it become so dull and predictable? And how do we fix it? My point was really about predictability and stagnation.
The formula I outlined – using a few randomly picked BBC science articles as a guide – isn't necessarily an example of bad journalism; butscience reporting is predictable enough that you can write a formula for it that everyone recognises, and once the formula has been seen it's very hard to un-see, like a faint watermark at the edge of your vision. Journalism – Analysis = RSS Feed To see what I mean about predictability, take a look at the BBC Science & Environment news page. I could go on, but you can see 'the pattern'. Cobblers. Fundamental Units of Science.
..nil nisi bonum. « previous post | next post » I can understand why Margalit Fox would want to give such prominence to Edwin Newman's two books on usage in her New York Times obituary for for the journalist, who died recently at 91. Newman retired from NBC more than 25 years ago, and people who remember him are likely to be hazier on his journalism than on his 1970's bestsellers Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue, which are still in print (though only in large type and audio editions appropriate to a public of advancing diopter). But I wish they had left me out of it.
His prescriptive approach to English did not win favor everywhere. In an article in The Atlantic in 1983, the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg took Mr. Newman and the author Richard Mitchell to task for writing "books about the language that rarely, if ever, cite a dictionary or a standard grammar; evidently one just knows these things. ". Not that I have any reservations about my criticisms of Newman's books. Among the sins that set Mr. Mr. Bersenev. When Interviewees Record! An experiment/interview on journalism | Not Exactly Rocket Science.
How can journalists make the most of the interviews that they do? And how can interviewees protect themselves from being misquoted? I’ve been thinking about both of these questions for some time and was delighted when an excellent opportunity presented itself for testing a potential answer. A few weeks ago, Zoe Corbyn asked to interview me about science journalism and blogging for a feature she was writing for the Times Higher Education Supplement.
I agreed and suggested that we try a little experiment: I would record the interview myself, transcribe it and post it here to coincide with her piece. As a journalist, I’ve done this on past features, as has Mark Henderson. Others have supported the practice for many reasons: It allows you to get more value out of work that’s already been done. During a Twitter discussion, Ed Gerstner suggested to me that interviewees could do the same thing, recording their own conversations and posting them on their own sites. EY: I think so. "Part of Our World: Journalism as Civic Leadership" 1. The news as cultural artifact Some years ago, while watching the CBS Evening News, I was startled to hear Dan Rather say, "And that's part of our world tonight.
" Mr. Rather then thanked me for watching, but it was I who wanted to thank him-- for frank acknowledgment of what he and his colleagues actually do. They give us part of the world, a version of it; and there is no scandal in saying that this artifact, the news, is something journalists make, which means it can be made poorly or well. The point may seem simple, or even simple-minded; and yet it is a good starting point for any discussion of journalism and our public culture. Freed from some of its grander pretensions, ("Expect the world," says the New York Times in its current ad campaign, "And that's the way it is," spoke Walter Cronkite from the chair Rather now holds) the news is made simultaneously more human, more artful, more reliable-- in fact, more real.
But what about those whose investment is in democracy itself? 2. Trial by error. How bad is mainstream science reporting? Can it be improved or has it had its time? Zoë Corbyn investigates the issues and considers whether a paradigm shift is needed In June, Dorothy Bishop decided to take matters into her own hands. Seething over the inaccuracies in a press report about a study in her field, the professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford decided it was time to launch a new prize for science journalism. Via the medium of her blog ( she called for nominations for her Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation. "I am offering a prize each year for an article in an English-language national newspaper that has the most inaccurate report of a piece of academic work," she explained.
"I think it stirred things up," she says, adding that although she has yet to receive a nomination, she has had many messages from fellow scientists who say it is a great idea. Mark Henderson is science editor of The Times. Jay Rosen on the media: Seven questions for Jay Rosen. Attributing sources. Phone hacking: Met police put on spot by ignored leads and discreet omissions | Media. Somewhere in the offices of the Crown Prosecution Service, there is a file that will be of great interest to any independent inquiry that attempts to tell the truth about the behaviour of the Metropolitan police in the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World. The Guardian has read it. The police were dragged into the centre of the scandal last week when the New York Times quoted unnamed detectives claiming that Scotland Yard's "close relationship" with the News of the World had hampered the inquiry. Essentially, the Met is charged on two counts: first, that it cut short its investigation; second, that it then failed to tell the truth to the press, public and parliament.
The police insist that they are innocent on both counts. The unpublished CPS file shows the inquiry started well. They wrote: "A vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals (politicians, celebrities) have been identified as being accessed without authority. Adam Penenburg.
Adam Penenberg. If you call yourself an online journalist, and yet that name doesn’t immediately prompt a nod of recognition – a smile, even – then it’s time to close your laptop and bow your head in shame. Or at least head over to Netflix. It was Adam Penenberg who, back in 1998, first forced traditional journalists to sit up and take online reporting seriously. And he did so with a double whammy: scooping them on a big story – a scandal that went to the heart of one of America’s journalistic institutions – while also exposing a rising star of print journalism as a hack and a liar.
The lying hack was New Republic wunderkind Stephen Glass and the story of how Penenberg – then a reporter for ‘Forbes Digital Tool’ (now sadly swallowed by the execrable Forbes.com) – exposed Glass’ fabricated reporting was subsequently made into a movie. (Penenberg was portrayed in the movie by Steve Zahn while Glass was played by Hayden Christensen. Weirdly, Jonathan Chait was played by Chloë Sevigny.) Yep. Jay Rosen @ Sciences Po: Who is the audience, and what does that make us, journalists? @ Fiction in Truth.
Fury at BBC’s ‘anti-Scottish’ broadcast. Saturday, 28 August 2010 16:04 Politicians and members of the public have reacted with fury after a BBC Radio 4 broadcast heard commentators describe Scots as living off of benefits provided by the English and describe the Scottish parliament as a “charade of a building” inhabited by MSPs who “crawl out of the darkness”. The comments were made on the radio programme ‘Any Questions’ by Baroness Ruth Deech who is a former Governor of the BBC and Douglas Murray who is the Director of The Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC). The comments have resulted in a stream of complaints to the BBC. The show, broadcast on Friday 20th August, heard Baroness Deech claim that Scots lived off of benefits paid for by English subsidies and that the release of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi had embarrassed the rest of the UK.
Deech said:“Alright, they're devolved, but I think they did this [Megrahi release] just to show the rest of us oh, that we are independent, we make our own decisions,” Hello Kind RegardsNewsnet Scotland.