Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.: The End of Objectivi. (This is a draft. Over time I hope, with your help, to revise this into a better document. Let me know what you think.) Maybe it's time to say a fond farewell to an old canon of journalism: objectivity. But it will never be time to kiss off the values and principles that undergird the idea. Objectivity is a construct of recent times. There were good business reasons to be "objective," too, not least that a newspaper didn't want to make large parts of its community angry. Again, the idea of objectivity is a worthy one. I'd like to toss out objectivity as a goal, however, and replace it with four other notions that may add up to the same thing.
The lines separating them are not always clear. Thoroughness When I was a reporter and, later, a columnist, my first goal was to learn as much as I could. Today, thoroughness means more than asking questions of the people in our Rolodexes (circular or virtual). Accuracy Get your facts straight. Say what you don't know, not just what you do. Fairness. Ambassador Imad Moustapha Critiques N.
National Geographic and the Syrian Embassy in Washington have fallen out over what reality really is in Syria. Read the following N.G. article and letter from Ambassador Moustapha. Then vote in the opinion poll on the left. National Geographic published a controversial article on Syria, entitled: Shadowland by Don Belt. Ambassador Imad Moustapha wrote an eight page critique of the article, which he argues “is laden with inaccuracies and disinformation.”
Shadowland Poised to play a pivotal new role in the Middle East, Syria struggles to escape its dark past. October 22, 2009 Chris Johns, Editor-in-Chief National Geographic Magazine 1145 17th Street, NW Washington, DC 20036 Dear Chris Johns: It is with a heavy heart and a great deal of indignation that I write this letter to you. The author clearly did not approach this project with objectivity; rather, he came with a preset thesis and searched for people and settings to prove his point. Detailed critique of the article: “Shadowland.” Investigative journalism is alive and snooping in the Middle Eas. The 2008 Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RWB) shows that, in a report spanning 173 countries, most in this region ranked outside the top 100 in terms of press freedom. Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Iran are among those countries that recorded low press freedom scores, with most of them moving down the rankings from their 2007 positions.
Only Lebanon, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates ranked in the top 100, with the first four even moving up in comparison to the previous year. That doesn’t mean these countries are at the vanguard of free speech. This summer UAE-based Arabic daily newspaper Al Emarat Al Youm’s print and online versions were suspended for 20 days and the editor was fined AED20,000 for publishing an article in 2006 about the doping of a racehorse owned by the country’s ruling family. The paper was accused of “deliberately publishing false and inappropriate information.” Egyptian ruins. “It’s a strange situation,” he continues. When coverage outpaces interest – can statistics show us when th. Posted by Ethan on Sep 2nd, 2009 in Media | 2 comments I’m working on some research on press coverage of Iran, wondering whether the heavy restrictions on international journalists reporting from within Iran led to a shift in journalistic practices, specifically a heavy reliance on citizen media.
That’s basically Brian Stelter’s analysis in the New York Times – I’m curious whether this was a phenomenon specific to the Iranian situation, or whether this is a shift in journalistic practice. In the process of researching, I came across a report from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, ground zero for quantitative media analysis in the US, and the inspiration for a lot of the work we’re doing on Media Cloud. The June 24th report, an analysis of weekly figures of press coverage and reader/viewer interest, was titled “Iran’s Interesting… For a Foreign Story“. What struck me was the graph that accompanied the piece, comparing news interest with news coverage. How Social Media is Radically Changing the Newsroom. Leah Betancourt is the digital community manager at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minn.
She is @l3ahb3tan on Twitter. Did Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey or even Mark Zuckerberg ever portend that their means of connecting among social circles would be the news du jour in many newsrooms across the country? Social networking sites are some of the newest tools for reporters to use in news gathering, networking and promoting their work. But many newsrooms are fuzzy on the usage.
"It’s very much the issue of the day. Twitter and Facebook have exploded, and you can’t ignore them,” says Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, who gets a call about once a week from a television station or a newspaper with questions on the ethical issues involving the use of social media. She says journalists’ attitudes toward social media tools range from presuming nothing bad can happen to being terrified.
“You don’t want to be on either end,” says McBride. Verify & confirm 1. Journalism will always be in ‘beta’ mode, all the time. Foreign reporting in the digital age. There is very little that qualifies as better foreign reporting than a story by a Robert Kaplan or a Dan McDougall. It’s not a 2-minute soundbite from a television camera on broadcast news or a ten-thousandth reiteration of an Associated Press story. It’s hardcore investigative journalism that usually comes after months if not years of living in a region, interacting with its denizens, and observing livelihoods. Unfortunately, in a flailing journalism world, where international bureaus are far from cost effective for major news organizations and foreign correspondents are fast becoming their most dispensable employees, this breed of reporters is dwindling.
The good news – if there was ever one in journalism these days – is that new media is taking up the slack. Such sites are not restricted to short breaking-news reports alone. The reports focus on the human element, something mainstream outlets tend to ignore. Like this: Like Loading... How the web changed the economics of news - in all media | Onlin. Listening to news executives talk about micropayments , Kindles , public subsidies , micropayments , collusion , blocking Google and anything else that might save their businesses, it occurs to me that they may have missed some developments in, ah, well, the past ten years.
Any attempt to create a viable news operation needs to recognise and take advantage of these changes. I will probably have missed some – I’m hoping you can add them. UPDATE: Jay Rosen suggests reading this post alongside this one by David Sull : “newspapers are essentially a logistics business that happens to employ journalists”. He’s right – it makes some great points. In the physical world news came as a generic package. It’s probably no coincidence that majority news consumption r ecently shifted from regular consumption to sporadic ‘grazing ‘. 2. Online you know exactly how many have looked at a specific page. There are two huge implications of this measurability (which many advertisers are only just waking up to).
Why journalists deserve low pay | csmonitor.com. By Robert G. Picard / May 19, 2009 Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted. Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition Actually, journalists deserve low pay. Wages are compensation for value creation. Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models. Where does value come from? Moral philosophers differentiate intrinsic and instrumental value. Economic value is rooted in worth and exchange. To comprehend journalistic value creation, we need to focus on the benefits it provides.
These benefits used to produce significant economic value. What are journalists worth? For Iraqi Journalists, Free Press vs. Free Land. UK | Magazine | Journey through terror. Having covered everything from the IRA to al-Qaeda in four decades of journalism, few people in Britain have spent as much time as the BBC's Peter Taylor with the people behind political violence. Here he reflects on some of his experiences. I first became aware of the word "terrorism" in 1970 when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) blew up two aircraft at a remote airstrip in Jordan to try and secure the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli and other jails. They let the passengers and crew off first. Al-Qaeda would have killed them.
That same year the IRA was beginning to emerge in Northern Ireland, planning to turn the issue of civil rights into a violent insurgency designed to drive the British out of the province. I'd never crossed the Irish Sea before and didn't even know where Londonderry was on the map. Watch a clip from Age of Terror, Episode One Ruthlessly abnormal He was the leading IRA figure in the city at the time. Suicide bombers Changed world.