Marieke Hardy
I can’t help but feel dismayed by her decision to throw herself into the often undignified maelstrom of breakfast radio.
Part… ]]>
As traditional news outfits migrate online to become dot-coms, one of their biggest headaches is how to adapt to the sprawling new frontier of public comment.
In the pre-Internet world of TV and newspapers, public comment wasn’t a problem. Broadcast news didn’t have any—aside from the weekly guest spot, usually some hapless civic association president reading from a prompter and staring terrified into the camera. Papers had their letters pages, but allowed only enough space for a few dozen a week, and they were generally written with… ]]>
SYKTYVKAR, Russia—Savva Terentyev doesn’t hide his disdain for police. The anger threading through a rant he posted on a friend’s blog made that clear. Bad cops, the young Russian songwriter wrote, should be taken to this city’s downtown plaza and burned alive.
Terentyev meant his remarks for a small circle of friends who vent and muse on each other’s blogs. He had no idea local police were watching.
The blog on which Terentyev posted his message was run by Boris Suranov, a Syktyvkar journalist whose… ]]>
Beneath the somber tales of shrinking revenues and staff cuts is an even more somber reality about the news business: The nearly 2-century-old marriage between consumer advertising and journalism is on the rocks.
In the United States the union dates from the advent of the penny press in the 1830s, when newspaper owners realized that by slashing what they charged readers they could send their circulations soaring and get rich off advertising sales. News found a durable source of funding, and manufacturers hitched a… ]]>
Journalists love to debate the use of anonymous sources, but the discussion this week at Northwestern University’s journalism school is no hypothetical: the texts are published columns by the controversial dean of the school, John Lavine.
Earlier this week, a columnist for The Daily Northwestern, a student newspaper, questioned the use of anonymous quotes in two introductory letters Lavine wrote last year for the Medill alumni magazine.
“I sure felt good about this class. It is one of… ]]>
Marieke Hardy
I can’t help but feel dismayed by her decision to throw herself into the often undignified maelstrom of breakfast radio.
Part… ]]>
I’m so tired of John Edwards.
Apparently, in another act of campaign desperation, with interest in his presidential bid fading faster than a setting sun, the Edwards campaign is now blaming the media for his failures to earn primary votes. During a recent interview with MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, Edwards campaign manager David Bonior, a former Democratic whip in the House of Representatives, turned testy when asked why Edwards wasn’t gaining more traction. His answer? It’s the 5% less media coverage Edwards has been receiving compared to Hillary Clinton and… ]]>
Corey Delaney
By Rowena Robertson
It’s only just over a week since it happened, but it seems as if Corey Delaney (aka Corey Worthington) has always been there. For the remaining few who don’t know who he is, Corey is the yellow sunglasses-sporting, Melbourne (Australia) teenager who hosted a MySpace-enabled party at his parents’ outer suburbs home last weekend while they were away on holiday. The party was apparently attended by over 500 people, neighbours’ property was supposedly trashed and the police were called in (dog squad, helicopters… ]]>
This already has been one of the most interesting and unpredictable presidential election campaigns in decades.
I wish I could say it’s been a stellar performance by the press, but I can’t. The only good thing on that count is that voters aren’t letting what we say influence their decisions. In fact, the opposite might be true. How delightful.
We buried Sen. John McCain months ago - well before any votes had been taken - because his campaign organization was in a mess. We, the collective media,… ]]>
In 2002 Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan. His widow, Mariane, also a journalist, wrote a book about her search for him that was adapted into a movie that was released in 2007. “I don’t know if I would have had the strength to do what she did,” Angelina Jolie, who plays Mariane Pearl, told Voice of America, “and when I first saw her interviews and the way she responded to what happened to her husband ...and… ]]>
Penelope Trunk delivered career advice on Yahoo Finance until two weeks ago, when Yahoo dropped her Brazen Careerist column. Trunk says Yahoo decided the column didn’t draw enough traffic to warrant the premium rates advertisers pay to be in its financial news package. So out she went.
Now, I have sympathy for a career columnist with career problems, but my concern here isn’t with whether she was handled fairly but with what her experience suggests about the direction that online journalism is heading.
… ]]>
Book Sculpture by Su Blackwell
Google granted a magazine patentTechcrunch reports on a patent issued to Google called “Customization of Content and Advertisements in Publications.” It speculates that Google is about to create a magazine template that people can insert personalized content into, and wrap advertising around, and may even go as far as creating kiosks where people can print out and quick bind copies of “their” magazines. Techcrunch pulls a description from the patent application in which Google describes what it sees as the… ]]>
I’m sure that since Tim Page is a music critic for The Washington Post and won a Pulitzer Prize, he’s a fine journalist. But he did something stupid recently when he sent an aide to Washington’s ex-mayor Marion Barry an angry e-mail demanding to be taken off the solicitation list for some cultural initiative that Barry was pitching.
“Must we hear about it every time this crack addict attempts to rehabilitate himself with some new - and typically half-witted - political grandstanding?” Page asked. (Barry, you’ll recall,… ]]>
New Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as Boy Journalist Tintin. Cartoon by Bill Leak
Journalists as Candidates in the Australian ElectionAustralian Prime Minister John Howard was defeated in the federal election on Saturday and also seems set to lose his own seat of Bennelong, on Sydney’s North Shore, to former Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Maxine McKew. She was an articulate and respected print and television journalist, working with the television news analysis programs Lateline… ]]>