journalism

There are 86 posts filed in journalism (this is page 7 of 11).

“Enthusiast” Is Pejorative

John Gruber recently called out AllThingsD for failing to provide name attribution to an Apple-focused website. Today, he elaborates on that:

“Enthusiast site” is pejorative. Enthusiast implies that MacStories is produced by zealous hobbyists. Not naming the site at all implied that the site was not worthy of being named. To later attribute it to “macstories.net” rather than “MacStories” implies that it is something less than a fellow peer publication, and not even worth the effort of hitting the shift key to camelcase the M and S. MacStories is the name of the website; macstories.net is MacStories’s domain name. This is subtle, yes, but it is a disparagement nonetheless — the most begrudging form of attribution that could have been added.

As someone who writes for what many would describe as an “enthusiast” website, I can relate.

Who’s Afraid of Fox News?

Shortly after New York magazine published their profile of Fox News head Roger Ailes, Rolling Stone unleashed their own 10,000-word behemoth on the world, covering the same topic but with a different tone and focus. Ailes is portrayed as cunning, vicious, and incredibly powerful. But Slate’s Jack Shafer doesn’t see it that way:

There are few facts in Dickinson’s well-reported pile that I’d take issue with—Ailes has worked hard to establish his credentials as a malicious man, absent of scruples. But I draw the line at “fearing” Ailes or being daunted by his Fox News “power,” the two searing take-home messages in Dickinson’s piece. Ailes can’t be a very fearsome or powerful media monster if he failed to prevent the election of a freshman senator—a black, liberal freshman senator with an, um, exotic name—to the White House!

Don’t Get Left Behind

Frédéric Filloux breaks down some lessons from the coverage of Osama Bin Laden’s death:

[B]eat reporters now need a new skill: they must master the microblogging service in the most professional of ways. Tweeter has now reached a new status: main alert feed – as long as (and that is a big “if”) a proper credibility index is used to qualify the source. Such capability is supposed to be the key differentiation between a pro and an amateur.

Obama Reveals His Birth Certificate

James Fallows breaks it down. James Poniewozik also has some good analysis.

The conclusion? This solves nothing. And the fact that our President felt the need to subject himself to this means we all lose.

Update: I really appreciated the words of David Frum on this matter:

[T]hose who imagine that they somehow enhance the value of [American] citizenship by belittling the American-ness of their president – they not only disgrace the politics they uphold, but they do damage that will not soon be forgotten by the voters a revived Republicanism must win.

Salon also has some arguments on why this wasn’t Obama caving; it was Obama cannily portraying the Republican party as out of touch and a tiny bit crazy.

The Future of AOL/HuffPo

There’s a great piece at Capital New York that probably has the best forecast for what will become of this AOL/HuffPo marriage:

So, my final, gut prediction, which I would be very pleased to see falsified: Arianna Huffington will create a vital and interesting news desk that in the short term garners AOL praise as a remarkably ambitious and high-quality web-native news operation. It will gain traction against other web operations and will even look, for a while, like it’s making a little bit of a run at the big guys, like cnn.com and nytimes.com.

Traffic will increase—slightly. There will be reports of budget overruns and creative disputes. […] Within a year, several of the most high-profile editorial hires will leak out to a variety of other news organizations, some old and some new. Before long you will be wondering what happened to all those names. And finally, the fast-and-cheap view of “journalism” will return to AOL-Huffpo, amid reports of mild success after a rocky start, all judged on pageviews and profit margins; the “quality” and “journalism” buzzwords will be forgotten parts of the corporate lexicon. Because, to borrow a phrase from Buch, journalism and the “content” strategy of AOL are misaligned.

If I was a betting man, that’s where I’d put my money.

Internet Comments Are The Worst

I don’t see eye-to-eye with James Rocchi on everything, but I wholeheartedly endorse his viewpoint on internet comments:

[I]t’s because internet commenters are either lazy, cowardly or stupid that I find myself relying on Twitter more and more. I disagree with lots of people in my Twitter feed — @jenyamato didn’t want to vomit from the Justin Bieber film, @mtgilchrist actually liked Tron: Legacy, @MarkReardonKMOX has a political sensibility so opposite to mine I’m amazed we don’t explode when we shake hands — but they are polite, and articulate and, please note, saying what they do under their real names. I think I’ve given up on internet comments about the things I write — reading them or caring about them — unless they’re from people who use their real names. Otherwise, it’s just opening up your life and brain to too much negativity and stupidity.