A rubber bullet shot by the Hong Kong police on Sunday caused a journalist to lose sight in an eye. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) again urges the authorities to guarantee reporters’ safety. A reporter working for Indonesian-language media outlet Suara Hong Kong News, Veby Mega Indah, has permanently lost eyesight in the right eye on…
Microsoft is laying off dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations. The layoffs are part of a bigger push by Microsoft to rely on artificial intelligence to pick news and content that’s presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft’s Edge browser, and in the company’s various Microsoft News apps. Many of the affected workers are part of Microsoft’s SANE (search, ads, News, Edge) division, and are contracted as human editors to help pick stories. Robots will now pick news stories for MSN and Microsoft News.
A Facebook meme with 52k reactions and 37k shares includes pictures of volunteers cleaning the streets in Minneapolis, the day after mass protests of the death of George Floyd. The pictures make a powerful point about the values of the community. However, the text includes an unnecessary slam against journalism, because it introduces the images…
Sobering report from the New York Times, providing evidence that COVID-19 deaths have been over-reported. Mortality data in the middle of a pandemic is not perfect. In most places, the disparities between the official death counts and the total rise in deaths reflect limited testing for the virus rather than intentional undercounting. Officially, about 355,000 people had…
On social media recently I saw people mocking Trump for “refusing” to unveil the traditional presidential portrait of Obama, and I saw people attacking “the fake news media” for pushing a narrative designed to make Trump look bad. The original NBC story that broke this item accurately states that neither Trump nor Obama is interested…
About a dozen local TV news stations aired a video segment produced by Amazon. Some identified the source, but most just let TV viewers assume the video was a news story, rather than a PR piece hosted by an Amazon employee. Journalism matters. See Forbes for details on the story. Similar:Richard Halloran / Owns Home…
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If, like pollster Matthew McDermott, you shared (or at least chuckled at) that Jimmy Kimmel clip of VP Pence joking about delivering empty boxes because it confirms what you already believe about Pence; or, if you feel the C-SPAN clip that unfairly makes the VP look bad confirms your attitude about the lying America-hating media,…
The English program is not going anywhere, but Seton Hill is graduating its last “New Media Journalism” major this year. Likewise, students who graduate under the current catalog won’t get diplomas that say “Literature” or “Creative Writing.” This was a step that the English faculty took on our own initiative, in the context of a…
Another example of effective new media design, by those nasty #fakenews America-hating journalists at the New York Times. Because I’m so insecure that I can’t bear to encounter facts and professional analysis that threaten my cherished personal beliefs, I won’t click through and see for myself how scrolling through the story makes this complicated information…
Journalists covering state responses to the coronavirus pandemic are hampered as officials reduce seating in briefing rooms, introduce unreliable technology and, in some cases, refuse real-time questions. Governors have also seemingly used the crisis to retaliate for critical coverage, blocking access or reducing press pools to friendlier outlets. But some state governments have pivoted with more…
In April 2000, I was blogging about… HTML frames (who remembers how much they sucked?) The sorry state of web design (AskTog) The future of reading “Rules grammar change: English traditional replace to be new syntax with” (The Onion) Journalism students who don’t read or watch journalism A design critique I published in the innovative…
Today my Facebook feed featured memes that mocked Trump for telling people to drink bleach, pour it into their bodily orifices, etc. He did say some reckless things, but Donald Trump did *not* suggest that people inject bleach, drink disinfectant, or expose their bodily orifices to sunlight. An opinion on the president is more valuable if…
You sheep who trust the lamestream fake news media think you know them as Prince Charles, the heir to the UK throne, and Prince Harry; but this exclusive from NewsBreak.com exposes them as a married couple who died of COVID-19 within hours of each other. You’ve heard of newsbreak.com. They’re the source that exposed this…
Have you seen this image mashup being cited as evidence that you should wake up because “the media” is lying to you? Newsbreak.com is an aggregator. Its business model is scraping stories off of various places on the Internet and reposting them on its own site. I found a page on newsbreak.com with the headline…
Sometimes when my social media contacts are complaining about “the media,” they are really responding to headlines, which they cite as examples of “fake news.” Sometimes the headlines they respond to are creative interpretations supplied by a third party with a dog in a particular fight; but other times I can see very clearly…
Public officials misspeak all the time. Journalists make mistakes all the time. Ordinary citizens over-react to headlines without reading the full article all the time. We are all of us human. It’s unfair for any of us to treat every gaffe as evidence of malice or incompetence. For example, critics of President Trump are stretching…
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Not fake news. Not the enemy of the American people. “Nobody ever thought a thing like this could have happened,” said the the president at Thursday’s press event. Feb 27: “We’re going very substantially down, not up.” [Narrator: “Cases were not going down.”] Feb 26: “The 15 [documented cases of COVID-19 in the USA] within…