Unless Buzzfeed-style Clickbait Replaces all Forms of Human Communication, or Republicans Return to the White House, Listeners will Continue to Deal with the Smug Dread Generated by the Formulaic Endings of NPR Stories

I love some good meta. I wrote a dialogue-heavy short story about writing dialogue-driven short stories. Mark C. Marino wrote this excllent MPR-style essay about the formulaic endings of NPR stories, which are designed to leave you feeling smarter but emptier, so that you return to fill your pledge-drive mug with another dose of First World…

Verification Handbook

One of journalism’s most treasured clichés, spouted by seasoned editors who ruthlessly slash other clichés from stories, is: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” But the cliché doesn’t tell the journalist, or humanitarian professional, how to check it out. Verification is the essence of journalism, but it also illustrates the difficulty…

Boosting the Signal: Peaceful Protesters in Baltimore are the Norm

Video of people throwing rocks or burning cars appeals to our baser emotions (anger, fear, disgust), which leads to faster, more intense emotional responses that TV can use to make money (by packaging our eyeballs and selling them to advertisers). TV news is very good at capturing our attention. Images of hundreds of peaceful, determined…

How The NY Times Is Sparking the VR Journalism Revolution

Just as young people in journalism school five years ago learned that Twitter was important to reporting, soon enough they might be learning how to film with a 360-degree camera. The same goes for documentary filmmakers. “As these younger journalists are coming out of J-school they’re all learning how to use every single way of…

What Can You Do With An English Degree? | Seton Hill University

One of our seniors interviewed recent graduates for her Honors project. It’s all too common for English majors to hear “What can you do with an English degree?” from well-meaning relatives and friends, implying that the most viable career for an English major is that of a “starving artist.” So what can you do with…

FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades

So what if a WaPo story about huge flaws in FBI lab testimony shakes the foundation of the justice system, calling into question death sentences that have already been carried out? We are all too busy looking at Upworthy articles about the genius thing these blogging kittens did. Who needs the professional journalists? Similar:The Ascent…

Fraternity Announces “Legal Action” Against Rolling Stone

“The Rolling Stone article viewed by millions fueled a court of public opinion that ostracized Phi Kappa Psi members and led to vandalism of the fraternity house,” the fraternity’s statement said. “Clearly our fraternity and its members have been defamed, but more importantly we fear this entire episode may prompt some victims to remain in…

Rolling Stone and UVA: The Columbia School of Journalism Report

Sloppy journalism can ruin lives. Check your sources. Before publishing accusations against someone, get that person’s side of the story. My personal belief is that it’s silly to want to join clubs with greek letters, but then again in my spare time in the past few weeks I have pretended to be shot by a…

Pizza, Religious Freedom, Bigotry, and Yellow Journalism

I have not seen the pizzeria TV interview in question, I have not been following developments in the controversy, and I won’t link to any of the coverage. Yellow journalism is bad when it supports an unjust status quo, or when it simply creates noise that distracts us from more important things. But it is…

Google responds to streaming report with shruggie GIF

The Daily Dot proceeded to shrug the GIF off, chalking it up as an unconventional “no comment.” But the YouTube rep then got back in touch a day later, demanding they include it in their story. No it’s not a joke, he said — “the GIF really is our official response, it technically wasn’t a decline…

Citizen Journalist Thrown Out of City Council Receives $200,000 Settlement

Know your rights as a journalist, and your rights as a citizen. The Mayor called the meeting to order and then said, “First of all, a little house cleaning. Uh, Chief Tatum, if you would, remove the camera from — from the auditorium. We don’t allow filming inside of the city hall here unless it’s…

Los Angeles Times reorients for digital

Three weeks ago, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet informed staff that the paper would no longer take enterprise pitches for Page 1 of the print edition. Instead, editors from the various news desks would pitch their best enterprise pieces for digital slots on what will be called “Dean’s List.” Those stories’ publication in…

NYT: G.W. Bush is “super-overexposed” and “so far to our right” — so they omitted his presence from “Bloody Sunday” coverage

The quotes in my headline are accurate, but completely misleading. Saving this for an example in my journalism class, demonstrating the obligation that journalists have to avoid the perception of bias in their reporting. A photographer for The New York Times says the publication did not crop former President George W. Bush and first lady…

I’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters in my apps look like me?

I found that when an app did sell girl characters, it charged on average $7.53, which is a lot in the world of apps. After all, each of the apps I downloaded only cost an average of $0.26. In other words, girl characters cost about 29 times more than the cost of the apps themselves.…

Local News in a Digital Age

Local TV news is the “most visible presence” in the news space, according to a Pew study, though most TV stories are routine traffic and weather reports and short, shallow “anchor reads” (in which the well-coiffed announcers read into the camera) rather than the result of thoughtful, original reporting. To paraphrase Into the Woods, “Visible…

New rules governing drone journalism are on the way — and there’s reason to be optimistic

Mapping disasters? So long as you’ve got ATC clearance, it’s possible. Imaging structures in 3D? Totally possible. Covering protests? With the caveat that you can’t fly over people, very possible. Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8)…

Brian Williams is Giving NBC an Opportunity to Bravely Break with Tradition

NBC has a marketing decision to make, not whether the punishment of expelling the nation’s top-rated nightly news anchor fits the crime. The question NBC needs to ask itself is: “Where can we go from here?”

Vandal scratches Poe phrase into car at dealership

Language nerds will appreciate this news story about a Latin vandal. The scratching on one of the cars spelled out “Nemo me inpune lacessit.” The phrase means “No one attacks me with impunity.” The quotation, in fact, comes from Edgar Allan Poes classic horror story “The Cask of Amontillado.” It is the family crest of…

Why the Weather Channel’s Hype Has Lost Me for Good

After the break, we’ll tell you how important it is for you watch our live WeatherFear (TM) StormPorterCast (TM) Mobile NewsHole Coverage Team tell you to keep watching for the next XtremeSnowFerno (TM) WeatherUnleashed NatureBlast ScareCast (TM), so that the advertising manager can sell your eyeballs (and thus earn enough to buy his kid another…

In defense of the Selfie Stick

I’m sure there are hipsters, even now, lamenting “I just think without the organic feel of the human arm, the selfie really loses something,” but we have not listened to them before, and we need not heed them now. —The Washington Post. Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker…