When I worked at a radio news station in the late 80s, when I was about 20, I would often saunter into the newsroom a half hour before my shift started, so that I could sit down with a sandwich and a bottle of apple juice, and page through the newsroom’s copies of The Washington…
Federal officials have approved a site on the National Mall for the capital’s first memorial dedicated to journalists who have died while reporting the news and to the role of the free press in a democracy, the foundation planning the project announced Monday. The Fallen Journalists Memorial will be located on a third-of-an-acre parcel in…
Here’s to you, grim-faced photojournalist who waited just long enough to make sure 20-year-old me learned an important lesson, before saving me from the consequences of my own poor planning. Every day on the job, I’m trying to pay it forward. In 1989, I was an intern in a crowd of media professionals covering…
NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other…
In July, 2002, I was blogging about Intelligence Officers Read Between the Enemy Lines A great headline for an LA Times story about interrogation and document analysis during the military campaign in Afghanistan. Weblogs: Put Them to Work in Your Newsroom Journalism was still a print-first medium at the time, and local TV reporters were…
American law protects the free speech and press rights of all citizens, including journalists; and the courts are open for all citizens, including the subjects of new stories. Democracy has flourishes where the press is free. Despotism rises where it is not. DeSantis is framing this as a defense of the average citizen, but we…
Artificial intelligence has been deployed to handle facial recognition, recommend movies, and auto-complete your typing. The news that CNET had been using it to generate entire stories, however, sent a ripple of anxiety through the news media for its seeming threat to journalists. The robot-brained yet conversational ChatGPT can produce copy without lunch or bathroom breaks and…
The story goes like this: A man goes to a morgue in Galilee, RI to look at a body that had been identified as him. “Nope,” he said, “that ain’t me.” Then he left. 84 years after premature reports of his death, the late Charles Keville is going viral. Background on this story from The…
Ad Fontes Media
For some reason today I was thinking of the 3D shape scientists recently discovered in our cells — I had to look it up just now to refresh my memory. Not being an expert in geometry, I would describe the “scutoid” as an irregular prism-like shape with a hexagon on one end and a pentagon…
“Journalism is an imperfect human activity done by biased people who have bills to pay and passions that drive them,” said Dennis Jerz, Seton Hill associate professor and advisor of The Setonian. “If you believe that your organization is the only pure organization that exists you are approaching journalism from a perspective that I just…
In the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections, the message from Fox News was clear: violent crime is surging, cities are dangerous hellscapes and Democrats are responsible. With the vote over, however, the rightwing news channel appeared to decide things weren’t that bad after all, and decreased its coverage of violent crime by 50% compared…
CBS News is halting its activity on Twitter over Elon Musk’s turbulent and potentially devastating moves following his takeover of the company. “In light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform,” Jonathan…
The very useful “media bias chart” is one of several useful ways to classify sources of journalism. UPDATE: See the Media Bias Chart, v.11 While individual items published by any of these sources can vary considerably from the general location depicted in this chart, the takeaway message is that journalism can still be valid and…
In April, the FBI raided an ABC journalist’s apartment. James Gordon Meek abruptly resigned, and his former colleagues say they haven’t seen him for months. Rolling Stone just broke this story. Multiple sources familiar with the matter say Meek was the target of an FBI raid at the Siena Park apartments, where he had been living on…
What a storyteller. Boston Globe journalist Jack Thomas, who wrote about his impending death a few months ago, made me laugh out loud several times in this touching essay. Very powerful. He was 83. I’ve had the privilege of having spent more than 60 years working for newspapers. There was not a day when it…
I’m conflicted. This is a very well done animated documentary, creating visuals that were not part of the original press coverage of Floyd Collins, the caver trapped in Sand Cave in 1925, and the subject of the first media circus, fed by the emerging new medium of radio journalism. The animation adds sight gags and…
Tell me you didn’t click the link without telling me you didn’t click the link. I don’t watch any TV news and CNBC plays no role in my life, but come on. This post has gotten thousands of likes and generated hundreds of comments, many of them suggesting that CNBC is out of touch for…