Wanted: Minority Game Programmers

“It’s been said that a bunch of nerdy white guys are creating these games,” Armstrong said. “The problem with a bunch of white guys creating the games is that the story isn’t being created with balance.” Roughly 80 percent of video-game programmers are white, according to preliminary results of an International Game Developers Association survey.…

'Dateline' Visits Missing-Persons Coverage

Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, JonBenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart and now Natalee Holloway all became household names because of the way television news divisions, particularly the cable networks, extensively covered the story when they went missing. Each had another common trait: they were young, white, pretty and female. Some have questioned how they became stories, when…

Measuring the Blogosphere

If the blogosphere continues to expand at this rate, every person who has Internet access will be a blogger before long, if not an actual reader of blogs. The conventional media – this very newspaper, for instance – have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator…

Colleges Ward Off Overinvolved Parents

A number of colleges and universities are having to assign full-time staffers or forming entire new departments to field parents’ calls and email. Others hold separate orientations for parents, partly to keep them occupied and away from student sessions. The University of Vermont employs “parent bouncers,” students trained to divert moms and dads who try…

Why Truman Dropped the Bomb

In 1945, an overwhelming majority of Americans regarded as a matter of course that the United States had used atomic bombs to end the Pacific war…. The critics divide over what prompted the decision to drop the bombs in spite of the impending surrender, with the most provocative arguments focusing on Washington’s desire to intimidate…

The First Amendment Handbook

At a time when newsgathering techniques are under increasing scrutiny, big business tries to intimidate news organizations by filing lawsuits based on novel tort theories ranging from fraud to breach of duty of loyalty, courts order journalists to jail for refusing to disclose confidential sources, and government officials are finding new ways to close down…

Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists (PDF)

Readers spoke compellingly of their experiences with newspapers and their observations about the behavior of journalists. Their comments evoked a sense of belief in the press as an important institution in our democracy, but they were unsparing, as well, in documenting their concerns about basic journalistic practices that they see as being unfair: Newspapers get…

R.U.R.: Themes

The entire concept of cyborgs or automated labor of any kind is inseparable from the contexts of economic production, and R.U.R. emphasizes this context much more than the first cyborg text, Shelley’s Frankenstein. Some of the basic concepts of Marxist analysis involve recognizing the social and economic structure as consisting of a base and a…

Brain-Dead Woman Dies After Giving Birth

A brain-dead woman who was kept alive for three months so she could deliver the child she was carrying was removed from life support Wednesday and died, a day after giving birth. —Matthew Barakat —Brain-Dead Woman Dies After Giving Birth (AP|MyWay) Because there isn’t any controversy that drove the coverage of the Torres story, it received…

The Blogs of War

For now, the Pentagon officially tolerates this free-form online journalism and in-house peanut gallery, even as the brass takes cautious steps to control it. A new policy instituted this spring requires all military bloggers inside Iraq to register with their units. It directs commanders to conduct quarterly reviews to make sure bloggers aren’t giving out…

Interviewing

Most interviews are not the kind of confrontations that we’ve come to associate with journalism due to the ambush-camera techniques of some TV broadcasts. The vast, vast majority are all about something simple: You want to learn more about a subject or person, or both, and the person you’re interviewing wants to help. Also remember…

Bloggers Champion Missing Woman

The group was frustrated that the disappearance of Latoyia Figueroa, 24, who is five months pregnant, did not get national press, though her case is similar to other widely covered disappearances like those of Natalee Holloway and Laci Peterson. The bloggers argue that Holloway and Peterson, who are both white and good-looking, are more attractive…

Current TV

I’m not to enthused about this Current TV thing. It’s for the people…but you have to pay a cable subscription fee to media conglomerates to see it. It’s apart from the establishment….except that it gets its revenue from the same corporate advertisers as every other channel. It’s new and independent… except that it’s headed up…

Nicknames and Grammar

Nicknames and Grammar (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) While I was at home with my son, my wife took our three-year-old shopping. “We’ve got a lot of things to get,” she said, “so we’d better get a move on, Honeycakes.” In a strangely mature and clipped voice, Carolyn replied, “Peter isn’t here. So I am just one honeycake.”…