![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjournalism.nyu.edu%2Fpubzone%2Fweblogs%2Fpressthink%2Fimg%2Fspace.gif)
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
March 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
Read about Jay Rosen's book, What Are Journalists For?
Excerpt from Chapter One of What Are Journalists For? "As Democracy Goes, So Goes the Press."
"Web Users Open the Gates." My take on ten years of Internet journalism, at Washingtonpost.com
Read: Q & As
Jay Rosen, interviewed about his work and ideas by journalist Richard Poynder
Audio: Have a Listen
Interview with host Brooke Gladstone on NPR's "On the Media." (Dec. 2003) Listen here.
Video: Have A Look
Jay Rosen explains the Web's "ethic of the link" in this four-minute YouTube clip.
"The Web is people." Jay Rosen speaking on the origins of the World Wide Web. (2:38)
One hour video Q & A on why the press is "between business models" (June 2008)
Recommended by PressThink:
Group Blogs
Digests & Round-ups:
Daily Briefing: A categorized digest of press news from the Project on Excellence in Journalism.
Press Notes is a round-up of today's top press stories from the Society of Professional Journalists.
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjournalism.nyu.edu%2Fmts%2Fimages%2Fmt-powered-white.gif)
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fus.i1.yimg.com%2Fus.yimg.com%2Fi%2Fus%2Fmy%2Faddtomyyahoo4.gif)
September 18, 2008
If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn't. So Let's Get a Clue.
"Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform operating as a closed system in a one-to-many world."In January of 2005 I wrote Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over, by which I meant “this debate isn’t going anywhere.” But I’ve since realized that bloggers and journalists are each other’s ideal “other,” and so the flare-ups and controversies will probably continue.
These notes are my attempt to clarify some of the key terms and offer a few ideas to help people caught up in the bloggers vs. journalists conflict, which of course goes on. They were presented to “Whose rules?” a conference at Kent State University, billed as a “no-holds-barred discussion of online ethics.” (In other words, a genuine blogger ethics panel!)
Here’s the video of my presentation, which is called…
If Bloggers Had No Ethics Blogging Would Have Failed, But it Didn’t.
So Let’s Get a Clue.
1. Because we have the Web…
There are now closed and open editorial systems: they are different animals.
They don’t work the same way, or produce the same goods. One does not replace the other. They are not enemies, either. Ideas that work perfectly well in one—and describe the world in that setting—may not work in understanding the other: they misdescribe the world in a shifted setting.
Because we have the Web…
There’s the press, but there is also the press sphere, an open system.
Within the press we find the people we know as “professional” journalists.
Within the press sphere we find pro journalists and the people formerly known as the audience, mixed together.
Because we have the Web…
The means of production—editorially speaking—have been distributed to the population at large.
“Press tools” once owned by media companies and operated by professional journalists are now firmly in the hands of anyone who wants them.
This meets the technical definition of a revolution: the means of production have actually changed hands. (Almost all Internet hype derives from that one fact.)
2. Citizen Journalism
When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, we call that “citizen journalism.”
Citizen journalism is most likely to thrive on an “open” platform.
That’s what blogging is: an early and awkward name for open platform publishing, in which anyone can participate.
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, said A.J. Liebling. Still true. But blogging means anyone can own one. Therefore freedom of the press belongs equally to the amateur and the pro. As does journalism, including its essential practices. The pros may be in a better position to excel at those practices but they do not “own” them.
Important! If anyone can that does not mean that everyone will. It means, “anyone who has time and reason can freely participate.”
In practice, closed and open editorial systems, the press and the press sphere, are not separate things but richly interactive with one another in the news and information marketplace.
3. Gatekeepers and filters
In closed systems, editorial production is expensive, so we need good gatekeepers. We solved that problem by having professionals do it.
In open systems, production is cheap and new material abundant, so we need good filters. We solved that problem by having bloggers, social media sites and software do it.
For a filter to become more intelligent and effective on the web, it needs to be highly interactive with the filter-ees: the people one is filtering for.
The original service that bloggers provided was exactly that: they were intelligent and agile filters of the Web for the people who came to rely on them. The users.
In closed editorial systems, the barrier for an individual author is vertical: getting published. Then you’re “in.”
In open systems, the barriers are horizontal: getting picked up. If your post is not shared, indexed, bookmarked, discussed, commented upon, and linked to, it’s not going to “stick” and become part of the Web. Getting published is the easy part.
The number one reason why journalists should blog is that it tutors you in how the Web works. You learn about open systems, and getting picked up; you become more interactive and have to master the horizontal part— or your blog fails. Fails to stick.
4. Trust
Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, says a blog is not defined by the software or features in the format (like comments) but by a person talking: “one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think.” Blogging, he says, is “writing without a safety net” and taking personal responsibility for the words.
To trust a blogger is to trust in a person, talking to you, who is working without the safety net of an institution.
If we rely on a blog for news in a given sphere—gadgets, politics, food, pets, moms—we are trusting in it as an intelligent filter of the live Web. This is the first thing a good news blog has to be.
Trust can also be lodged in the community of people who regularly show up at a blog to kibbitz about the news.
You can trust in the way a blog distributes you around the web: the world it links you to.
In all these ways, good bloggers—like Dave Winer—have earned the trust of users who come to rely on them.
5. Ethics
If “ethics” are the codification in rules of the practices that lead to trust on the platform where the users actually are—which is how I think of them—then journalists have their ethics and bloggers have theirs.
In all these ways, good bloggers build up trust with a base of users online. And over time, the practices that lead to trust on the platform where the users actually are… these become their ethic, their rules.
Those in journalism who want to bring ethics to blogging ought to start with why people trust (some) bloggers, not with an ethics template made for a prior platform that operated as a closed system in a one-to-many world.
That’s why I say: if bloggers had no ethics, blogging would have failed. Of course it didn’t. Now you have a clue.
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fjournalism.nyu.edu%2Fpubzone%2Fweblogs%2Fpressthink%2Fimg%2Ffile_icon.gif){kind=icon}
September 3, 2008
The Palin Convention and the Culture War Option
John McCain's convention gambit calls for culture war around the Sarah Palin pick. And now The Politico is reporting just that: Palin reignites culture wars. An option is forming. This is my attempt to describe it before her big speech in St. Paul.“She’s from a small town, with small-town values — but apparently, that’s not good enough for some of the folks out there attacking her and her family. Some Washington pundits and media big shots are in a frenzy over the selection of a woman who has actually governed rather than just talked a good game on the Washington talk shows and hit the Washington cocktail circuit.” —Fred Thompson addressing the Republican convention, Sep. 2, 2008.
John McCain’s convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the “angry left,” Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago ‘68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.
At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were. The Politico is reporting just that: Palin reignites culture wars.
Continue reading "The Palin Convention and the Culture War Option"August 20, 2008
Hype Busting at Mother Jones Goes Bust
Has Obama compared his campaign to the great movements in progressive history, like civil rights? Mother Jones says he has. What were the editors thinking? And why aren't they linking?Mother Jones is currently running a feature called The Audacity of Hype? It offer us the views of 24 writers, thinkers and historians on a question the editors find important:
There’s no quote from Obama comparing his campaign to the great progressive moments in American history. There’s no link to a text where he says that. This seemed odd for 2008; by now, the ethic of the link is reasonably well known among those who publish online. I asked the people in my Twitter feed, “If you’re editing this for Mother Jones, do you run the feature without a quote or link where Obama offers the comparison?” Russ Walker, formerly an editor at washingtonpost.com, said, “Absolutely not.”
Continue reading "Hype Busting at Mother Jones Goes Bust"August 13, 2008
National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News
This American Life's great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems.(This is a revised and expanded version of a post that ran at Idea Lab July 17, 2008.)
1. The Giant Pool of Money: Greatest Explainer Ever Heard
Behold the special episode of “This American Life” called The Giant Pool of Money. It’s a one-hour explainer on the mortgage crisis, the product of an unusual collaboration between Ira Glass, the host and force behind This American Life, producer Alex Blumberg, who works with Glass and told the story, and NPR, which lent economics correspondent Adam Davidson. He used to work for the show he was collaborating with.
If you don’t know “The Giant Pool of Money” you really should (here: download the podcast) because it’s probably the best work of explanatory journalism I have ever heard. I listened to it on a long car trip when everyone else was sleeping. Going in to the program, I didn’t understand the mortgage mess one bit: subprime loans were ruining Wall Street firms? And I care because they are old, respected firms?
That’s what I knew.
Continue reading "National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News"August 7, 2008
"The Whole Anthrax Case Would Make For a Good Journalism Class." Brian Ross Responds.
This week Dan Gillmor and I posted our questions for ABC News about its reporting in October, 2001 linking anthrax attacks in the US to Iraq. Brian Ross, the reporter on the case, has now responded. But I wouldn't say he brought clarity to the matter.For the background see Three Vital Questions for ABC News About its Anthrax Reporting in 2001 (PressThink, Aug. 4, 2008.)
A. Three confidential sources told us it was arson. Just before deadline, the fire department called. “It was not arson,” a spokesman said. So I reported: “Arson! Three sources said so.” Later, a colleague of mine went on the air to report what the fire department said: that it was not arson. I immediately went back to my sources and asked them: guys, what’s going on here? A couple days later, a fourth source said it was arson. So I reported that: four sources now say arson, though the fire department says no. Then a few days after that I again reported what the fire department said: that it was not arson, even though our sources had said it was arson. By this time, my sources had changed their mind: not arson, they all said. So I think our audience was kept well informed throughout.
Q. I see… Well, did you ever correct your first report, stating that it was arson?
A. I just told you: six days after I reported that it was arson I reported that the fire department said it was not arson. That’s a correction.
Q. But the fire department had said it was not arson even before your original report, so why did you—
A. Because on first inspection my sources said it was arson, okay? They later came to a different conclusion. That’s not my fault. You’re only as good as your sources.
Continue reading ""The Whole Anthrax Case Would Make For a Good Journalism Class." Brian Ross Responds."August 4, 2008
Three Vital Questions for ABC News About its Anthrax Reporting in 2001
"On Saturday morning, Dan Gillmor and I had the same thought when we read Glenn Greenwald's post: ABC News has to respond. But to what, exactly? We tried to put it into three questions: tough but fair as people there would probably say on other occasions."No need for a big preamble. Dan Gillmor and I are posting these questions simultaneously. (Here’s his case for them.) We think ABC News should answer them. They arise from two columns by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who has been tracking this story for some time.
If you want to understand our questions, go read Greenwald now.
Continue reading "Three Vital Questions for ABC News About its Anthrax Reporting in 2001"July 14, 2008
A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism
It's mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the "so-called" from in front?There are other definitions, but they will have to be discussed in the comments.
… And here’s the video version, “Got it?” by Chuck Olsen for The Uptake (“Will journalism be done by you or to you?”). YouTube has a thread for it.
July 8, 2008
Big Daddy Newspaper Has Gone and Left Journalism
Tree House Media Project Debuts. Self-reliance for angry journalists, preached by a former member of the tribe. Plus: "Last gasp of the curmudgeon class." NEWSROOM ID EXPLODES LIKE FIREWORKS OVER INTERN'S UPBEAT BLOG POST. Newspaper revanchism 'splained.Now this is interesting. Kind of an anti-curmudgeon site. The opposite of bitching about the bosses. Or unloading your frustrations on newspaper interns. I give you Tree House Media Project and its blog, which appears on a tab called “Fuck Google.” (Just an expression, wastes zero time on that.)
The first entry—Free or Subscription?—is informative and unhysterical. It highlights some of the “niche” news sites that have proven sustainable on the Web, each created by a person, not a firm.
The tone is self help for angry journalists. Empower ex-newsroom people with tools to learn with. Enough with the ignorant griping, the site says: figure out the self-publishing puzzle and you can take matters into your own hands. It’s like a band with a new sound. “No amount of bitching will prevent Yahoo from poaching our readers.” Suck it up, news tribe.
Continue reading "Big Daddy Newspaper Has Gone and Left Journalism"June 26, 2008
Migration Point for the Press Tribe
"Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable."(This is a revised version of the talk I gave to the Personal Democracy Forum, June 23, 2008. Originally published at TechPresident, same day. I have been using the “migration” image for a while, but felt it needed fuller expression. Hence…)
We are early in the rise of semi-pro journalism, but well into the decline of an older way of life within the tribe of professional journalists. I call them a tribe because they share a culture and a sense of destiny, and because they think they own the press— that it’s theirs somehow because they dominate the practice.
The First Amendment says to all Americans: you have a right to publish what you know, to say what you think. That right used to be abstractly held. Now it is concretely held because the power to publish has been distributed to the population at large. Projects that cause people to exercise their right to a free press strengthen the press, whether or not these projects strengthen the professional journalist’s “hold” on the press.
Continue reading "Migration Point for the Press Tribe"June 19, 2008
Update on Beatblogging.org Six Months In
David Cohn is moving on to figure out if crowd funding can be made to work for news. Another young web-savvy journalist is moving in: Patrick Thornton. He's going "scour the Web for the people who are pushing the practice of beat reporting."I have an update for you on Beatblogging.org, the project I announced six months ago in this post: These Beat Reporters Will Try the Social Network Way. (“Thirteen sites want to see if it works: from the Houston Chronicle to the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, PA, plus ESPN.com, MTV, the Seattle Times… Some of the beats: Child welfare, Dallas public schools, ‘green’ tech, Big Pharma, digital music, Procter & Gamble.”)
I said then that the project—which is part of NewAssignment.Net—offered a simple proposition: “Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a ‘live’ social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.” I felt the only way to find out was to try it for a year, with different beats in different locales and different editorial settings.
Continue reading "Update on Beatblogging.org Six Months In"June 16, 2008
Filter the Best Stuff to the Front Page: A Demo
OffTheBus and NewsTrust.Net ran a little test two weeks ago. It's a crowdsourced week in review feature for high quality John McCain coverage, June 2 to 9. Here's the background and results.The mission of NewsTrust—it’s nonprofit and non-partisan—is to be a “guide to good journalism.” The site offers a “range of tools to help you find and share” the best work. It has a system for surfacing quality news that anyone can participate in by rating news stories and works of commentary, or by submitting them to be rated.
NewsTrust is one kind of answer to a question I am often asked. If supply keeps expanding (because so many have media power now) won’t there come a crisis in demand? And don’t we lose something if we no longer have that common narrative once provided by Big Media? (A favorite of Big Media interviewers.)
Sites like NewsTrust take it for granted that expansion in media space is a good thing. But filtering and forwarding systems must keep pace. The better we are at that—finding the good work, forwarding it to eager users—the easier it is to relax and accept that anyone can be a producer, or that good contributions can come from anywhere.
Continue reading "Filter the Best Stuff to the Front Page: A Demo"June 9, 2008
When Mayhill Fowler Met Bill Clinton at the Rope Line
"Trust me because I mask my true feelings about the matter" is not an inherently better way to journalize or gain cred. "Trust me because I show you what my true feelings on the matter are..." can also work. And if it has pro and amateur wings maybe the press can fly again.You like your citizen journalism by the case? OffTheBus brings you another case with Mayhill Fowler in the middle of it. (See my post, From OffTheBus to Meet the Press, about her first one.)
…On the final day of an epic primary season, Mayhill Fowler is in Milbank, S.D. on the rope line as Bill Clinton and the crowd make contact. From three directions people are shouting at him to get his attention. He’s grabbing hands and accepting well wishes. People are taking pictures as they get close to Clinton and some record the commotion on their cell phones. Fowler means to hand him her business card, which explains who she is and why she might be asking questions, but somehow she fumbles it. As Clinton comes within ear shot she extends her hand and with it asks her question. “Mister President what do you think about that hatchet job somebody did on you in Vanity Fair…?”
Continue reading "When Mayhill Fowler Met Bill Clinton at the Rope Line"May 29, 2008
What Happened to Scott McClellan in Longer Perspective: 100 Years of the White House Press
I never expected McClellan to write a book about being the jerk at the podium for Bush, or to make connections between his experience and the larger wreckage of the Bush presidency. But he's done just that.“You got to be able to step back and look at the big picture,” said Scott McClellan on the Today show this morning, talking about his book disturbance. I did that in April 2006 when McClellan resigned as White House spokesman. See The Jerk at the Podium: Scott McClellan Steps Away. Most of what I have to say on this week’s events is in that post.
(This week it was still on the first page of results for a Google search of McClellan’s name. The New York Times topic page for McClellan also picked it up. So did Mahalo. Long form bloggers live for these moments, when the live web and search come together.)
McClellan saw that he became just that: the jerk, the guy whom everyone could abuse. He is now trying to explain, in public, how such a thing happened. In “The Jerk at…” I was talking about his visible part in the Bush presidency— on television, in the public eye. Invariably, Washington reporters I met would tell me what a good person McClellan was… in person. “Great guy to work with.” And they almost always said the same thing about why his performances were so excruciating. “He’s in a tough spot.” And then their voices would trail off.
Continue reading "What Happened to Scott McClellan in Longer Perspective: 100 Years of the White House Press"May 6, 2008
Looking for the Mouse in Media: Clay Shirky on Deploying the Cognitive Surplus for Public Good
"The imagery is geological: the release of trapped deposits. He thinks we can reverse the time sink for people once marooned on the receiving end of a one-way system that didn’t care what you thought or brought to it, since it couldn’t afford the costs of interacting with you."Ever wondered: where’s the time going to come from for all these nifty open source ventures that people are planning? Well, Clay Shirky says we got plenty. He just gave an extremely useful and imaginative speech to Web heads about where we are in media time.
Shirky, who teaches at NYU but in a different program, has a new book out: Here Comes Everybody (“The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.”) This speech stands alone. You can read it here, but you should really watch him here— after absorbing this post. The clip is less than 15 minutes. It lets you think along with Shirky as he explains “the cognitive surplus” we developed during the age of TV.
Continue reading "Looking for the Mouse in Media: Clay Shirky on Deploying the Cognitive Surplus for Public Good"April 28, 2008
The Presses Stop But the Press Goes On: Capital Times Lives on the Web
The Cap Times was re-born to Madison on Saturday. Ambivalence was felt about the lost authority of print-on-paper news. Generational blues were sung, a flying leap taken. Now a progressive newspaper must make real progress on the Web.“They may be the last presses we ever own.”
Jeff Jarvis, The Last Presses, Buzzmachine, Dec. 5, 2005.
Take a look at this photograph. It shows employees of the Capital Times in Madison, WI, holding one of the last editions of their newspaper, an afternoon daily founded in 1917. These people are losing their jobs, and the newspaper they brought forward six days a week will no longer stretch across the big machines you can see behind them.
The photo isn’t a celebration. The people in the picture, though proud of their work, are not full of that fighting spirit. They are gathered to mark the end of something. Every day they put out a newspaper that won’t be put out that way any more. Behind them are the last presses at the Capital Times.
The presses have stopped but the press goes on. That’s my headline. Here’s the New York Times account and a local report. I wanted to add my own.
Continue reading "The Presses Stop But the Press Goes On: Capital Times Lives on the Web "
We need to keep the press from being absorbed into The Media. This means keeping the word press, which is antiquated. But included under its modern umbrella should be all who do the serious work in journalism, regardless of the technology used. The people who will invent the next press in America--and who are doing it now online--continue an experiment at least 250 years old. It has a powerful social history and political legend attached...
The People Formerly Known as the Audience: "You don't own the eyeballs. You don't own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new balance of power between you and us." More...
Okay, Ready? My Coordinates for a Successful News Site: "Howard Weaver, Vice President for News at The McClatchy Company said, 'It comes as close as anything I’ve seen to a roadmap for the near future.'" More...
The Beast Without a Brain: Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us. "Just so you know, 'the media' has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not 'get behind' candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy… or gal. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.." More...
They're Not in Your Club but They Are in Your League: Firedoglake at the Libby Trial: "I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think." More...
Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class: "We’re at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they’re giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they themselves say is happening." More...
Getting the Politics of the Press Right: Walter Pincus Rips into Newsroom Neutrality "The important thing is to show integrity-- not to be a neuter, politically. And having good facts that hold up is a bigger advantage than claiming to reflect all sides equally well." More...
Introducing NewAssignment.Net: "Enterprise reporting goes pro-am. Assignments are open sourced. They begin online. Reporters working with smart users and blogging editors get the story the pack wouldn't, couldn't or didn't." More...
Assignment Zero: Trend Reporting Gone Pro-Am "NewAssignment.Net just launched its first reporting project, a partnership with Wired.com and Newsvine. It's called Assignment Zero. Here's the deal, and the links." More...
Assignment Zero Lands. OffTheBus Launches. Lessons Fly. "'A highly satisfying failure,' Jeff Howe called it in Wired. No, 'a spectacularly successful failure,' says Beth Lawton at The Digital Edge. Meanwhile, OffTheBus.Net launched this week, carrying the lessons of 'Zero' into political space..." More...
What I Learned from Assignment Zero "Here are my coordinates for the territory we need to be searching. I got them from doing a distributed trend story with Wired.com and thinking through the results." More...
Rollback: "This White House doesn't settle for managing the news--what used to be called 'feeding the beast'--because there is a larger aim: to roll back the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country." More...
Bush to Press: "You're Assuming That You Represent the Public. I Don't Accept That." "Bush and his advisors have their own press think, which they are trying out as policy. Reporters do not represent the interests of a broader public. They aren't a pipeline to the people, because people see through the game of Gotcha. The press has forfeited, if it ever had, its quasi-official role in the checks and balances of government." More...
Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop: ""Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are different ideas. We shouldn't fuzz them up. The press is capable of doing that because it never came to terms with what Suskind reported in 2004." More...
Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press: "Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain." More...
Journalism Is Itself a Religion: "We're headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers." More...
News Turns from a Lecture to a Conversation: "Some of the pressure the blogs are putting on journalists shows up, then, in the demand for "news as conversation," more of a back-and-forth, less of a pronouncement. This is an idea with long roots in academic journalism that suddenly (as in this year) jumped the track to become part of the news industry's internal dialogue." More...
Two Washington Posts May Be Better Than One: "They're not equals, but Washington and Arlington have their own spheres. Over the newspaper and reporting beats Len Downie is king. Over the website Jim Brady is sovereign. Over the user�s experience no one has total control. There's tension because there's supposed to be tension." More...
Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die: "An industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise." More...
The Migration: "So while people in the old press pack up, and tell stories about giants they knew in the era when, they are also asking each other: where headed? As in: How are your people planning to make it across? And as the preparations are made the headlines keep landing, where they have for years: 'Newspapers struggle to avoid their own obit.'" More...
The Jerk at the Podium: Scott McClellan Steps Away: "McClellan, Bush, Cheney, and Rove proved there were other ways. Replace news management with press nullification. Drop the persuasion model, in favor of the politics of assent. Choose non-communication to demonstrate that you ought not to be questioned (it only helps our enemies.)" More...
Grokking Woodward: "Woodward and Bernstein of 1972-74 didn't have such access, and this probably influenced--for the better--their view of what Nixon and his men were capable of. Watergate wasn't broken by reporters who had entree to the inner corridors of power. It was two guys on the Metro Desk." More...
News Comes in Code: Judy Miller's Return to the Times "Just one man's opinion, but now is a good time to say it: The New York Times is not any longer--in my mind--the greatest newspaper in the land. Nor is it the base line for the public narrative that it once was. Some time in the last year or so I moved the Washington Post into that position." More...
Maybe Media Bias Has Become a Dumb Debate: "This here is a post for practically everyone in the game of seizing on media bias and denouncing it, which is part of our popular culture, and of course a loud part of our politics. And this is especially for the 'we're fair and balanced, you're not' crowd, wherever I may have located you." More...
A Little Detail in the Sale of About.com to the New York Times: "The Post's links don't expire, you see; links to the New York Times do. The Elliot column couldn't embed itself in the Web, and sink proper roots. It's effectively "gone." From Elliot's point of view, he loses a potentially huge readership for his work. Can he afford it?." More...
Bill O'Reilly and the Paranoid Style in News: "O'Reilly feeds off his own resentments--the establishment sneering at Inside Edition--and like Howard Beale, the 'mad prophet of the airwaves,' his resentments are enlarged by the medium into public grievances among a mass of Americans unfairly denied voice." More...
Rather's Satisfaction: Mystifying Troubles at CBS: "Dan Rather and CBS took the risky course, impunging the motives of critics, rather than a more confident and honorable one: Let's look at our sources and methods. What can explain such a blind reaction? Here is my attempt."More...
The View From Nowhere: "Occupy the reasonable middle between two markers for 'vocal critic,' and critics look ridiculous charging you with bias. Their symmetrical existence feels like proof of an underlying hysteria. Their mutually incompatible charges seem to cancel each other out. The minute evidence they marshall even shows a touch of fanaticism." More...
Thoughts on the Killing of a Young Correspondent: "Among foreign correspondents, there is a phrase: 'parachuting in.' That's when a reporter drops into foreign territory during an emergency, without much preparation, staying only as long as the story remains big. The high profile people who might parachute in are called Bigfoots in the jargon of network news. The problem with being a Bigfoot, of course, is that it's hard to walk in other people's shoes." More...
The News From Iraq is Not Too Negative. But it is Too Narrow: "The bias charges are getting more serious lately as the stakes rise in Iraq and the election. But there is something lacking in press coverage, and it may be time for wise journalists to assess it. The re-building story has gone missing. And without it, how can we judge the job Bush is doing?." More...
The Abyss of Observation Alone. "There are hidden moral hazards in the ethic of neutral observation and the belief in a professional 'role' that transcends other loyalties. I think there is an abyss to observation alone. And I feel it has something to do with why more people don't trust journalists. They don't trust that abyss." More...
THE WEBLOG, THE WEB and JOURNALISM TODAY
"Find Some New Information and Put it Into Your Post." Standards for Pro-Am Journalism at OffTheBus: "Opinion based on information 'everyone' has is less valuable than opinion journalism based on information that you dug up, originated, or pieced together. So it’s not important to us that contributors keep opinion out. What’s important is that they put new information in. More...
Out in the Great Wide Open: Maybe you heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain Dealer with four "outside" voices brought in from the ranks of Ohio bloggers: two left, two right. Twelve points you may not have seen elsewhere." More...
Some Bloggers Meet the Bosses From Big Media: "What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never." More...
PressThink's Blue Plate Special Launches. We Name the Top Blogging Newspapers in the U.S. "Number One is the Houston Chronicle, Number Two the Washington Post. There's more. And there's a big chart. So check it out. More...
Notes and Comment on BlogHer '05 "I think the happiest conference goers at BlogHer were probably the newbies, people who want to start blogging or just did. They got a lot of good information and advice. Some of the best information was actually dispensed in response to the fears provoked by blogging, which shouldn�t be avoided, the sages said, but examined, turned around, defused, and creatively shrunk.." More...
Top Ten List: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most of today�s journalism comes out of the market economy." PressThink's most linked-to post. More...
A Second Top Ten List: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism? "The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly." More...
Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds: "Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out." More...
Editors Rock Who Let Weblogs Roll: "When you're sitting at your desk and there are things strange, wonderful and new on your screen, you may have to re-decide what journalism 'is' and is finally about, in order to cover the new class of cases that arise when you're doing it live online." More...
The Weblog: An Extremely Democratic Form in Journalism "It's pirate radio, legalized; it's public access coming closer to life. Inside the borders of Blogistan (a real place with all the problems of a real place) we're closer to a vision of 'producer democracy' than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform." More...
No One Owns Journalism: "And Big Media doesn't entirely own the press, because if it did then the First Amendment, which mentions the press, would belong to Big Media. And it doesn't. These things were always true. The weblog doesn't change them. It just opens up an outlet to the sea. Which in turn extends 'the press' to the desk in the bedroom of the suburban mom, where she blogs at night." More...
Brain Food for BloggerCon: Journalism and Weblogging in Their Corrected Fullness "Blogging is one universe. Its standard unit is the post, its strengths are the link and the low costs of entry, which means lots of voices. Jounalism is another universe. Its standard unit is "the story." Its strengths are in reporting, verification and access-- as in getting your calls returned." More...
Dispatches From the Un-Journalists: "Journalists think good information leads to opinion and argument. It's a logical sequence. Bloggers think that good argument and strong opinion cause people to seek information, an equally logical sequence. What do the bloggers bring to this? My short answer to the press is: everything you have removed."More...
Political Jihad and the American Blog: Chris Satullo Raises the Stakes "Journalists, you can stop worrying about bloggers 'replacing' the traditional news media. We're grist for their mill, says Satullo, a mill that doesn't run without us. Bloggers consume and extend the shelf life of our reporting, and they scrutinize it at a new level of intensity.."More...
Questions and Answers About PressThink "The Web is good for many opposite things. For quick hitting information. For clicking across a field. For talk and interaction. It's also a depth finder, a memory device, a library, an editor. Not to use a weblog for extended analysis (because most users won't pick that option) is Web dumb but media smart. What's strange is that I try to write short, snappy things, but they turn into long ones." More...
CAMPAIGN POLITICS AND THE PRESS, 2004, HIGHLIGHTS:
Politics in a Different Key: "It is the politics of the savvy class. Its members are the insiders. They are the pros. They are the pundits, handlers and funders, vultures and parrots who run and staff the campaign story, which is above all the inside story of how you get elected in this country. Its outstanding feature, Joan Didion wrote, is "remoteness from the actual life of the country." They are the people of this remoteness." More...
A Politics That is Dumber than Spam: "I remember the moment when presidential campaigns turned from just maddening and absurd to completely empty for me. It might have happened years before, but I am a believer in politics. So it took until the fall of 2000. Bush and Gore were then fighting it out, not by opposing one another in any kind of argument, but by running virtually the same campaign, on the same issues, pandering to the same groups, advancing a rhetoric that sounded the same but for a few catch phrases." More...
Private Life, Public Happiness and the Dean Connection: "Somehow it had all gotten away from them. Presidential campaigns had drifted out of alignment with most Americans. The ritual no longer seemed like something the country did for itself every four years, but what a professional cadre did, and sold back to the country as 'politics.' But it wasn�t, really. At least it wasn�t democratic politics at anything like capacity." More...
The Master Narrative in Journalism: "Were 'winning' to somehow be removed or retired as the operating system for news, campaign reporting would immediately become harder to do, not because there would be no news, but rather no common, repeatable instructions for deciding what is a key development in the story, a turning point, a surprise, a trend. Master narratives are thus harder to alter than they are to apprehend. For how do you keep the story running while a switch is made?" More...
Raze Spin Alley, That Strange Creation of the Press: "Spin Alley, an invention of the American press and politicos, shows that the system we have is in certain ways a partnership between the press and insiders in politics. They come together to mount the ritual. An intelligent nation is entitled to ask if the partners are engaged in public service when they bring to life their invention... Alternative thesis: they are in a pact of mutual convenience that serves no intelligible public good." More...
Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever!: "How is it you know you're the press? Because you have a pass that says PRESS, and people open the gate. The locker room doors admit you. The story must be inside that gate; that's why they give us credentials. We get closer. We tell the fans what's going on. And if this was your logic, Bill James tried to bust it. Fellahs, said he to the baseball press, you have to realize that you are the gate." More...
Psst.... The Press is a Player: "The answer, I think, involves an open secret in political journalism that has been recognized for at least 20 years. But it is never dealt with, probably because the costs of facing it head on seem larger than the light tax on honesty any open secret demands. The secret is this: pssst... the press is a player in the campaign. And even though it knows this, as everyone knows it, the professional code of the journalist contains no instructions in what the press could or should be playing for?" More...
Die, Strategy News: "I think it's a bankrupt form. It serves no clear purpose, has no sensible rationale. The journalists who offer us strategy news do not know what public service they are providing, why they are providing it, for whom it is intended, or how we are supposed to use this strange variety of news."More...
He Said, She Said, We Said: "When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report 'what happened.'" More...
If Religion Writers Rode the Campaign Bus: "Maybe irony, backstage peaking and "de-mystify the process" only get you so far, and past that point they explain nothing. Puzzling through the convention story, because I'm heading right into it myself, made me to realize that journalism's contempt for ritual was deeply involved here. Ritual is newsless; therefore it must be meaningless. But is that really true?."More...
Convention Coverage is a Failed Regime and Bloggers Have Their Credentials: "No one knows what a political convention actually is, anymore, or why it takes 15,000 people to report on it. Two successive regimes for making sense of the event have collapsed; a third has not emerged. That's a good starting point for the webloggers credentialed in Boston. No investment in the old regime and its ironizing." More...
Down at the Tick Tock Diner, I Caught Up With CNN: "'Nobody had ever asked to anchor convention coverage from the floor,' Feist said as we shared a booth-- like real diners. CNN got the new gear, tested it out, and made the request to the Democrats. The Democrats said yes. And right there the sky box era at conventions came to an end."More...
Stark Message for the Legacy Media: "Journalists find before them, with 50 days left, a campaign overtaken by Vietnam, by character issues, attacks, and fights about the basic legitimacy of various actors-- including the press itself, including Dan Rather. It's been a dark week. And the big arrow is pointing backwards." More...
Every Four Years Journalism "The Every Four Years headset is like outdated software still running because it's an expensive decision and major disruption to replace a piece of press think so big, with so many parts. There is no agreement on a new 'think' system. And there is every incentive to keep the old program going for another election cycle, even though the world has moved on." More...
Philip Gourevitch: Campaign Reporting as Foreign Beat: "'A presidential election is a like a gigantic moving television show,' he said. It is the extreme opposite of an overlooked event. The show takes place inside a bubble, which is a security perimeter overseen by the Secret Service. If you go outside the bubble for any reason, you become a security risk until you are screened again by hand."More...
You are viewing a mobilized version of this site...
View original page here
