Journalists write stories. Most stories are intended to convey information. The strategic thinking that should be the next step — who needs this information, how might they act on it, how will they find it, how will they share it, how is it useful to them? — gets little attention in most newsrooms. This piece [...]
This is a mirror post of an editorial I wrote for The Exception Magazine (here for post). I enjoyed writing this because it was written for readers instead of for other journalists. Journalists suddenly noticed their industry looks like all the other ones they write about on Wall Street. Newspapers, such as the Rocky Mountain [...]
In the past week a lot has been written about Jon Stewart’s skewering of CNBC and the faux-populist Rick Santelli. In the midst of all the praise for what was truly a deserving comedic spanking of arguably the most-watched group of financial journalists on television, others are concluding that Stewart’s eight-minute jab-fest was an example of good journalism. Something tells me Stewart – a comedian – would disagree.
While the Daily Show’s bit on CNBC was hilarious (video below), it should have prompted every working journalist to engage in some serious self reflection. The piece, instead, held up a mirror to a system that is obviously in need of a fix: journalists with all-access passes to the rich and powerful lobbing softballs at the crooks who got us into this economic mess in the first place. Sure CNBC does not represent every working reporter out there, and there are plenty of good examples of financial journalism that warned of the looming meltdown years before it happened (even though it was tragically and largely ignored by the public – but that’s another debate). The problem is we are losing credibility and fast no thanks to the massive cut in resources newspapers are enduring.
Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, “how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?”
This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, citizen journalism, etc.
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This question is asked a lot by everyone. But usually the answer is given by journalists. We don’t usually ask readers. I’ve had the fortune of being part of peripheral conversations that ask this question to non-journalists. In my Citizen Participation class, we discussed election campaigns and candidate advertisements. Students in that class overwhelmingly agreed: [...]
Several recent posts in the blogosphere have argued about who is to blame for the current crisis in journalism. Jeff Jarvis said it was the fault of journalists and was then sharply criticized by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate (Is Jeff Jarvis gloating too much about the death of print?) Paul Farhi, writing in the American [...]
Objectivity in journalism is not only a fallacy but a dangerous goal.
She basically said in order to be an objective journalist, you cannot have values. Therefore, because journalists publish themselves to other people, in order to remain perfectly objective, you cannot make moral judgments on what you observe and write about, otherwise you are inherently biased.
With this argument, an objective journalist is ammoral. Therefore, of the three purposes above, an ammoral journalist can only “inform the public.”
Readers of The Nevada Sagebrush seem to break the general trend recognized by other student publications. Many of them said their readers are apathetic and comment rarely and many times when they do, conversations degrade into racist remarks, troll battles and other things often experienced by professional papers.
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but what you can do for SND