October 2007
37 posts
Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia... →
Predictaby, Wikipedians deleted many of the students’ contributions, sometimes with rude comments. Yay Wikipedia!
Daily Kos: The Cult of the Professional →
Hey, I didn’t realize Markos Moulistas Zuniga was a trained journalist either. Cool to know.
ProPublica – Journalism in the public interest →
Viacom opens up Daily Show archive →
A Brief Message: Neologotastic! →
People who don’t hesitate to create new things in other media — who happily design their own fonts and mix their own colors — shy away from coining new words, with an almost reverent attitude towards the existing language. But words are human, and were made by human creativity. (reblogged via cubicle 17)
“We’re introducing this type of open source aggregation into the new magazine,...”
– BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum on the magazine’s redesign (source)
Reaganomics finally trickles down to area man →
Noted without comment.
Journey to the heart of China’s Internet... →
In partnership with Reporters Without Borders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Chinese Internet expert working in IT industry has produced an exclusive study on the key mechanism of the Chinese official system of online censorship, surveillance and propaganda. The author prefers to remain anonymous. Here, in PDF form, is the report. Cory Doctorow notes that “this report might do more good as...
Online journalism job titles, responsibilities and... →
Journerdist Will Sullivan exhaustively breaks down online journalism jobs and what pay candidates can expect. This is an awesome list. An earlier post explains his methodology.
Open your news or lose
A man was arrested this morning after firing shots from an apartment building balcony in Bloomington. Bloomington’s local paper, the Herald-Times, only allows subscribers to read articles online. Thankfully, they have a bloggy Web article available free online. They must have realized that no one is going to pay the $6 registration fee just to find out if the shooter’s been arrested or not. That...
A huge list of free (as in speech) Mac software →
(Just begging for a massive “free software for journos” post.)
“It’s perhaps the ultimate case of cognitive dissonance: by YouTube’s...”
– Jeff Atwood
UT satirists take aim at journalism professors →
A group of UT Austin j-school students are printing and distributing an anonymous four-page publication satirizing their professors. When The Yellow Journalist debuted at the University of Texas this month, professors wondered if perhaps they’d taught their students a little too well. The four-page newsletter, written and edited by anonymous students and printed on yellow paper, lampoons...
Newspapers, bloggers now on same page →
Once upon a time, newspapers wanted nothing to do with bloggers, those amateurs who opined on anything that caught their fancy, whether it was interesting, or accurate, or not. That was then. Now newspaper websites, desperate for readers and revenue, are increasingly in cahoots with bloggers, posting and plugging them and even sharing advertising revenue.
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Links, Google and the Associated Press
The Google–AP deal is now more than a month old, and it looks like pretty much everyone but Google and the AP hates it. Keith Robinson, AP Indianapolis bureau chief, came to speak to my reporting, writing and editing course earlier this week. He talked about the AP’s history and how it operates today. He even talked about freedom of information and the AP. But what about the Google deal?
He...
U.S. guards kill 2 Iraqi women in new shooting →
Jon and I talked about this tonight, and I agree: what’s most powerful about this story is the image of an Iraqi boy peering through the bloodstained vehicle. Tell me again why it’s a good idea to turn military operations over to private security firms?
The Internet’s “black holes” →
Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Maldives, Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. (via aatw)
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NYT on Free Culture - Boing Boing →
Boing Boing toots its own horn about a nice article on copyleft in The New York Times, of all places.
Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the popular technology blog Boing Boing, said the recording industry lawsuits were not “scaring students away from file-sharing, but scaring them into political consciousness.” Last year, Mr. Doctorow was an adviser to the Students for Free Culture chapter at the...
Is the Net good for writers? →
Fort Hunt's quiet men break silence on WWII →
Strenuous interrogation techniques have change a lot in the past 60 years:Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.(via Whatever)
J-School Confidential: Rude Awakening →
Above all else, I’ve realized that j-school requires major self-motivation. Nervous at the beginning, I was secretly hoping for a little hand-holding. I wanted some supervised activities during which I’d be coached on how to approach strangers on the street, conduct a proper interview, ask good questions, and then synthesize all of this into a super story. In truth, we had a few lectures and...
Berkeley puts class lectures on YouTube →
The new news — Facebook, Flickr and YouTube →
Misogyn•E →
Pixar’s trend of making blatant ly sexist movies looks to continue with their latest, Wall•E: Really, this isn’t even subtle. The traditional “women’s work” of cleaning, laundry, and taking care of the children is assigned to Sally, Wendy, and Nancy, while Gary goes out to do the yardwork and Wally picks up the garbage, typically “men’s chores.” These are stereotypes dating back decades — do we...
Laptop with a mission widens its audience →
David Pouge lakes a look at One Laptop Per Child’s XO, and loves it:No, the biggest obstacle to the XO’s success is not technology — it’s already a wonder — but fear. Overseas ministers of education fear that changing the status quo might risk their jobs. Big-name computer makers fear that the XO will steal away an overlooked two-billion-person market. Critics fear that the poorest countries need...
Oh, the Times they are a changin’ →
The Times, which didn’t even run color photographs a couple of decades ago, which had the most hideous front page design this side of the Wall Street Journal, has become a leader in innovation as well as solid journalism. Notice anything about that masthead?
Why the Amish forgive so quickly →
Amish faith is grounded in the teachings of Jesus to love enemies, reject revenge, and leave vengeance in the hands of God. As a father who lost a daughter in the schoolhouse said, “Forgiveness means giving up the right to revenge.”
From the State Department, all the news for... →
But now the State Department is in the blogosphere, and says it “offers the public an alternative source to mainstream media for U.S. foreign policy information.” The blog, launched last week and called “Dipnote,” is “taking you behind the scenes.” This is what we’ve all been waiting for! No more media filters and distortions. Unbiased news directly from the federal government, a news source long...
Science in Islamic countries →
Slashdot geeks take on religion? This can’t end well. It’s kind of like watching a trainwreck — you know the comments will all miss the point, yet wind up rated “5, Insightful.”
Confessions of a community theater critic →
It’s about 5:00 in the afternoon, it’s been raining all day and now into the night, and the radio says it’ll keep raining well into tomorrow. The phone rings. It’s my arts editor at the Baltimore City Paper. He sounds like he’s ready to go home. “I’ve got a play for you,” he says. The rain is beating against the windows. “Hapgood,” he says. “By Tom Stoppard. You good with it?” Before I...
An opinion on media objectivity →
The standard newspaper writing style is often stale and homogeneous. Newspapers seldom publish (in print) commentary from the blogosphere and message boards. Many newspaper Web sites bury their interesting blogs at the bottom of their home pages and don’t regularly link to local blogs. And, most poignantly, killer editorials almost never appear on the front page; they’re buried in the back of the...
With his camera seized, photojournalist uses... →
When ABC’s senior foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto crossed into Myanmar today from neighboring Thailand the authorities took away his camera. So he filed his report for World News and the webcast, with the next best thing, his cell phone.
On the ground in Yangon →
Good video from Burma from Al Jazeera English. (via Mindy McAdams)
A Tipping Point in History Accelerated by the... →
Craig Newmark:During the 1600s, William of Orange sought the throne of England and prepared for that using the Net. Specifically, he utilized a network of bloggers, particularly John Locke, and distributed the blogs as pamphlets via a router network of coffee houses. (reblogged via Journerdism)