“The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.” — Hunter S. Thompson
Category Archives: Journalism
Secrets of the Vatican
This Frontline documentary was… damning. I’m sure “defenders of the faith” have ready responses to every charge although I’m not sure what one would say to 8-year-old Monica Barret who was raped by her priest (“If You Tell Anybody, Your Parents Will Burn in Hell”). A middle aged woman now, Ms. Barret’s dry-eyed account of that event was chilling and heart breaking.
I suppose you argue that the producers and Frontline and the media (and all non-Catholics?) are out to ‘get’ the Catholic Church. Fuck if I know. Has anyone said, “I don’t want to be part of this. I’ll find another place worship. Call me if you get your shit together.”
Sounds like the new Pope might be trying to make some changes but the corruption runs deep and high and any real house cleaning is gonna be ugly.
“There is no news industry”
“If the public can speak directly to one another in large groups and with high visibility, then the self-definition of a journalist as a privileged translator takes a big hit. If you think of yourself as a member of the only class allowed to find and explain information, you find yourself in a very uncomfortable position.“
“The easiest way to get people in institutions to do interesting new things is for that institution to go bankrupt and for those people to change jobs.”
“Anything in the news business that can be commodified will be commodified. The people who cling to the idea that humans are required to rewrite wire service copy are spending money that no longer needs to be spent.”
From an interview with Clay Shirky by The Europlean Magazine
Challenges of Conversational Journalism
“The most visible journalism these days — aka the loudest journalism, namely cable news, pop culture blogs, tabloid magazines, TMZ, Buzzfeed, HuffPo, talk radio, etc. — mostly takes the form of opinionated conversation: professional media people discussing current events much like you and your friends might at a crowded lunch table. A side effect of this way of doing journalism is that you rarely hear from anyone who actually is an expert on the subject of interest at any particular time. That approach doesn’t scale; finding and talking to experts is time consuming and experts without axes to grind are boring anyway. So what you get instead are people who are experts at talking about things about which they are inexpert.”
Twitter Radio
Twitter is my first source for breaking news. If anything big (that I care about) happens, it will show up first in my Twitter feed. I guess a cable news channel might come close or a good all-news radio station (do those still exist?) but my Twitter stream is non-stop in my pocket. Smart news organization (NPR and Reuters, for example) know they need to have their stories where I am, rather than try to get me to come to where they are.
