At a recent meeting with a Facebook representative, he said something that really struck me: “The News Feed has really developed into the daily newspaper of our lives.” It’s true. Think about the way we now peruse Facebook – much like how we used to read newspapers. We scroll Facebook at various points in the [...]
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Tag Archives: Journalism
News Breaks First Online: Osama bin Laden & the Web
May 3, 2011
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Forty-four percent of people learned that Navy SEALs from the United States had killed Osama bin Laden during a raid in Pakistan from an online source, according to an unscientific poll of almost 6,000 people by CNET. The poll asked people how they found out about the news, which broke on the night of Sunday, [...]
Read more Balance Continues to Undermine Journalism
April 25, 2011
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Balance in journalism needs to be reassessed. It damages the fundamental purpose of journalism, which is to provide readers with the truth, and has led to a proliferation of misinformation. The latest example is the increasing numbers of the people who believe President Obama was born in Africa. A recent poll showed that nearly half [...]
Read moreIs American Journalism Working Anymore?
April 21, 2011
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Peter Finley Dunn, the late writer and humorist, once described the role of journalism to “comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.” When I was a journalist, Dunn’s quote was at the heart of how I practiced the craft. I believed deeply in Dunn’s assessment and even scribbled the quote onto my journalism notebooks as a [...]
Read moreOther Reasons Why Newspapers Aren’t Read
April 8, 2011
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Journalists and media observers spend a lot of time exploring how the Internet and social networks are cutting into the readership of print publications like magazines and newspapers. I plead guilty as charged. There is little doubt that digital communications is undermining print. The Pew Research Center noted in its “State of the News Media [...]
Read moreOne of the Culprits Might be Technology
April 5, 2011
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A bigoted Christian pastor of a tiny fundamentalist church in Florida burns the Koran while noting that it burn “very good” and the flames could have cooked a burger or toasted a marshmallow. The pastor posts a video of the act on the Internet. The president of Pakistan calls it “serious set-back” in American relations [...]
Read moreThe New York Times Big Gamble: Paywalls (Again)
March 17, 2011
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Starting on March 28, the New York Times will dive headfirst – yet again – into digital subscriptions and… take a deep breath… paywalls. Or should I say the dreaded and much maligned paywalls. The last time the New York Times tried this they dove into the shallow end of the pool and nearly broke [...]
Read more Why “Balance” Hurts Journalism
March 4, 2011
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Intelligence Squared is a wonderful program on NPR that features Oxford style debating among experts on various topics. This month, the show, hosted by ABC News correspondent John Donovan, featured a debate on whether to repeal “Obamacare.” Arguing for the repeal was former U.S. Rep. John Shadegg (R-Arizona). As Donovan introduced Shadegg they had this [...]
Read more Has Blogging Entered its Twilight?
February 22, 2011
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The answer is no, absolutely not. But I’ll get back to that in a moment. The blogging is dead meme has been around for a few years (I first read about blogging’s demise at ReadWriteWeb in 2007). So it isn’t a surprise that the New York Times recently tackled the issue and declared: “Blogs were [...]
Read more Backlash Against Huffington Post Heats Up
February 10, 2011
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Has the Huffington Post jumped the shark? The news this week that AOL bought the Huffington Post for $315 million has been met with outrage by many readers and, worse, by the hundreds, if not thousands of bloggers who contribute free content to the site. Comments on the Huffington Post’s announcement about the sale have [...]
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