Nearly 1,000 bundled Ann Arborites lined the city's downtown sidewalks during a snowstorm in February 1985, waiting to enter a three-story Art Deco office building on East Huron Street. The residents weren't waiting to see a politician speak or to watch a well-known musician play, two events that might draw such a crowd in […]
Na Imprensa Internacional
When I began my current job in the journalism school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my director told me I had a particularly daunting mission: “train students for jobs that may not yet exist.” I’ve tried to keep her voice in my head over the years and keep my courses on pace accordingly. But […]
Most of the recent attention around WikiLeaks has been focused on the legal issues surrounding its controversial founder, Julian Assange. But we shouldn't let that blind us to what the organization has accomplished and the critical role it plays as a "stateless news organization." By now, anyone with even a passing interest in the […]
TV critics haven't been overly kind to The Newsroom. Media critics, especially, haven't been overly kind to The Newsroom. Yet I love it. Week after week, I watch and am mesmerized. And those who are not and haven't been in the news "industry" don't seem to have the same feelings about The Newsroom as […]
Moving on from newspapers, journalism industry soothsayers are now predicting the decline of something much younger: the homepage. As with newspapers – which haven't so much disappeared as been pushed off center stage – few are saying that homepages will disappear completely. But as more people enter news sites sideways – via search engines, […]
If you register on its site, Princeton Review will give you a list of schools ranked by the quality of their newspapers. That’s great news for the Daily Collegian of Penn State, this year’s No. 1, up from No. 6 in 2011. The rest of the Top 10: 2. UNC Chapel Hill 3. Yale […]
Ecuador’s decision to grant asylum to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks wanted in Sweden for questioning over claims of rape and sexual molestation, has put the country in a political standoff with Britain, where he is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy. But the confusion in London has, in fact, little if anything […]
How did nature manage to survive for the past 3bn years, with no landowners and gamekeepers to look after it? That's the question you might ask yourself after reading Magnus Linklater's article in the Observer magazine, attacking the RSPB and suggesting that grouse moors, pheasant shoots and "vermin" control are necessary to protect the […]
China’s investment prowess and construction know-how is widely on display in this long-congested African capital. A $200 million ring road is being built and partly financed by Beijing. The international airport is undergoing a $208 million expansion supported by the Chinese, whose loans also paid for a working-class housing complex that residents have nicknamed […]
Before writing this column on recent incidents of plagiarism and fabrication, I spent time on the Web reading all known thought on the subject, making notes as I went. When I wrote it up, I used those notes to help create something I am now claiming as my own. Yes, I made phone calls […]
Steve Rubel outlines what he calls the “Continental Content Divide” that has emerged among media companies: Some publishers see social networking as their primary path to growth. As a result, they are mixing journalism and web culture in clever ways that get their stories shared so they find you. Others, meanwhile, believe the future […]
FOR one household a cannon blast signals the end of the daily fast during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan, just as it has done for many years. For another the beep of an iPhone does the job, thanks to a smartphone application called Ramadan Times. The app sets the fasting times depending on […]
A growing number of social networks are racing to capture the loyalties of the Web's youngest and most vulnerable users. Last month, Silicon Valley-based Kazaana launched with $3 million in funding and with hopes of attracting subscribers younger than 13 who will be addicted to friending, photo-sharing and farm-tending games. Kidzworld, with its 2.2 […]
This is a movie that the internet industry has seen before, says Joe Kennedy, chief executive of Pandora, the US internet music service that counts itself among the top five beneficiaries of mobile advertising. Internet users may be flocking to mobile devices, but profits have been scarce as many advertisers remain wary of the […]
This week, journalism educators meet in Chicago. I hope they think about how far reform should go to catch up with digital age realities and how funders see their progress so far. We've been talking about defining "better" universities not as the biggest but as those able to do certain things better than most. […]
Anyone living even a moderately wired life has heard the complaints: We can't concentrate the way we used to, before the Internet and its temptations came along to distract us. We used to get lost in books; now we get lost in the digital surf. Alan Jacobs will be either an inspiration or a […]
Gerald Gold, an editor for The New York Times who helped supervise the herculean task of combing through a secret 2.5-million-word Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, later known as the Pentagon Papers, to produce articles showing that officials had lied about the war, died on Wednesday at a hospice in Melville, N.Y. […]
In response to recent news media disclosures about the so-called kill list of terrorist suspects designated for drone strikes and other intelligence matters, the Senate Intelligence Committee has approved misguided legislation that would severely chill news coverage of national security issues. Drafted in secret without public hearings, the provisions are part of the intelligence […]
In response to my previous post about the Jonah Lehrer affair, a reader emailed: "I don't think people expect writers or journalists to take their jobs seriously anymore. The standards have just degraded that much." Au contraire! Speaking as someone who has practiced journalism long enough to have witnessed the alleged decline, I'd say […]
Twitter’s decision to suspend the account of a British journalist raises a host of questions about the company’s behavior, but one of the important ones is to what extent Twitter’s filtering and curation features could make it legally liable for the content flowing through the network. There are a whole host of issues raised […]