Documents from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation cast doubt on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in his 1966 bestseller “In Cold Blood,” Kevin Helliker reports in The Wall Street Journal. And Capote’s contract with Columbia Pictures, reports Helliker, required the studio to hire the wife of a KBI detective as a consultant […]
Na Imprensa Internacional
Imagine if The Post broke a story about the biggest scandal of the Obama-era — and Washington responded with a collective yawn? That’s precisely what happened recently when The Post reported on its front page that senior Obama administration officials were being investigated by the FBI and Justice Department for the leak last summer […]
Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age ? By Steven Johnson Riverhead, 233 pp., $26.95 There are two ways to be wrong about the Internet. One is to embrace cyber-utopianism and treat the Internet as inherently democratizing. Just leave it alone, the argument goes, and the Internet will destroy dictatorships, undermine […]
When Sir Brian Leveson published his report into the British press last November, he was clear about the regime that he wanted. A new regulator, endowed with strong enforcement powers, would protect the public against abuses. This would be dominated by independent minds. Newspapers would no longer get to mark their own homework. The […]
About 400 people gathered this week in Miami at the Knight Foundation’s Media Learning Seminar, its annual gathering of community foundations to talk about community information needs. They, along with representatives from nonprofits, libraries, and other community groups, wanted to discuss the information gaps left by a dwindling press corps. Among those sharing stories […]
Judging by his pace on Twitter, little has changed for Jim Roberts over the last three weeks. The links to news near and far, on topics both timely and unearthed, are coming as rapid as ever. But things have changed. Roberts parted way with The New York Times after 26 years at the newspaper […]
As anybody who has installed anti-virus software on their home computer knows, technology carries risks and vulnerabilities which are evolving over time. But why do people seek to exploit them? Is it all for personal gain, or have new motivations taken over? Orla Cox, Symantec's senior manager, security response, believes personal gain is still […]
“What are you doing here?” The software billionaire choked in astonishment when I told him I was a physicist. The reaction was informative: it was as if he had encountered a seasonal labourer at our meeting place, the World Economic Forum in Davos. Between networking, self-promotion and all the other things politicians and financiers […]
Mention the words "press cuttings" to journalists of a certain age and they will usually come over all misty-eyed about the yellowing newspaper files of their youth. Until the mid-1990s, almost every media organisation – from the smallest local newspaper to national TV stations – maintained a cuttings collection. These libraries consisted of scrappy folders […]
Last week, the debate over drone strikes broke out into plain view during the confirmation hearings for John O. Brennan, President Obama’s choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Given that the program has been operating largely under the public radar, a question has been raised whether the news media have done their job […]
Forget layoffs and paywalls: Recent reports of cyberattacks by Chinese hackers have made cybersecurity a pressing issue for the media industry. In recent weeks, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have all announced that they were victims of Chinese hacking attacks. (Twitter also announced that it was a […]
When Barbosa family members botched their cover of an old Brazilian gospel song last year on a family video, they thought it was pretty funny—funny enough to upload to YouTube. But they didn't expect the rest of Brazil to laugh along with them. Within weeks, though, the video was viewed and shared millions of […]
IN the not-so-distant past, the chipper AOL sound of “You’ve got mail!” filled me with giddiness and glee. I would eagerly check my in-box, excited to see what message had arrived. Those days are long gone. Now, when I examine my various e-mail accounts, my main emotion is dread. One morning last week, I […]
Almost as soon as the Super Bowl came of age as a festival of American excess, thriller writers began to imagine how terrorists might target the game for attack. Thomas Harris published “Black Sunday,” in 1975; in the novel, secular Palestinian terrorists collaborate with a disgruntled American veteran of the Vietnam War to strike […]
It is fitting that, in a project that is touted as the show that could reshape the digital future of television, House of Cards is deeply concerned with the rapid reconstruction of journalism in the internet era. The new Netflix political drama stars Kevin Spacey as a ruthless congressman bent on revenge against the […]
Daniel Defoe's novel about London's 1665 plague can help us understand new media. No, really. The plague was abroad. Londoners knew not where it had come from, only that it was upon Holland. "It was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey […]
Fighting for a competitive advantage on the Web, journalists have turned once powerful adjectives into nothing but hype. What does breaking mean? Who knows! In George Orwell’s 1984, an employee of the Ministry of Truth, tasked with creating the Newspeak dictionary, explains to Winston Smith that his job is often misunderstood. “You think, I […]
It is fitting that, in a project that is touted as the show that could reshape the digital future of television, House of Cards is deeply concerned with the rapid reconstruction of journalism in the internet era. The new Netflix political drama stars Kevin Spacey as a ruthless congressman bent on revenge against the […]
Daniel Defoe's novel about London's 1665 plague can help us understand new media. No, really. The plague was abroad. Londoners knew not where it had come from, only that it was upon Holland. "It was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey […]
The question is no longer who has been hacked. It’s who hasn’t? The Washington Post can be added to the growing list of American news organizations whose computers have been penetrated by Chinese hackers. After The New York Times reported on Wednesday that its computers as well as those of Bloomberg News had been […]