Archive for the ‘Journalism’ Category

The head of Google News on the future of journalism, objectivity, and everything else

- May 13th, 2012

Richard Gingras is the head of Google News. Here’s one of the many interesting things he had to say about journalists during a recent talk at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation:

We need to reconsider our missions and our ethical guidelines (in terms of behaviors and audience engagement, not core ethics), and the concept of objectivity. Richard sides with transparency in this debate and believes readers place their trust in the individual online rather than the brand, and expects reporters to be transparent about their views. He doesn’t buy the opaque objectivity of yore where reporters said, “Trust us,” and consumer opinion surveys bear this out. Read more…

Why are most journalists small-l liberals? Russell might have some answers

- May 6th, 2012

I think most journalists — myself included — are small-l liberals. That’s not to say we’re small-l liberals in the political sense. Indeed, I’ve long held that journalists are like any other group: A bunch probably voted Conservative in the last election; a bunch voted New Democrat and a bunch voted Liberal. (In Quebec, some may even have voted for the BQ). But I and, I think, many journalists, like to conceptualize themselves as free thinkers who resist dogma, power, authority, arbitrariness, etc. and that would make us small-l liberals in a philosophical sense. For proof, I offer up the following 10 commandments, put forth by big-l Liberal philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1951 as 10 guides for teachers but I think they are all likely philosophical touch points for most Western (small-l liberal) journalists: Read more…

Video: Waddell, Levy on the Ford-Star feud

- May 4th, 2012

From last night’s Daily Brief on Sun News Network, Carleton University journalism school director Christopher Waddell and Toronto Sun city hall columnist Sue Ann Levy on the latest dustup between The Toronto Star and the Mayor Rob Ford.

Politics, Twitter, and the MSM: What to make of it all?

- April 30th, 2012

Highly recommend an essay by Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns in a recent issue of Journalism Practice. It’s called “(Not) The Twitter Election: The dynamics of the #ausvotes conversation in relation to the Australian media ecology”. [Like most scholarly publishers, the publishers of this paper insist on locking this up behind a paywall so you'll have to seek out your favourite library, I'm afraid]  Here’s the abstract:

This paper draws on a larger study of the uses of Australian user-created content and online social networks to examine the relationships between professional journalists and highly engaged Australian users of political media within the wider media ecology, with a particular focus on Twitter. It uses an analysis of topic-based conversation networks using the #ausvotes hashtag on Twitter around the 2010 federal election to explore the key themes and issues addressed by this Twitter community during the campaign, and finds that Twitter users were largely commenting on the performance of mainstream media and politicians rather than engaging in direct political discussion. The often critical attitude of Twitter users towards the political establishment mirrors the approach of news and political bloggers to political actors, nearly a decade earlier, but the increasing adoption of Twitter as a communication tool by politicians, journalists, and everyday users alike makes a repetition of the polarisation experienced at that time appear unlikely.

Some quick notes after reading the paper: Read more…

Margaret Atwood: The Turnip Who Would Be PM and other Tales from the Enchanged E-Forest

- March 13th, 2012

I’ll bet a nickel that this is the first time the populist Toronto Sun has been cited in the New York Review of Books, a favourite of left-wing intellectual elites. (I read and enjoy both!).

The citation comes via Margaret Atwood who blogs at NYRB.com about Twitter, The Rotating Skull, The Ford Brothers, The Turnip Who Would Be PM, and other Tales from the Enchanted E-Forest. An excerpt: Read more…