These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:
- The Mumbai terrorist attacks: traditional journalism versus tweets | Kim Andrew Elliott — What is says…
- Citizen Journalists Provide Glimpses Into Attacks | NYTimes.com — Mr. Shanbhag, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said he had not heard the term citizen journalism until Thursday, but now he knows that is exactly what he was doing. “I felt I had a responsibility to share my view with the outside world,” Mr. Shanbhag said in an e-mail message on Saturday morning.
- Unexpected but inevitable pops | Doc Searl — “Most car owners have awakened to the fact that cars are cars, and most of what we do with them is just drive from place to place. New cars purchases are impelled mostly by advertising and fantasy. Drive a lot of rental cars and you get hip to the obvious: the differences between cars, especially fairly new ones, isn’t large. After a few years they all plateau at a certain level of partial suckage and stay that way for the duration. You forget the quiet cabin and tight handling that turned you on in the first place. You care less about its color than just being able to find it in the parking lot. You know the noise in the heater is some rocks your kid put down the vents and won’t ever get fixed.”
- My New Job as CEO of Me Inc! (Urgh) | Rob Alderson — “I am under no illusions as to the seismic scale of the changes our industry is currently going through and in the current climate I am more than willing to do whatever I can to sell myself to employers.
But let’s not lose sight of the values that underpin our industry and avoid the irreversible drift to becoming just another business.”
- “Common Myths about al-Qaida Terrorism” | eJournal USA — “Myth: Islam radicalized young Muslims into becoming terrorists and exported violence to the West from their home countries.
Actuality: The vast majority of al-Qaida terrorists in the sample came from families with very moderate religious beliefs or a completely secular outlook. Indeed, 84 percent were radicalized in the West, rather than in their countries of origin. Most had come to the West to study, and at the time they had no intention of ever becoming terrorists. Another 8 percent consisted of Christian converts to Islam, who could not have been brainwashed into violence by their culture.”
- The politics of intimidation | The Guardian — John Kampfner: “The threat to robust inquiry is perhaps greater now than ever before in our system. Much of British journalism has become supine in the face of intimidation from state organs and from libel laws that encourage the crooked around the world to sue in UK courts to prevent legitimate inquiry.
For some time reporters have complained that editors and proprietors are shying away from difficult stories for fear of “getting into trouble”. The fear with the Green case is that civil servants and politicians will now do so as well.”
- Establishing a Fourth Estate | The National Newspaper — “The Arab world, which mostly lacks parliamentary democratic systems, has a long way to go before in-depth reporting, designed to reach the truth – or even simply the facts, as best as they can be determined – becomes an integral facet of daily journalism. True investigative journalism involves professional reporting, informed by imaginative and original research to edge closer to a truth. But many of these techniques remain alien to Arab newsrooms across the board.
The region also lacks other equally important factors; a reformed legal environment, a tradition of lively and competitive press – with a diversity of owners – and adequate public support for bold journalists willing to break social, political and religious taboos.”