The Magnificent Folly of Great American News Reporting

The charge of the Light BrigadeI don’t know John Crewd­son, but I’m sorry he’s out of a job. He’s the sub­ject of this post at the Chicago Reader:

The Nobel Prize in medi­cine was awar­ded last month to Luc Montag­nier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pas­teur Insti­tute in Paris for dis­cov­er­ing the HIV virus in 1983 — but not to the Amer­ican sci­ent­ist Robert Gallo.

This res­ult might be inter­preted as the ulti­mate vin­dic­a­tion of reporter John Crewd­son, who in 1988, in a 50,000-word story in the Chicago Tribune, argued that Gallo — cred­ited back then with codis­cov­er­ing the virus — had merely redis­covered Montagnier’s virus, which had been sent to Gallo as a pro­fes­sional cour­tesy. Con­tinue read­ing

Rupert Murdoch on the future of newspapers

Here is an edited ver­sion of Rupert Mur­doch’s Boyer lec­ture — The Future of News­pa­pers: Mov­ing Bey­ond Dead Trees. One word sum­mary? Brands.

But here it is:

Too many journ­al­ists seem to take a per­verse pleas­ure in rumin­at­ing on their pending demise. I know indus­tries that are today facing stiff new com­pet­i­tion from the inter­net: banks, retail­ers, phone com­pan­ies and so on. But these sec­tors also see the inter­net as an extraordin­ary oppor­tun­ity. But among our journ­al­istic friends are some mis­guided cyn­ics who are too busy writ­ing their own obit­u­ary to be excited by the oppor­tun­ity. Con­tinue read­ing

Saving journalism, one summit at a time

World Economic Forum Summit on the Global AgendaLike Jeff Jar­vis, I too was in Dubai for the World Eco­nomic Forum’s inaug­ural Sum­mit on the Global Agenda. Charlie Beck­ett (whose upsum­mer is here) and I were in the Future of Media group. So what was our dia­gnosis of the state of journalism?

Well, here it is. We did talk about cen­sor­ship and val­ues — but remem­ber what Oscar Wilde said about a camel being a horse designed by a com­mit­tee: Con­tinue read­ing