For those not familiar with it, Britain’s Channel 4 News is probably what the Guardian would look like on television.
A very smart former Fulbrighter at Harvard KSG, Felicity Spector will be producing their road coverage of the US Presidential election. She’s an old chum and is blogging here. Worth checking out.
Over at the BBC, Nicola Meyrick steps up to defend Analysis from 7 August 2008, Al-Qaeda’s Enemy Within, against the claim from a document leaked to the Guardian that suggested the programme was inspired by a government information unit. Continue reading
What value do newspapers add to information? A couple of days ago, I bookmarked this piece on product placement, from the New York Times. Basically, it’s about coffee cups appearing on the desk during a local morning news show in Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas Sun reported it first on Monday:
Oooooooh, they’re calling out your name.
Two cups of McDonald’s iced coffee (BUY!) sit on the Fox 5 TV news desk, a punch-you-in-the-face product placement (BUY!) to chase down your morning news.
Quoted? Fox 5 news director, Adam Bradshaw, and Kelly McBride of the journalism ethics outifit, Poynter. The New York Times hat tips the Las Vegas Sun, ditches the breezy style — and the line that the coffee and ice cubes are fake — and clocks up eight quoted sources in under a thousand words. Continue reading
For anyone interested in exploring the limits of citizen journalistic enterprise, and the economics of investigative reporting, there’s interesting news about whistle-blowing site, Wikileaks.
Wikileaks is planning to drop the wiki model entirely. In the future, it plans to pre-release selected documents to investigative journalists, then publish them once a story appears. That gives the favored reporters time to analyze and verify documents without fear of being scooped. Continue reading
Whilst journalists like the Guardian’s Chris McGreal were reporting from inside Zimbabwe in June (Zimbabwe’s voters told: choose Mugabe or you face a bullet), others were getting a more — well — ‘considered’ view. Continue reading
My two penn’orth on Samantha Power from the Guardian:
For me as a broadcast journalist, the camera and the microphone are the record. You can’t unsay things to a recording device or speaking live, only apologise or cringe. But in conversation, different standards apply.I was at ITN in the early 1990s when John Major referred to his colleagues as “bastards” in a TV interview with ITN’s political editor. The Beeb’s Nick Jones overheard the remarks. BBC bosses shared ITN’s view that these post-match mutterings were off the record so Jones leaked his notes to the Observer, which broke the story.
I think the technology has changed all the rules. ITN/BBC were operating within their conventions, the Observer within theirs, but now politicians would be cagier — broadcasters can blog those off-mike moments.
In Power’s case, uttering “off the record” immediately after you’ve said something better left unsaid is no protection.