This is some of what’s caught my attention in the past hours:
- Quality journalism: the need only grows | The Age – "Newspapers imply community. Anyone wishing to survive in them must find a common voice. The internet is about mass individuality… People who form their view of human nature from the net tend to arrive at a picture of human beings as so many disconnected molecules floating through the universe like a spaceship driven by nothing but competing greeds."
- ‘There’s no better job’ than journalism: Garcia Marquez | Daily News Egypt – "Gabriel Garcia Marquez hailed journalism as the best profession… "There's no better job" than journalism, said the 81-year-old author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," who started out as a journalist and often says he writes to avoid having to speak."
- The future of newspapers | Club Troppo – "Many academics, especially academic bloggers, have highly developed research and writing skills that would be incredibly valuable for in-depth investigative journalism projects. If projects could be structured as “research consultancies” then it might be possible to obtain the services of highly qualified academics at minimal cost to the newspaper." Really…?
- Katie Price is Really, Really, Big in Britain | NYTimes.com – "This interview had been arranged after much back and forth with Price’s people, but now that I had her again (for 45 minutes, I was told), I realized I had nothing much else to ask. The Katie Price phenomenon was remarkable; the woman beside me was an overscheduled businesswoman with horse blankets to design."
- Leonard Shecter’s Secret Led to Candid Sports Reporting | NYTimes.com – “We were friends with the writers in those days. You could talk to them. That trust was betrayed.” So was trust among writers themselves. No longer could they expect a story to remain unreported; to avoid being burned again, they had not only to report what they saw and heard, but also to ferret out new tales before anyone else. The race for the salacious was on… Readers did not realize how interested they would be in athletes’ dirty laundry until they began to see it.
- Emotion, victims and Modern Journalism | Window on the Media – Using Google News Archives to chart the rise of 'victim' reporting.