Category: Journalism

  • The British National Party – a mash-up challenge

    The British National Party once posted my email address on their website. I got 400 emails of varying degrees of unpleasantness – my favourite being the one that described me as a “nigger-loving, Jew.” Yes, it takes a lot of imagination to work racism against black people and anti-semitism into one easy epithet. Now the…

  • Good journalism’s demand ‘problem’

    The Columbia Journalism Review takes on a familiar trope – the scarcity of attention – and riffs on it in relation to journalism. Attention—our most precious resource—is in increasingly short supply. To win the war for our attention, news organizations must make themselves indispensable by producing journalism that helps make sense of the flood of…

  • The News Media’s Lessons From The Obama Campaign

    My chums – the Carnivores of Journalism (read in tooth and claw) – are ripping apart the lessons for the news media from the online electoral campaigning of President-elect Barack Obama. Here’s my message for the old news media. You missed a revenue stream. Auction endorsements. Don’t be fooled by the SMS and Facebook wrappers.…

  • The Magnificent Folly of Great American News Reporting

    I 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…