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Do bylines matter?
The Daily Telegraph on the importance of bylines: The signature system has … dwindled into a purely technical and professional matter, a typographical detail, a means of obtaining recruits for new journals, or for enabling writers to find employment in different papers. Out of a thousand signed articles only about twenty carry with them any…
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Andrew Gilligan: hero of journalism…
Andrew Gilligan takes one more chance to defend himself at CiF: Although Hutton was, of course, a tactical triumph for [Alastair Campbell], with a knockout victory in the report and three good BBC scalps, it was an unparalleled strategic disaster. If his aim in taking us on was to disprove my story about the sexed-up…
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The Psychology of Newspapers
From a paper by Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport and Janet Faden in the December, 1940 edition of Public Opinion Quarterly: It is well known that waves of interest in governmental reform are notoriously short-lived for the population at large; yet they do constitute a lasting tide of concern for a handful of professional reformers. So…
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The wisdom of Neil Postman
Mike Rosenblum has been riffing over on his blog about Neil Postman and the U.S. presidential debates. Back in the day, Postman wrote 1980s media classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, which blames telegraphy for all our modern woes. IMO, before the telegraph, information overload came in the the form of religious works (try reading the…