kottke.org posts about journalism
This recent interview of journalist Jonathan Rauch is full of good stuff. On bad predictions and making mistakes:
Everybody makes [mistakes]; it’s par for the course. What I have learned is not to be too sure I’m right. The world is much more surprising than we give it credit for. That’s part of my political philosophy, my philosophy of life. That’s really fundamental to it: Trial and error is really the only thing in life that works ultimately over the long term. Journalism is like that, too, so we need to be honest about our mistakes. We often aren’t enough. Everybody makes mistakes. And we need to be a little bit cautious about making predictions.
On real journalism vs. opinion:
There’s a very talented, hard-working press corps and, of course, it represents only a small fraction of the people who are doing [journalism]. I think all the major newspapers are doing it well. Not a single one is doing it badly, the ones that are committing resources to it. The larger fraction are the parasites, the bloggers, commentators, opinionizers — I don’t exempt myself — who are feeding off of the real news that the press is providing. That larger sort of commentariat is not doing a very good job.
The future of real journalism:
What I worry about is what everyone in my business worries about: Who’s going to fund the real reporting? The magazine and newspaper business was a cross-subsidy. You had the advertising, particularly classified, and you had a local market, which subsidized the gathering of news. That model is breaking down because the bundle is breaking into pieces and it’s hard to see in the long run who funds the kind of large-scale news reporting operations that the major papers have run if the advertising is all going online and if people can all get the news for free at Yahoo.
On extremism in American politics:
The [political] system has been rigged by partisan activists to their advantage. They participate in primaries. General elections don’t matter because they’ve gerrymandered the congressional districts. They have the advantages of energy and being single-minded and they use these wedge issues which they’re very good at and which both sides conspire in using in order to marginalize the middle. The result of that is the turnout among moderates and independents is down; turnout on the extremes is up. The parties are increasingly sorted by ideology so that all the liberals are in one party and all the conservatives are in another. That is a new development in American history.
On getting out of the way of a story:
I’m not a fan of the idea that the journalist and the journalist’s attitude should be front and center. I think that a good journalist’s duty is to get out of the way. The hardest thing about journalism — the hardest thing, a much higher art than being clever — is just to get out of the way, to show the leader of the world as the reader would see it if the reader were there. Just to be eyes and ears. Calvin Trillin, another writer I greatly admired who steered me towards journalism, once said that getting himself out of his stories was like taking off a very tight shirt in a very small phone booth. He’s right.
And lots more…I recommend reading the entire thing, especially the exchange between Rauch and the interviewer about personal political identities that was too long/difficult to excerpt here. Much more from Rauch here.
The content of the O’Reilly Factor was recently analyzed and compared against “rhetorical techniques identified as elements of propaganda by the now-defunct research group Institute for Propaganda Analysis”. The findings indicate that host Bill O’Reilly called someone a name almost 9 times a minute.
What a group of copy editors thought of the best headline ever (Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo). “For the the Han solo hed to work, there’d have to be a reason for the allusion to Star Wars. Since there isn’t, it’s a forced attempt to be clever. Your average rap artist has a far better grasp of cleverness than whoever wrote that headline.” (thx, braulio)
I know it’s only 2007, but this is the headline of the decade. For a story about people crossing a tightrope strung across the Han River in South Korea, AP came up with this masterpiece: Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo.
MadLibs-style template for writing general interest news stories about “weird” subcultures. “[Bizarre pseudonym], otherwise known as [male person’s name #1] a [number between 15 and 75]-year-old software engineer, was dressed in [costume or armor piece] as he waited in line to pay the $[your age + 50] fee to carouse, enjoy [exotic or fictional food], and discuss [oddball topic] with others drawn to this, the greatest spectacle in the tri-state region involving [entertainment franchise].”
It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these. Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently:
Two counterexamples to the assertion that cities != organisms or ecosystems: cancer and coral reefs. (thx, neville and david)
In pointing to the story about Ken Thompson’s C compiler back door, I forgot to note that the backdoor was theoretical, not real. But it could have easily been implemented, which was Thompson’s whole point. A transcript of his original talk is available on the ACM web site. (thx, eric)
ChangeThis has a “manifesto” by Nassim Taleb about his black swan idea. But reader Jean-Paul says that Taleb’s idea is not that new or unique. In particular, he mentions Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. (thx, paul & jean-paul)
When I linked The Onion’s ‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times’ Newsroom Apart, I said “I’d rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications”. American Journalism Review published one such story last summer, as did the Chicago Tribune’s Hypertext blog and the LA Times (abstract only). (thx, gene & adam)
Related to Kate Spicer’s attempt to slim down to a size zero in 6 weeks: Female Body Shape in the 20th Century. (thx, energy fiend)
Got the following query from a reader:
are those twitter updates on your blog updated automatically when you update your twitter? if so, how did you do it?
A couple of weeks ago, I added my Twitter updates and recent music (via last.fm) into the front page flow (they’re not in the RSS feed, for now). Check out the front page and scroll down a bit if you want to check them out. The Twitter post is updated three times a week (MWF) and includes my previous four Twitter posts. I use cron to grab the RSS file from Twitter, some PHP to get the recent posts, and some more PHP to stick it into the flow. The last.fm post works much the same way, although it’s only updated once a week and needs a splash of something to liven it up a bit.
The guy who played Spaulding in Caddyshack is a real estate broker in the Boston area. (thx, ivan)
Two reading recommendations regarding the Jonestown documentary: a story by Tim Cahill in A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Seductive Poison by former People’s Temple member Deborah Layton. (thx, garret and andrea)
In case someone in the back didn’t hear it, this map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from Zork/Dungeon. (via a surprising amount of people in a short period of time)
When reading about how low NYC’s greenhouse gas emissions are relative to the rest of the US, keep in mind the area surrounding NYC (kottke.org link). “Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable.” (thx, bob)
NPR did a report on the Nickelback potential self-plagiarism. (thx, roman)
After posting about the web site for Miranda July’s new book, several people reminded me that Jeff Bridges’ site has a similar lo-fi, hand-drawn, narrative-driven feel.
In the wake of linking to the IMDB page for Back to the Future trivia, several people reminded me of the Back to the Future timeline, which I linked to back in December. A true Wikipedia gem.
I’m ashamed to say I’m still hooked on DesktopTD. The problem is that the creator of the game keeps updating the damn thing, adding new challenges just as you’ve finally convinced yourself that you’ve wrung all of the stimulation out of the game. As Robin notes, it’s a brilliant strategy, the continual incremental sequel. Version 1.21 introduced a 10K gold fun mode…you get 10,000 gold pieces at the beginning to build a maze. Try building one where you can send all 50 levels at the same time and not lose any lives. Fun, indeed.
Regarding the low wattage color palette, reader Jonathan notes that you should use that palette in conjunction with a print stylesheet that optimizes the colors for printing so that you’re not wasting a lot of ink on those dark background colors. He also sent along an OS X trick I’d never seen before: to invert the colors on your monitor, press ctrl-option-cmd-8. (thx, jonathan)
Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother photograph was modified for publication…a thumb was removed from the lower right hand corner of the photo. Joerg Colberg wonders if that case could inform our opinions about more recent cases of photo alteration.
In reviewing all of this, the following seem related in an interesting way: Nickelback’s self-plagiarism, continual incremental sequels, digital photo alteration, Tarantino and Rodriquez’s Grindhouse, and the recent appropriation of SimpleBits’ logo by LogoMaid.
A photo of a Jewish settler seemingly fighting about 50 soldiers by herself won a prize in the 2007 World Press Photo contest.
Update: In an earlier iteration of this post, I incorrectly identified the woman in the photo as a Palestinian…she is a Jewish settler. (thx to everyone who wrote in)
Michael Pollan has some good advice for writing about nature and science. “So choose your first person deliberately. Too many newspaper first persons — and a lot of magazine first persons too — are written in the voice of the neutral feature-writer. They’re the voice of the Journalist. That is the least interesting first person you have. Nobody cares about journalists. They’re not normal people. So choose a first person that draws on a more normal side of your personality. And think about which one will help you tell the story. You’ll see that in very subtle ways it will shape your point of view and your tone and unlock interesting things.”
The WTFCNN blog takes CNN to task for their increasingly non-news news headlines. I’d highlight quite a few more things…all the Britney and Anna Nicole headlines for a start.
Nice positive review of Monocle, a new monthly magazine that would “bond and glue all the people that roam the world”. I finally got my hands on the first issue the other day and it is quite something. “Overall, Monocle comes across as fresh, original, careful not to be influenced in its editorial choices by the media system’s herd logic (no stories on the ‘hot topic of the moment’, and zero — zero! — celebrities and people gossip).”
How the newspaper gets made: 1. The Washington Post runs an article on Dec 24, 2006 about how the New Yorker picks its cartoons, which article mentions in passing that several of the magazine’s cartoonists gather weekly at a Manhattan restaurant. 2. Three weeks go by. 3. The NY Times publishes a piece profiling said weekly gathering of the cartoonists at the Manhattan restaurant.
Malcolm Gladwell on the difference between secrets and puzzles, particularly as it relates to something like the Enron scandal. I think this is one of the more interesting pieces from Gladwell in recent years. Having lived in California during the blackouts and the absurdly high electricity bills, I want Skilling’s head as much as anyone, but Gladwell has a good point here. There’s more on his blog, including a question: “According to the way the accounting rules were written at the time, what specific transgressions were Skilling guilty of that merited twenty-four years in prison?” Also note the similar themes to one of my favorite articles from last year, The Press’ New Paradigm.
In the WSJ, Dow Jones Chairman Peter Kann lists “10 current trends in the mass media that ought to disturb us”. “There are too many instant celebrities. Too many two-day crises. Too many ‘defining moments’ from people in search of instant history. In a world where everything is considered critical, nothing needs to be taken very seriously.”
The top 10 underreported news stories in 2006, including US funds going to the Taliban and Israel & Iran holding secret talks.
Every year, Regret the Error1 publishes a roundup of the year’s media errors and corrections. I didn’t think anything could beat these corrections from the 2005 list:
Norma Adams-Wade’s June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.
The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday’s Town Talk regarding New Jersey’s proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author’s intention to call New Jersey ‘Jew Jersey.’
but the 2006 collection is a strong one. Here are some of my favorites:
A correction in this column Thursday about a June 14 Taste section recipe for French coconut pie incorrectly suggested that the recipe called for a pint of vodka.
In Wednesday’s Taste section, a Washington Post recipe on Page F7 included an incorrect cooking time for carbonada (braised beef with onions and red wine). The dish should be cooked for 2 1/2 hours, not 10 to 20 minutes.
Because of an editing error, a recipe last Wednesday for meatballs with an article about foods to serve during the Super Bowl misstated the amount of chipotle chilies in adobo to be used. It is one or two canned chilies, not one or two cans.
A story in the July 24 edition of the Sentinel & Enterprise incorrectly spelled Sheri Normandin’s name. Also, Bobby Kincaid is not a quadriplegic.
The regional court in Duesseldorf ordered the weekly WirtschaftsWoche to print a correction to an article that claimed Piech wore “garish ties with hunting motifs” and did not know the exact number of his children from various marriages, a court spokesman said. The magazine, owned by the Handelsblatt group, had published a picture of Piech wearing a tie with a picture of a man with a gun and an elephant. It quoted Piech as saying in an interview that he had sired “about a dozen children. The exact number is not known”. The court accepted Piech’s argument that his comment had been meant ironically and that the motif on his tie was not a hunting motif…
Mr Wakefield is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party. The error is regretted.
In a March 17 story about protests planned against the Iraq war, The Associated Press erroneously identified Jeremy Straughn as a political socialist at Purdue University. He is a political sociologist.
She’s got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She’s African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that. [He meant “coup”.]
Recent articles in this column may have given the impression that Mr Sven Goran Eriksson was a greedy, useless, incompetent fool. This was a misunderstanding. Mr Eriksson is in fact a footballing genius. We are happy to make this clear.
I especially like the recipe ones…just the thought of some unsuspecting reader eating her meatballs with all those chilies or the fellow debating whether he should serve his obviously raw braised beef to the rest of his family. Be sure to check out the whole list.
[1] When I first posted this, I misspelled “Regret” as “Reget”. (No, really!) I deeply regret the error. (thx, mauayan)↩
Pro baseball player Don Carman wrote up a list of stock responses to reporter’s questions…it reads like a script for almost every locker room interview I’ve ever seen. “We’re going to take the season one game at a time.”
Some musings on the future of the newspaper in The Atlantic. “The barbarians, on the other hand, don’t seem to care; they’d rather get the news they want, not the news the mandarins say is good for them.”
15 ways to improve your newspaper business. “1. Go out in street, see news, write it up.”
R.W. Apple, longtime and beloved political and food writer for the NY Times, died early this morning aged 71. “In the interests of efficiency, The New York Times recently equipped its main office with…a 185-pound, water-cooled, self-propelled, semi-automatic machine called R. W. Apple Jr.” Here’s Apple’s last piece for the Times, on the cuisine of Singapore.
Update: The NY Times put up a piece that Apple filed right before he entered the hosptial that they were going to run later in the fall: The Global Gourmand.
Update: Ed Levine wrote a nice personal remembrance of Apple. See also Trillin’s article on Apple from the New Yorker.
Michael Kinsley: do newspapers have a future? “Newspapers on paper are on the way out. Whether newspaper companies are on the way out too depends.”
Last month I covered the hubbub surrounding the still-potential proof of the Poincare conjecture. The best take on the situation was a New Yorker article by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber, detailing the barest glimpse of the behind-the-scenes workings of the mathematics community, particularly those involving Grigory Perelman, a recluse Russian mathematician who unveiled his potential Poincare proof in 2002 and Shing-Tung Yau, a Chinese mathematician who, the article suggested, was out for more than his fair share of the credit in this matter.
After declining the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics, Perelman has quit mathematics and lives quietly in his native Russia. Yau, however, is upset at his portrayal (both literally and literary) in the New Yorker article and has written a letter to the New Yorker asking them to make a prominent correction and apologize for an illustration of Yau that accompanied the article. From the letter:
I write in the hope of enlisting your immediate assistance, as well as the assistance of The New Yorker, in undoing, to the extent possible, the literally world-wide damage done to Dr. Yau’s reputation as a result of the publication of your article. I also write to outline for you, on a preliminary basis, but in some detail, several of the more egregious and actionable errors which you made in the article, and the demonstrably shoddy “journalism” which resulted in their publication.
The letter, addressed to the two authors as well as the fact-checker on the article and CC’d to David Remnick and the New Yorker’s general counsel, runs 12 pages, so you may want to have a look at the press release instead. A webcast discussing all the details of the letter is being held at noon on September 20…information on how to tune in will be available at Dr. Yau’s web site. (thx, david)
Oh, rejoice and be glad…there will be a season five of The Wire. “Balancing small audiences again critical acclaim, HBO has picked up a fifth season of drama The Wire.” The season may focus on the media’s role in politics. (thx, mark)
State of Emergency photo shoot from the September 2006 issue of Vogue Italia. The editorial of these fashion photos exceeds that of much photography found in more conventional US news media. (via bb)
Adrian Holovaty, who works at the Washington Post, has some advice for how the news media should function: “newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview”. Holovaty argues for more structured data to be offered, not just the typical written story. Matt Thompson previously argued that the press needs a new paradigm, a shift from searching for hidden information (a la Watergate) to interpreting the massive amounts of publicly available data for patterns and stories (a la Enron/WorldCom/etc).
A short interview with Grigory Perelman, the Russian mathematician who proved the Poincare conjecture and turned down the Fields Medal. “Newspapers should be more discerning over who they write about. They should have more taste.” (thx pedro)
Newer posts
Older posts
Stay Connected