Torontoist's Metrocide series did some digging on murder and crime stats in Toronto to get to the bottom of whether T.O. is a "safe" city or not. Must read through (and should have posted it last week).
Today, they call out the Toronto Sun for another of its horrible headlines and come up with a fear mongering checklist.
The comments are a good read... mostly.
Daniel Libit of Politico on the relationship between blogs, journalists and audience engagement.
"Behold the Commentocracy, where big ideas and rough remarks sit shoulder to shoulder, altogether transforming the nature of the Web and of journalism...Writers and editors have become obsessed with comment tallies (even if many don’t deign to read the comments themselves), which have become a favored, albeit unreliable, barometer for determining editorial success and tapping into the political zeitgeist."
Pardon me for barfing up a whole press release, but as this is a research blog (and not really a reporting site), you can live with it.
Poynter Receives Boost to Transform Journalism Education Through E-Learning
$1.4 million grant from Knight Foundation to NewsU e-learning program adds digital transformation modules and multiple languages
St. Petersburg, Fla. - July 8, 2008 - The Poynter Institute announced today that it will use a $1.4 million, five-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to help transform journalism education by expanding the world's most successful and innovative journalism e-learning site. Launched in 2005 with a prior Knight Foundation grant, NewsU provides interactive, inexpensive courses to journalists at all levels of experience and in all types of media.
The grant will help NewsU expand in four key areas:
. Enhance the skills and digital abilities of journalists,
. Find new ways to teach and inspire journalists as well as those without access to formal journalism training,
. Increase news literacy, and
. Use the Internet to deliver training in innovative and effective ways.
Specifically, NewsU plans to offer new courses to help journalists and others make the transition to a digital world, shift its current content management system to a Web 2.0 platform, deliver course content in multiple languages, and create e-learning modules on news literacy for the general public.
"More than 73,000 participants have enrolled in NewsU courses since its introduction, vastly exceeding initial expectations and making NewsU the top e-learning destination for journalists and others interested in journalism," said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at The Poynter Institute. "We are excited about taking NewsU to the next level and reaching journalists around the world."
"This second Knight grant is a major vote of confidence in the work of our faculty and staff, our partners and our diverse and expansive user base," said Karen Dunlap, president of The Poynter Institute.
"New technology is transforming journalism," said Gary Kebbel, Director of Journalism programs at Knight Foundation. "Journalism education cannot meet the training needs of today's journalist without using that same technology. We hope this grant helps anyone learn to use new platforms to pursue the fair, accurate, contextual search for truth." He added, "Every community in this democracy has a core need for information that creates shared experiences that unite us."
NewsU was launched in 2005 to help journalists understand and adapt to the digital revolution. Through partnerships with more than 25 journalism organizations, the online site has developed and introduced more than 65 interactive learning modules that can be taken anytime and anywhere.
About The Poynter Institute
Founded in 1975 in St. Petersburg, Fla., The Poynter Institute (www.poynter.org) is one of the nation's top schools for professional journalists and media leaders, future journalists and journalism educators. Poynter offers training throughout the year in online and multimedia; reporting, writing and editing; leadership and management; TV and radio; ethics and diversity; visual journalism; and journalism education. Poynter's News University (www.newsu.org) offers training to journalists, journalism students and others through interactive e-learning modules and links to other journalism education and training opportunities.
About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes journalism excellence worldwide and invests in the vitality of the U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950 the foundation has granted more than $300 million to advance journalism quality and freedom of expression. Knight Foundation focuses on ideas and projects that create transformational change. To learn more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.
Contacts:
News University/The Poynter Institute
Howard Finberg, Director, Interactive Learning
Phone: 1.727.553.4371
E-mail: hfinberg@poynter.org
Marc Fest, Vice President of Communications
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Phone: 1.305.908.2677
Email: fest@knightfoundation.org
Great post today at The Spectator (T.O. Life's media blog) about Tucker Carlson's recent spat with Gerri Peev from The Scotsman about what constitutes on and off the record.
The Spec does a good job laying out the issue, so just read Mr. Bell's post and check out the brief YouTube clip.
It has never occurred to me in my short career that what Carlson suggests could be a feasible way to work. It's seems stupid. I personally would never write a word if all someone had to so was say "...but that's OTR" to get me to put my pen down.
Though it's not really surprising that Carlson's attitude exists. I have to explain OTR to my interview subjects all the time. I don't always run what they try to erase from the record, but I consider it fair game. Many don't get that you can't just un-tell a reporter something. We aren't paid to keep people's filthy secrets.
A well-written first hand account of what it's like to work at a paper in North America. I (and Esquire) give you David Simon, creator of The Wire (which, incidentally, is the best television show ever produced in a kind of plain, epic way... but I digress) and former writer for The Baltimore Sun.
The excerpt I link to is a great read. I guess I'll have to pick up the March issue to get it all.
It took me a long moment to regroup.
“John,” I said finally, “if I was the editor of a major metropolitan daily and I had to retract three stories by the same reporter, I would remember it until the day I fucking died.”
I’m not prescient. At that moment, I can’t yet fathom all the still-to-come Tribune Company cost cutting at The Sun, the Kafkaesque reductions in staffing, the slow-motion demolition of the Washington bureau, the shuttering of the foreign bureaus.
And I am still as clueless as the captains of the newspaper industry when it comes to the Internet, still mistaking the Web as advertising for the product when, in fact, it is the product. I don’t yet envision the steep declines in circulation, the indifference of young readers to newsprint, the departure of display advertising to department-store consolidation and classified space to Craigslist.
Admittedly, I can’t even grasp all of the true and subtle costs of impact journalism and prize hunger. I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city -- eliminating such fundamental responsibilities as a poverty beat, a labor beat, a courthouse beat in a city where rust-belt unemployment and crime devour whole neighborhoods -- and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.
Edit Jan 17 - After returning to Understanding Crime after... well, after months and months, I've found the New Yorker profile of David Simon here.
This link to DB Scott's blog has a number of interesting links about fact-checking. Glad to see that Cynthia Brouse has finally published her fact-checking text. I interviewed her once for an article I wrote on the subject for Masthead.
Also note the links to discussions on the future of fact-checking (which my article happened to be about).
Liberal activists are stepping up their campaign against Fox News Channel by pressuring advertisers not to patronize the network.. Story run on on Marketing's website, fed from AP.
Edit, Aug 1: This is how one AdAge columnist responds to some of MoveOn's tactics. Now that Murdoch has bought the WSJ, they're going to print some false covers with slogan-like headlines to illustrate their point. Ken Wheaton sees it as so much hogwash.
Lots here on the state of citizen journalism. Many claims made (be sure to check those out later) and his bias seems apparent in the initial skimming.
Of note, in #10:
"What becomes increasingly clear is the need to update media literacy for a media-saturated age. When people are creators of media, not just consumers, the task is more complex — but more important than ever.
Think of media literacy in terms of principles, not a bunch of specific must-do kinds of instructions. They differ somewhat depending on the role one is playing in the media ecosystem."
You can find it here.
BoingBoing amalgamates a bunch of links in this post about a scholarship for programmers who want to train as journalists. The goal, the post says, is to find ways to combine the two fields. Definitely worth following.
A look at a study that shows people who get news from a variety of sources tend to be more politically involved.
It's hardly surprising that, as a Statistics Canada study released yesterday reveals, Canadians' level of political engagement is related to their news usage.
The more news they consume, the more they are involved "in non-voting political activities such as attending public meetings; searching for information on a political issue; volunteering for a political party; expressing their views by contacting a newspaper or politician; signing a petition; or participating in a march or demonstration."
Thanks to Rachel for sending me this link to The Largemouth Citizen Journalism Manual.
LARGEMOUTH is a group of professional journalists who volunteerThe links at the bottom of the document are all golden for those interested in reading journalists on the subject of journalism.
time to listen to citizens and to teach the necessary skills
to produce accurate, fair, and compelling journalism.
It is a collaborative project of the the Twin Cities Daily Planet, The
Resource Center of the Americas and The McGill Report.
I found a media literacy podcast today via BoingBoing (though the situation that brought it to Mr. D's attention are sad indeed). It appears to be a well-known 'cast, hosted by a former reality TV personality.
Her apartment just burned down, and it seems to have taken her podcast archive with it. In the hopes that it will someday be resurrected, I'm posting a link to No One's Listening for future reference.
