In this video, blogger Duane Lester confronts the editor of a newspaper which plagiarized something he wrote. The best part is when the editor tries to physically intimidate him, a moment so inexplicable and hilarious I created a YouTube Infinite Loop of it for you.
There's a happy ending, though: he ultimately saw reason and paid Lester for the article.
When we think of journalists' anonymous sources, we think of the proverbial whistleblower. Company insiders, or civil servants, ready to violate their nondisclosure agreements to expose some wrongdoing, or perhaps to settle some score. On the other, sleazier, end of the scale, we might think of tipsters: a cash-strapped waiter at a restaurant who sells the story of a celebrity food-fight to a tabloid, a blabby nurse at a plastic surgery clinic who spills the beans on some captain of industry's chin-augmentation.
But the most commonly cited anonymous sources in the news today are the official, on-the-record spokespeople for corporations. And the anonymous speech that is protected by the journalists who quote them is the most bland, anodyne stuff you can imagine. — Cory
I missed this great read published a few months back by photojournalist Connor Boals in Columbia Journalism Review, but it's worth revisiting now: a story about the indigenous pirate radio stations that connect poor rural Mayan communities throughout Guatemala.
A story making the rounds this week: Drew Cox, a 6 year old boy in Texas, "decided to sell lemonade to help his father with medical bills." His dad, Randy Cox, has a rare form of metastatic cancer, diagnosed a few months ago. The family says Drew's lemonade stand earned more than $10,000. They have an online fundraising site here, where they're trying to raise more.
I am currently undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, diagnosed about four months ago. When I saw various versions of this story popping up on news sites, several thoughts came to mind.
First, hooray for this child. I hope his dad gets the treatment he needs, that the treatment is successful, and that the family doesn't go into debt or have to forego treatment for lack of funds.
But second: this is a disgrace. I hate it when stories like this are flogged in media as "feel-good" stories. This story should make America feel ashamed, not feel good. Seriously? A working father gets cancer, and the family has to rely on charity, and a lemonade stand manned by their 6 year old son, to obtain life-sustaining medical treatment?
Well, I have cancer. I have insurance. I still pay what is for me a huge out-of-pocket sum, even after my insurance, for each chemo infusion every two weeks. As a wise fellow cancer patient told me, if the disease doesn't kill you, the medical bills just might.
Laurie Penny, corporate-crime-fighting superhero journo, has a corker of an essay on Warren Ellis's website, about the uneasy role of muckraking journalism in the late days of crony-capitalism:
I thought I got into journalism to tell truths and right wrongs and occasionally get into parties I wouldn’t normally be cool enough to go to. Right now though, with a few exceptions, professional journalism is rarely seen as an exercise in holding power to account. Justly or unjustly, the media, especially but not exclusively the mainstream, corporate-controlled press, has come to be seen as the enemy of the voiceless rather than their champion. Justly or unjustly, few people believe what they read in the papers or watch on the news anymore, because belief has long ceased to be quite as important as complicity when it comes to the Daily Mail, the Daily Post or News International. On the streets of Athens and Madrid as well as during the London riots of August 2011, journalists have been threatened and attacked by desperate young people making havoc in the streets. Why? Not because these young people don’t want to be seen, but because they don’t want to be seen through the half-closed eyes of privilege.
Journalists are losing any case we ever had for special pleading. For the younger generation of digital natives, there is no particular reason to be deferential towards anyone who happens to be at a protest with a phone that can get the internet and an audience of thousands: it’ll be you and a hundred others, and unless the police have given you special privileges to write precisely what they want and nothing else, your press pass is less and less likely to keep you safe from arrest. As more and more ordinary men, women and children without degrees in journalism acquire the skills and technology to broadcast text and video, the media has become another cultural territory which is gradually being re-occupied. Those on the ground do not have to wait for the BBC and MSNBC to turn up with cameras: they make the news and the reporters follow. They have grown up in a world of branding and they know how to create a craze and set the agenda. They occupy the media. And the media is starting to worry.
If you live in the UK or Ireland, write about science, and have not been paid for that work, then you are eligible to apply for the Wellcome Trust's Science Writing Prize. The Prize is aimed at fostering high quality writing among science communicators who are either just starting their careers, or who write mainly as a hobby. Student journalists are eligible. So are people who blog about science. There are separate categories for professional scientists, and interested laypeople. The deadline is April 25. — Maggie
"Stories live on the landscape like geologic strata," — Krissy Clark, public radio journalist on California's KQED, talking about the realizations that originally drew her into journalism. Clark spoke Tuesday at the Conference on World Affairs on a panel about alternative jobs in journalism. Her passion project: Stories Everywhere, an effort to produce journalism with a very deep sense of place, and to embed that information into the landscape for people to find using phone apps, GPS, QR codes and other interactive technologies. — Maggie
(Updated with additions, March 10, 2012. Here's a Twitter list, so you can follow all of the African writers mentioned in this post who are on Twitter.)
There are indications the project may be about stealth-evangelizing Christianity. The Invisible Children filmmakers have responded to some of the criticism. Media personalities and celebrities are duking it out as the campaign (and now, backlash) spreads.
But in that flood of attention, one set of voices has gone largely ignored: Africans themselves. Writers, journalists, activists; people of African descent who live and work and think about life on the continent. In this post, we'll round up some of their replies to #Kony2012.
• Above, a video by Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan multimedia journalist who works on "media, women, peace and conflict issues." She writes, "This is me talking about the danger of portraying people with one single story and using old footage to cause hysteria when it could have been possible to get to DRC and other affected countries get a fresh perspective and also include other actors."
• Ethiopian writer and activist Solome Lemma writes that she is disturbed by the "dis-empowering and reductive narrative" evidenced in Invisible Children's promotional videos: "[It] paints the people as victims, lacking agency, voice, will, or power. It calls upon an external cadre of American students to liberate them by removing the bad guy who is causing their suffering. Well, this is a misrepresentation of the reality on the ground. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of child and youth advocates who have been fighting to address the very issues at the heart of IC’s work." Update: Here's another from Lemma on "Seven steps for critical reflection." She urges those concerned about human rights in Africa to "think before you give."
• Musa Okwonga, a " football writer, poet and musician of Ugandan descent," writes in an Independent op-ed: “I understand the anger and resentment at Invisible Children’s approach, which with its paternalism has unpleasant echoes of colonialism. I will admit to being perturbed by its apparent top-down prescriptiveness, when so much diligent work is already being done at Northern Uganda’s grassroots... Watching the video, though, I was concerned at the simplicity of the approach that Invisible Children seemed to have taken."
Colvin died trying to retrieve her shoes so she could escape a rocket shelling attack (the custom in Syria is to leave one's shoes at the door before entering a home; the rocket landed a few yards away from her as she was preparing to escape).
Looking at Marie Colvin's face, it occurs to me she has the perfect beauty of an older woman- the beauty of good bones and battle scars. The beauty that comes from bravery, from power, from competence, from taking no shit. Earned beauty.
This tribute at the New Yorker is a beautiful read. Reuters today released amateur video believed to have been shot by Syrian rebels just before, and after, the attack. In the video, one of the survivors says he believes—contradicting other reports— that they were not personally targeted by the Syrian government. "They've been bombing civilians for days... we were just unlucky."
Matter is a new startup hoping to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter to support thoughtful, long-form journalism on the Internet. Founded by Bobbie Johnson (my former editor at The Guardian) and respected journalist Jim Giles, it seeks to produce a stable business model for serious, reflective online writing.
MATTER will focus on doing one thing, and doing it exceptionally well. Every week, we will publish a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science. That means no cheap reviews, no snarky opinion pieces, no top ten lists. Just one unmissable story.
MATTER is about brilliant ideas from all around the world, whether they come from professors at MIT or the minds of mad people. But most of all, it’s about getting amazing investigative reporters to tell compelling stories.
We’re building MATTER for readers, not advertisers. So however you access our stories — whether it’s on our website, via the Kindle store, or on your Apple and Android devices — you will get a beautifully designed experience that puts you first.
Saudi Arabia is reported to have used Interpol's "red notice" system to locate and arrest journalist Hamza Kashgari, 23, (image at left) over tweets perceived as an insult to the Prophet Muhammad.
The international police organization denies involvement.
Police in Kuala Lumpur said Hamza Kashgari, 23, was detained at the airport "following a request made to us by Interpol" the international police cooperation agency, on behalf of the Saudi authorities. Interpol later denied that its notice system had been involved in
the arrest of Kashgari.
A spokesperson said: "The assertion that Saudi
Arabia used Interpol's system in this case is wholly misleading and
erroneous."
Kashgari's tweets are said to be blasphemy, and blasphemy is punishable by execution in Saudi Arabia.
Glenn Greenwald notes that the New York Times broke its own policies on source anonymity to run the quote.
The Bureau’s journalists and researchers spent months engaged in the painstaking and difficult task of gathering documentation on the effects of the top secret U.S. drone program in Waziristan — producing extraordinary findings — only to find themselves and their sources, many of whom are local villagers whose children have been killed, depicted as Al Qaeda’s witting or unwitting allies the very next day in The New York Times, by some senior government official too frightened to put his name on his accusations and aided (as always) by a newspaper that has repeatedly vowed to stop these practices.
It looks like the price of continued access to "senior counterterrorism officials" is that you must, now and again, launder their dirty political opinions.
I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about. ...
Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?
Dear New York Times. You may tell the truth about it when people lie. You may even be a "truth vigilante," as you Brisbane rather strangely put it. You will be rewarded with subjects that hate you, and readers that love you. Pick a side!
UDPATE: New York Times' National Legal Correspondent John Schwartz tweets: "Nota Bene: Public Editor doesn't speak for NYT, works "outside of the reporting and editing structure"
I don't know much about the editor they've hired, former CBS.com health editor David Freeman, but color me cautiously optimistic. Will this move clean up the HuffPo's notoriously woo-filled science coverage? Cross fingers. — Maggie
