Category: news
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The Scientific Journalism Formula
In a near-perfect parody of science reporting in the popular press, Martin Robbins, The Lay Scientist, created “a news website article about a scientific paper“. In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding? […] This…
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News’ Reliance on PR and Wire Services
News organisations and journalists are becoming less “active gatherers of news” and more “processors of […] second-hand materials”, suggests a surprising study conducted by researchers at Cardiff University. Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, commissioned the research and provides a brief overview of this study on the state of current media reporting: Specialists at…
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Learning to Concentrate and Media Dieting
Stating that “one of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate”, Alain de Botton‘s short essay for City Journal looks at our “obsession” with current events and how this distracts us from… everything. The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that…
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Media Consumption and Current Events
As part of their series on ‘media diets’, The Atlantic Wire is asking a number of media luminaries how they manage the deluge of information we all encounter online. Some names you’ll recognise include David Brooks, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen and the following from Clay Shirky discussing his distaste for ‘breaking news’: In general, there’s no real breaking…
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Journalism Online and Internet Entrepreneurship
In profiling a number of ‘online journalism entrepreneurs’, The New York Times does a good job of providing a relatively cliché-free, high-level overview of the current state of online news publishing. The article looks at the “new breed” of blog-based journalists, a few business models, and the problems associated with advertising online. There’s nothing new…
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Why There’s No Good News
Discussing briefly a key tenet from his latest book, The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley looks at how and why pressure groups limit the amount of good news reaching the general public and those in decision-making positions: There are huge vested interests trying to prevent good news reaching the public. That is to say, in the…
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The Over-Estimation of Sampling Errors
Fairly obvious, but something I haven’t previously given much consideration to: Sampling errors mean that initial figures are equally as likely to be under-estimates as over-estimates but [in media stories where figures for a disease or condition are quoted] we only ever seem to be told that the condition is under-detected. That’s from a short post…
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Reporting and the Internet
It seems you can’t spend five minutes on the Internet without coming across an opinion piece on the end of traditional media or an article riffing on the age of the blog. I’ve so far refrained from noting (m)any of these articles, mainly because the argument is becoming stale and the articles are so widespread.…
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Media Usage Over Time (1800–2020)
Accepting its unscientific’ness, Thomas Baekdal presents an inforgraphic depicting the usage of different types of media over time—from 1800 to 2020. In the past 210 years we have seen an amazing evolution of information. […] But 2009 is also going to be the start of the next revolution. Because everything we know is about to…