Tag: journalism
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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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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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Breeding Trust Through Better Science Journalism
With a public distrust of scientists comes the idea that “no scientific evidence will ever be compelling”. That’s what we can learn from Creationism, says Andrew Brown, and to solve this distrust we cannot rely on education to help the next generation understand, but instead we must improve science journalism. I’m not sure what the…
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The End of the Inverted Pyramid
The inverted pyramid style of reportage is broken, believes Jason Fry, and it is time to reinvent contextless reporting into a more reader-friendly style. Fry points to an essential Nieman Reports essay that suggests how context-central reporting could be the future of reporting and a reason why Wikipedia is becoming the destination of choice for those…
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Dan Baum and The New Yorker
Dan Baum (a staff writer for The New Yorker ’til his firing in 2007) has been revealing details about his tenure on his Twitter account. In addition to discussing some day-to-day workings of The New Yorker, he’s also provided some great advice for aspiring writers. Baum has compiled his tweets in a much more readable format on his…
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Gladwell, Journo-gurus, and Anecdotes as Science
You can guarantee that whenever Malcolm Gladwell brings out a book he’ll make headlines. And with his latest book having recently been released, here are a number of interesting and contrasting views. First (via Kottke, and in Gladwell’s own words), what to expect from Outliers: though the story of Sidney Weinberg, from high-school dropout to…