Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

The Melting-Pot Gazette

alhambra

Seventeen people squeeze around a dark wood table in a low, redbrick office building on the outskirts of Los Angeles, picking at a potluck dinner of fried chicken, pad thai, and Cherry Coke. The group is as oddly matched as the menu. There’s Eric Sunada, an engineer who also runs a small environmental non-profit. Kerrie Gutierrez, an instructional aide and mother of five. Joe Soong, an analyst for the Los Angeles Police Department. But they do have one thing in common: They are all newly minted journalists, contributors to a novel kind of local news outlet in the ethnically fractured, ... Read More

Churnalism Sorts Original Journalism From Repackaged Press Releases

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"This is just a repackaged press release." That's one of the most common complaints about the way that most media outlets cover the social and behavioral sciences—and even the hard sciences, really. The primary reason for that? Most working journalists have a limited understanding of many of the subjects they're often asked to write about. I would even argue that this—the ability to explore and report and write about something new every day—is a key motivator for many of us in the profession. (It's certainly why I dumped my early ambitions of working as a particle physicist. Quarks, ... Read More

Translation Studies: The News in English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic

A Syrian boy waits with his uncle, right, near the body of his father, who was killed by a shell in Sha'ar. (PHOTO: NICOLE TUNG/SYRIA DEEPLY)

Documentary experiment Syria Deeply, "exploring a new model of storytelling around a global crisis," has been conducting a fascinating series of interviews with members of the international media covering a nearly two year-long conflict. For anyone interested in translation and public communication, the interviews have evolved into a portrait of how reality can change depending on the number of translators needed to access it. Some excerpts: Nicole Tung, American photographer, describes gaining trust in a rebel hospital as a foreigner: ND: How did you know that this hospital was the ... Read More

Today in Saving Print: The Green Bay Packers Model

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Via The Guardian: A German newspaper, Die Tageszeitung, has figured out how to navigate the collapse of newspapering's 20th century business model -- by selling shares of itself to its readers. The paper has no owner, and shareholders don't get control over daily operations but can suggest policy. The plan resembles models from sports, where co-ops own successful teams like the NFL's Green Bay Packers and soccer's Futbol Club Barcelona. Fans can own a share of the team, and vote on a board and a chief administrator, but can't meddle in picking the coach or managing the ... Read More

Journalists: Why Do We Even Bother?

Why am I even writing this? Odds are that you, dear reader, don't believe a word journalists like myself have to say. A new Gallup poll finds that "Americans' distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly." Republicans are the most skeptical, with only 26 per cent expressing some degree of trust in the media. Independents aren't far behind. A slim majority of Democrats do generally trust the media, but even their numbers are falling. Not a good sign for the health of our ... Read More

What Academics Can Teach Fareed Zakaria

Another week, another scandal featuring a famous writer. This time, it’s Time magazine columnist Fareed Zakaria, who has acknowledged lifting—virtually verbatim—parts of a New Yorker magazine article for one of his own pieces. Now comes word that, in one of his own books, he included without attribution a passage from a book written by Clyde Prestowitz, and published three years earlier. At the risk of plagiarizing myself, it’s worth noting that I had a non-encounter with Zakaria quite similar to the one I had with the disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer. Like Lehrer, ... Read More

Jonah Lehrer: Requiem for a Writer in a Rush

As a journalist who frequently writes about psychology and brain science, my interests have frequently converged with those of Jonah Lehrer. Indeed, our paths crossed a couple of times. He once picked up one of my blog posts and (giving me full credit) wrote about it in his wired.com blog. Another time, he politely turned down my request for an interview. Sure, he was coming to Santa Barbara to give a lecture, but his schedule was so tight it allowed no time for talking. In retrospect, I’m wondering if that response helps explain his depressing fall into disgrace. We now know that Lehrer, ... Read More

Announcing Our New Name

Miller-McCune was launched in 2008 to showcase some of the most intriguing academic research being produced in the world today. Our belief then, and now, is that it’s important to publish stories that are research-driven and fact-based, written by journalists, innovative thinkers, and leading academics. In the run-up to our fifth year, we’ve considered carefully where we’ve been and where we’d like to go. And we’ve thought long and hard about the benefits, and pitfalls, of publishing this magazine in California when most American magazines (a few gems notwithstanding) are produced on ... Read More

Miller-McCune’s Top Stories of 2011

The word “top” always proves fungible in that modern media creation, “the list,” but this year Miller-McCune is adding a pinch of rigor to our own efforts to craft a Top 10 list. We’re drawing on the stories we published in 2011 that attracted the most web visitors. That’s not as elegant as some of the methodologies we’ve tried in the past, and traffic counts are fraught since gaining web visitors can verge into the black arts. Nonetheless, by accident or design, this year’s traffic winners tend to a present a balanced picture of the types of stories we favor at ... Read More

Call Us Names (Or At Least, Give Us Some …)

Editor-in-Chief Maria Streshinsky

Probably I shouldn't admit this, but before writing to ask for your help, I pulled up the quote finder at Thesaurus.com and typed "name." This came up: "The man who would change the name of Arkansas is the original, iron-jawed, brass-mouthed, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of the Ozarks! He is the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera ..." It is attributed to an unknown, and certainly surly, Arkansan from the late 1880s. Unlike our grumpy Arkansan, we at Miller-McCune would like to have ... Read More