Have the latest advances in communication technology radically altered the fundamental dynamics of struggles for change in authoritarian settings? Or have cell phones and social media merely brought about small shifts in the dynamics of revolution? Is the Web a godsend to those trapped in oppressive states, as Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo suggests in his essay “The Internet is God’s Gift to China”? Or does this thinking give in to a form of “cyber-utopianism” that glosses over the potential of new media to be used by autocrats, their propaganda ministries and security forces to massage ... Read More
The Third Way to Media Success
October 12, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Media users now sup at a cornucopia of choice. It's a Golden Age of information and a Dark Age of ill-informed opinion, and traditional and startup media alike frantically cast their (Inter)nets to engage audiences for more than a nanosecond. Those of us in "the media-academic complex" have tended to look at readers, viewers and visitors through two lenses that, at their margins, might be labeled "The Muse" and "The Marketplace." The media leaders looking through the Muse lens try to go beyond what people want right now to satisfy them with what they didn't even know they wanted. A Muse ... Read More
Knowledge-Based Journalism Is Not an Oxymoron
April 14, 2010 • By • 4 Comments
Early in my career, I attended a daylong court hearing that focused on a court challenge, pursued by large retailers in a major American city, to a so-called "blue law" that kept most stores closed on Sundays. The lawsuit was big news. This city was largely conservative and fairly religious, and the retailers were normally aligned with the right-leaning establishment. All the same, the retailers wanted to make money on the Lord's Day, politics be darned. The case was God v. Mammon, but with a twist, and so it was catnip to the news media. The run-up to the hearing included weeks of news ... Read More
A Primer on Media in the 21st Century: Part II
July 10, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
This is the second of two articles examining the Project for Excellence in Journalism's latest annual examination of the news media in the United States. Last year was a watershed for the Internet as news source, no doubt about it. But while they are growing and becoming more significant, new-media outlets are still not filling all the gaps left by the decline of newspapers and other traditional media, according to this year's Project for Excellence in Journalism report titled "The State of the News Media." More than a third of Americans reported getting most of their 2008 campaign news ... Read More
A Primer on Media in the 21st Century
July 9, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
This is the first of two articles examining the Project for Excellence in Journalism's latest annual examination of the news media in the United States. Traditional news media — newspapers, magazines and television news organizations — are testing novel responses to stem the steady losses of their subscribers, viewers and advertisers. Beyond cost-cutting measures like reducing staff, pulling back coverage and shrinking the size of their printed products, news organizations are sharing work with longtime rivals, using amateurs as volunteer reporters and moving heavily or totally ... Read More
Nonprofit-Funded, University-Based News
April 14, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
I met Len Sellers in the mid-1990s, when he was still a journalism professor at San Francisco State University, where, among other things, he taught a newswriting course that was generally considered make-or-break for aspiring journalists, a hard-core exercise in using public documents and other reliable information sources to write solid news reports. By all accounts I've heard, the course was quite old-school: Misspell a name in a story, and you get an F. Len also taught investigative reporting and co-authored an investigative reporting textbook. At the same time, he was an early believer ... Read More
Deep Throat Meets Data Mining
January 10, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
If you pay passing attention to the media landscape, you know that most mainstream news outlets have had their business models undermined by the digital revolution. As their general-interest monopolies have been pillaged by niche online competitors, traditional news organizations have lost revenue and cachet, laying off journalists in waves that have grown into tsunamis. This process has created dire prospects for the future of investigative reporting, often seen as the most costly of journalistic forms. In the middle of November, Sam Zell, the occasionally foul-mouthed chief executive ... Read More
The New New Media
October 2, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
It may be emblematic of the state of journalism today that I found one of the presidential campaign’s deepest insights put forward not by the political press but in a feature story about a museum. Like most great ideas, the thought is so simple and self-contained that it made a great headline: “They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensable, Too.” Clearly, the fossil fuel era is at an end, and we’re watching its death throes, with oil company executives and their political vassals cast in the role of frustrated whale-oil procurers and salesmen. Because of the realities of global ... Read More
The Bottom Line for Nonprofit News
March 4, 2008 • By • 1 Comment
Late last Halloween afternoon, four Chicago police officers allegedly bashed a teenage boy's head into a bus station pole until he could barely stand. The Chicago Sun-Times didn't send a reporter. Neither did the Chicago Tribune. But as soon as she could, Kimberly Michaelson of the Chi-Town Daily News rushed to the scene, notepad in hand. She took the 'L' train to Uptown, a working-class neighborhood on Chicago's north side, and then walked the streets, asking shopkeepers, homeless people and diners at a fried chicken joint what they’d seen. Though the Chicago Police Department didn’t ... Read More
