Tag Results for journalism

In some ways, , ABC's new medical drama Boston Med is television at its best. But the 8-part series is being produced under the news division while ABC has been cutting its news staff.  Instead of taking a look at real medical issues, Boston Med is more entertainment than enlightening. 

Advertising is down. Circulation is down. But with Saturday's launch of Apple's new iPad tablet, magazine publishers say things are looking up. GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Glamour, and Wired will all have iPad apps available by this summer that will combine eye-popping color graphics with long-form narrative journalism in portable form. Publishers are hoping they can start a "slow journalism" movement, coaxing consumers to read better in the same way that the "slow food" movement convinced them to eat better.

What role should the government have in preserving public-interest journalism? If you’re a First Amendment absolutist (and I consider myself to be pretty close), you might immediately respond with a resounding “none.” Yet such purity has never been the reality in American life.

Heavy postal subsidies from the earliest days of the republic helped create the most vibrant newspaper and magazine industry in the world. To bring matters up to the present, media corporations are now given virtually free use of the broadcast airwaves, theoretically owned by all of us, with little expectation that they will fulfill the public-interest obligations that were once required of them.

Earlier today, John Nichols (at right in photo) and Robert McChesney (at left) visited Northeastern to promote their new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.” (You can read excerpts of it here and here.) I won’t pretend to write an objective account — I introduced them, and we all said nice things about each other. Rather, I want to discuss briefly their idea that at a time when journalism is in crisis, government ought to step in and prop it up to the tune of some $30 billion a year — a number they say correlates, in 2010 dollars, with what was spent on postal subsidies in the 1840s.

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The National Enquirer broke the story of the John Edwards love-child as many main-stream media outlets dismissed it. Now that the magazine has been proven right, should it be allowed to compete for the Pulitzer Prize?

WGBH purchased classical music station WCRB-FM this week.  WGBH management plans to convert WGBH-FM into an all news and information format during the day.  What is the significance of the move and can the market support it?

The newspaper industry is in peril, television has been downsizing.  At the same time, there has been a spike in applications and enrollment in journalism schools. What’s behind the rise and interest in journalism schools when media jobs are disappearing?

Well-known photojournalist David Hume Kennerly is ripping mad at Newsweek for cropping his photo of Dick Cheney and his family to make it look like the former vice president is picking over the remains of a small animal. (Be sure to click through so that you can see the before and after pictures.)

Appropriately enough (make that inappropriately enough), the photo was used to illustrate something Cheney had said about torture, of which he’s all in favor.

Noting that Newsweek had taken a picture of a warm family scene and cropped it so that it looked like an animal sacrifice, with Cheney as the knife-wielding priest, Kennerly writes:

This radical alteration is photo fakery. Newsweek’s choice to run my picture as a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.

Kennerly’s right on target, as the lame response from a Newsweek spokesman makes clear. The photo was tortured into something that it was not. As a result, it’s not journalism, either.

A 24-year-old resident of Middletown, Conn., has been detained and identified as a “person of interest” in the murder of Yale University student Annie Le.

Most news outlets, including the New Haven Register and the New York Times, have identified the man as Raymond Clark, a Yale lab technician. Each includes a photo of him in police custody. Yet the New Haven Independent, a non-profit news site, has declined to name him. In a story posted late Monday afternoon, editor Paul Bass wrote:

As of Monday afternoon, police had no suspects in custody in the investigation of graduate student Annie Le’s grisly death, [New Haven Police] Chief James Lewis said.

He told the Independent that his cops have been busy interviewing “and reinterviewing” “lots of people.” The department will not reveal the names of interviewees or “persons of interest,” according to Lewis.

“We don’t want to destroy people’s reputations,” Lewis said.

(Update: Bass explains his decision. See Kennedy's post in the comments.)

But Lewis reversed himself once Clark was taken into custody.

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ESPN started as an anomoly 30 years ago. But the sports cable network has become a behemoth, influencing coverage not only of television but also other media. With no other significant sports network to compete against has ESPN become too big for its own good?

The University of Alaska plans to send three journalism students and a professor to Iraq to embed with the U.S. Army Stryker Brigade Combat Team for nearly a month.  Is this a once in-a-lifetime opportunity? Or is the assignment too dangerous for inexperienced reporters?