Journalism

There are 32 posts filed in Journalism (this is page 2 of 4).

ProPublica: Local Newspapers Are Vanishing. How Should We Remember Them? As smaller newspapers shrink or disappear, it’s easy to romanticize the role they played. But one reporter’s memories of the heyday of local journalism reveal a much more complicated reality. (My local newspaper has shrunk its overall coverage, now combining content from another local paper).

Upholding our democracy

The United States is having challenges in maintaining and upholding democracy. In Oregon, all of the candidates for governor have all called each other “extreme” for one reason or another. In many states, people who deny the results of the 2020 presidential election won their primaries and are candidates for high office. The Democracy Day journalism collaborative held an event in September 2022 to highlight issues and seek solutions. In a post on Waging Nonviolence, the group outlined seven ideas for coming together as partisans for democracy:

  • Look beyond electoral politics
  • Define “anti-democratic” behavior beyond partisan identities
  • Bridge the understanding of “anti-democratic” behavior to mobilize against it
  • Calling out toxic othering
  • Now is not the time for neutrality
  • Partisanship for democracy versus bipartisanship
  • A cross-ideological democracy movement is both necessary and possible

This post is excellent reading, with many links to supporting material. As for each of us, let us do what we can to help uphold our democracy.

Bookmarked Timothy Snyder on how to cover Trump’s coup attempt – CNN Video (CNN)

Yale professor Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” says Donald Trump is “moving from the territory of the medium-sized lie into the big lie” about the election. Snyder tells Brian Stelter the news media should “take a deep breath” and “talk about the context” of Trump’s anti-democratic actions, including what it means for the integrity of future elections.

Worth watching….

Curation as an act of journalism

In September 2020, I started a site called Portland Protest News. Its purpose was to be a daily collection of what I considered to be the best reporting and analysis over the past 24 hours on the subject of the protests in Portland, Oregon. The site focused primarily on local news sources, as I considered those the people closest to the action. However, I included links to posts/articles from other sources if they were bringing out aspects of the protests not covered in the local media.

In creating and running this site, I was not generating any original reporting on events concerning the Portland protests. However, I feel that my activity did fit within Wikipedia’s definition of journalism:

Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on current events based on facts and supported with proof or evidence.

I was filling the “distribution” role in the above definition. However, I was also performing these roles (per Mindy McAdams):

  1. Selection of the best representatives: If a museum curator has access to 10,000 small clay tokens from ancient Iraq and Syria, how many — and which ones — should appear inside the glass case? If a journalist is going to provide links to reliable sources about planning for retirement (or breast cancer, or choosing a college), which are the best, clearest, and most up-to-date?
  2. Culling: How many links is enough, and not too much? If the museum curator puts 100 of those tokens in one case, my eyes will glaze over.
  3. Provide context: Will you include a bit of explanatory text to show me how each source differs from the others? Why am I looking at this one? Where is it from? How old is it? Why is this one significant?

The Online Journalism Blog also touches on curation:

Curation is a relatively new term in journalism, but the practice is as old as journalism itself. Every act of journalism is an act of curation: think of how a news report or feature selects and combines elements from a range of sources (first hand sources, background facts, first or second hand colour). Not only that: every act of publishing is, too: selecting and combining different types of content to ensure a news or content ‘mix’.

Where I am going with this? Here is my point: when someone collects links on a topic, that is an act of journalism. It is a type of journalism that all of us can pursue and make contributions.

Bookmarked Journalism: A Manifesto for Change (Medium)

What my 25 years in newsrooms has taught me is that the intended audience in the minds of many journalists is just other journalists, not the viewers we’re supposed to be here to serve. That has to change.
If I, a TV journalist, find TV news impossible to stomach, how on earth do we expect anyone else to watch what we do?

Bookmarked Journalism is not for journalists (reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk)

“Journalism is not for journalists. It’s for citizens, and we should have citizens in our minds at every point of what we do”. Award-winning journalist Shirish Kulkarni explains why audiences are fed up with news and how journalists can re-engage with them

Bookmarked What’s next for journalists? (Substack Blog)

In 2010, at 29 years old, I came to the US as a freelance journalist. At the end of the year, I tallied my pre-tax earnings and found I had made $35,000.

Idea for journalists – create your own brand