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Real Reporters on the Screen? Get Me Rewrite!
All the News That’s Fit to Screen is a film series about journalism at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
BACK when paper and ink still mattered, I fell into a job as a nightside reporter at The Providence Journal, in the habitually newsworthy state of Rhode Island. This was many years ago, before exercise, sobriety and good hygiene had ruined the misanthropic bonhomie of the typical newsroom — or so the romanticizing journalist in me likes to think.
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The Deported
If you find your way through the door of the Juan Bosco Shelter in Nogales, just across the border in Sonora, Mexico, it’s because you’ve got nowhere else to go. You’ll find a bed here, your own slot in one of the 30 trilevel wooden frames that line the walls. Chances are, you need the rest. And Juan Bosco provides. You can sleep now and figure things out in the morning.
The shelter has three cardinal rules: (1) Keep it clean. (2) Care for others. (3) “You can’t talk about polleros here,” says a young man named José, using slang for guides who for a few thousand dollars bring immigrants over the border. “There are cameras and they hear the sounds.” Most of the people settling into the bunks tonight were just deported. They aren’t talking much, anyway.
José once slept at this shelter when he had nowhere else to go. He was one of the nearly 55,000 people a year, 150 a day, that the Mexican government says are pushed off buses into Nogales by American authorities. Now José sleeps here every night because its owners have allowed him free board in exchange for work. “The shelter is like a family,” he tells the new arrivals. “There are 3,000 people who come through here a month and we’re all equal.”
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“Terrorists? Us?” Owen Bennett-Jones
“The story of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, also known as the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK), is all about the way image management can enable a diehard enemy to become a cherished ally. The MEK is currently campaigning to be officially delisted in the US as a terrorist organisation. Once off the list it will be free to make use of its support on Capitol Hill in order to become America’s most favoured, and no doubt best funded, Iranian opposition group.”
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Turkey Diary Elif Batuman
“In 2010, I moved from California, where I had lived for 11 years, to Turkey, where I had never stayed longer than a month or two. I had been offered a job as writer in residence at a private university in the forest on the northern edge of Istanbul. When I got there, I found out that the university had no writer in residence programme. It didn’t even have a writing programme. There was just me. The two living beings I saw with the most regularity were a campus groundsman, who always seemed to be standing in the bushes when I left the house, and an obese one-eyed black cat, who used to come in through my bedroom window. It had one green eye and one empty socket, and the minute it saw me with its single eye, it would start running from room to room, uttering piercing meows and crashing into the furniture. There was a lot of furniture, which had come with the apartment.”
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“Issues for His Prose Style” by Andrew O’Hagan
“Good reporters go hunting for nouns. They want the odd verb too, but the main thing is the nouns, especially the proper ones, the who, what and where. The thing British schoolchildren call a ‘naming word’ was, for Hemingway, a chance to reveal what he knew, an opportunity to be experienced, to discriminate, and his style depends on engorged nouns, not absent adjectives. But at times it strikes you that the cult of specificity in Hemingway is a drug you take in a cheap arcade: lights flash on the old machines and a piano plinks overhead. One evening it came to me as a small revelation that he takes too much pride in the nouns. (And pride ruined him.) He never takes nouns for granted. He invests his whole personality in them, because nouns are the part of speech where a person gets to show off. Papa gets busted on the nouns because he can’t place them on the page without ego. Too often they are there to attract attention. To cause a sensation. To make a blaze. Hemingway will never say someone had a drink when he can say they had a vermouth.”
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Jacqueline Rose on Marilyn Monroe
“She was luminous – on that much everyone seems to agree. Hers is not the flawless matt beauty of Dietrich or Garbo. She is, as one might say, more curvy – I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed). That is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the recent My Week with Marilyn could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what – in the aura that surrounds her – she was lighting up or revealing, other than herself, is rarely asked.”
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Ray Bradbury, 1920–2012
“Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.”
—Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203
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Treading a Fine Line by Teaching Journalism in China
At the more progressive campuses, there is a struggle between those who say the media should serve the state, and those who see them as independent monitors.
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Three Varied Tools for Blogging With a Hand-Held
Being a dedicated blogger once meant accepting life as a laptop nomad or being shackled to a desktop workstation.
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Now, with a mobile device and the right apps, bloggers barely need to touch a conventional keypad to keep readers sated. Popular blogging services like Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress have free apps for Android and Apple, and while those apps are sometimes flawed, they’re generally good enough to download.
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Is Philanthropy Print Journalism’s Last Hope?
The Ford Foundation recently pledged $1.04 million to Los Angeles’ struggling daily. We might be looking at the future of newspapers.
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It was startling to read last week that the Ford Foundation was awarding a two-year grant of $1.04 million to the Los Angeles Times for the hiring of reporters. The money will be used for coverage of immigration issues, including the Korean and Vietnamese communities, the California prison system, and the border region with Mexico, and to staff a bureau in Brazil. Ford has long been a supporter of journalism, with an emphasis on public broadcasting and nonprofit enterprises. But this grant represents a different approach: support for a newspaper currently in bankruptcy that has endured years of cutbacks in its resources and revenues. While still the most formidable news organization in California, the Los Angeles Times carries the stigma of its acquisition by Sam Zell, the real estate magnate whose purchase of the Tribune Co. in 2007 was a disaster that remains unresolved and in litigation. Foundation grants are not generally thought to provide support for institutions in trouble, but rather to give backing to innovation and enterprises solely operating in the public interest. -
The Coming Arab Identity Crisis – The Atlantic
As independence movements pushed out European imperialists, Arabs were finally no longer second-class citizens in their own countries. Wahab’s song for “a perfect unity” captured a goal that today, as democratic movements sweep the region, has returned to once again fill Arabs with hope and pride.
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Sentences Crisp, Sassy, Stirring
Different sentences carry different weight, and we can craft them not just to get an idea across, but also to convey attitude or elicit emotion.
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A Chicago start-up developed software that writes
In a few short years, we’ve learned to delegate all manner of tasks to computers. For music recommendations or driving directions or academic scouring, we readily turn to our clever machines. They do it better most of the time, and with much less effort.
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Now computers have proven competence—no, fluency—in yet another aspect of human life: writing. Narrative Science, a Chicago-based startup, has developed an innovative platform that writes reported articles in eerily humanlike cadence. Their early work focused on niche markets, clients with repetitive storylines and loads of numeric data—sports stories, say, or financial reports. But the underlying logic that drives the process—scan a data set, detect significance, and tell a story based on facts—is powerful and vastly applicable. Wherever there is data, Narrative Science founders say, their software can generate a prose analysis that’s robust, reliable, and readable -
How open journalism helped us get better
It came up this week with this map on poverty and deprivation in London, part of our London: the data series. Recently we’ve been using the colour scale on the map below, which is a variation on the famous traffic light collection of colours – for the Guardian, this tends to go from green, meaning good, or low – up to red, meaning bad or high. It’s used by map makers and newspaper designers all the time. But is it any good?
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Read work of all Pulitzer Prizes awards
Columbia University has named its 2012 Pulitzer Prize winners. Huffington Post and Politico each won their first Pulitzers, for national reporting and editorial cartooning, respectively. The New York Times won two awards, and the Philadelphia Inquirer won for Public Service after a difficult year. The Associated Press won for an investigation into NYPD practices. Below is a list of the winners and finalists with links to their honored work and their own coverage of their victories.
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E. B. White on the Responsibility and Role of the Writer
What is the author’s debt to society and how does he repay it?
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Today, I’m headed to Columbia to take part in a symposium on the future of journalism—a subject that feels at once on some great cusp and under the weight of a myriad conflicting pressures. It prompted me to revisit one of my all-time favorite Paris Review interviews, a 1969 conversation, in which the great George Plimpton and sidekick Frank H. Crowther interview E. B. White. White has previously voiced strong opinions on the free press and, of course, the architecture of language, but here he shares some timeless yet strikingly timely insights on the role and the responsibility of the writer:
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
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Giuseppi Logan’s Second Chance
Beautiful writing and story by JOHN LELAND
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For more than 30 years after some pioneering albums, Giuseppi Logan was one of jazz’s missing persons, impaired by drugs and mental illness. Read more -
The Journalism Movies Post
For starters, what is a journalism movie? Is it a movie about journalism, like All The President’s Men, or would a journalist character be enough, as is the case with Superman? Then there’s the question of films like Capote or The Help, which don’t meet the former criteria, but have elements one could argue are representative of professional journalism. Would these films be worthy? Read more
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The Land of Broken Promises
In 1958, Baghdad was featured in Time magazine—not as a hotbed of revolutionary, civil or sectarian strife, but for its ambitious plans for the world’s most famous architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, to recapture through their modern buildings the city’s former glory.
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Slide Show: In the Caves of the Nuba
The Nuba people of southern Sudan live among a series of stone massifs west of the Blue Nile. It is said that there are ninety-nine tribes, with scores of languages between them—but they are culturally united. Nubans regard themselves as the descendants of the Nubians, the most ancient indigenous people of the region. They have been fighting the Islamist military regime in Khartoum off and on for three decades. The first war, as they call it, ended after a 2005 U.N.-brokered peace agreement, and, after a referendum, statehood for South Sudan. The Nuba were left out of the independence deal. War broke out again soon after.
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UK galleries join Google Art Project’s virtual tours
Google, the company that has already made it possible to explore our planet from above and discover cities street-by-street, has announced a global expansion of its Art Project site, which allows users to go on a cultural grand tour without ever leaving their computer.
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2012 National Magazine Award Finalists: Feature Writing
Check some of the best feature writing published last year featured in several magazines including the New Yorker and Rolling Stone.
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NYU Lists 100 Best Journalists
In March 2012 the faculty at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, together with an Honorary Committee of alumni, selected “the 100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years.” The list was selected from more than 300 nominees plus write-ins and was announced at a reception in honor of the 100th anniversary of journalism education at NYU on April 3, 2012.
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Comedian Aziz Ansari is hitting the road
The 29-year-old comedian and star of Parks and Recreation is embarking on a multicity comedy tour, where he’ll be riffing on what he calls the “fears of adulthood.” Read more
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Ex-Microsoft employees launch new iPad sketch app
Paper, a new iPad sketch app, launched last night with quite a bang. That’s not surprising when you consider it has a gorgeous UI, and the fact that many of its creators are ex-Microsoft employees, who once worked on the infamous Courier project.
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