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Forty years after Watergate, investigative journalism is at risk
Investigative reporting in America did not begin with Watergate . But it became entrenched in American journalism — and has been steadily spreading around the world — largely because of Watergate.
Now, 40 years after Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote their first stories about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office building, the future of investigative reporting is at risk in the chaotic digital reconstruction of journalism in the United States. Resource-intensive investigative reporting has become a burden for shrunken newspapers struggling to reinvent themselves and survive. Nonprofit start-ups seeking to fill the gap are financially fragile themselves, with their sustainability uncertain.
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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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Technology in Our Lives, and How to Make It Work Better
Technology is supposed to make life easier, but it often comes with layers of jargon, settings and hardware adjustments. Here are answers to some tech questions.
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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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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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Is Technology Fostering a Race to the Bottom?
In the West, a new informal economy is in the making – a peculiar byproduct of the digital revolution that has freelancers doing tasks rather than workers holding jobs.
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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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What Journalists Need for the Future
In a guest post Alexandra Stark, Swiss journalist and Head of Studies at MAZ – the Swiss School of Journalism, argues that it’s time for journalists to take action on business models for supporting journalism. Stark proposes a broadened set of skills and a new structure to enable greater involvement from journalists, while also fostering further teaching of such skills.
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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. -
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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App of the week for journalists
Byword, a great text editor for iPhone/iPad.
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What is it? A text editor that allows HTML and syncs with Dropbox and iCloud.
How is it of use to journalists? It allows journalists to write text articles on an iPad or iPhone and easily export.
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Investigative video news channel to launch on YouTube
Two not-for-profit news organisations in the United States have teamed up to launch a new channel on YouTube dedicated to investigaive reporting. The channel, which is due to launch in July, aims to become a “hub for high-quality, high-impact investigative videos” and is backed by $800,000 in funding from the Knight Foundation.It is a partnership between the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative News Network, who will work together to promote the channel and to engage users through social media and online chats.
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Want to Broadcast Live? Livestream Makes It Easy
Free apps and webcam-based streaming services make putting live video on the Internet accessible to just about anyone with a connected device. Streaming broadcast-quality live video, however, still requires expensive equipment that most people don’t have on hand. Livestream, a site for streaming live events, is aiming to lower this barrier of entry with its first hardware product.Read more
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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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Agreed: Journalism is the Best Job Ever
Last week journalists got some pretty disparaging news – journalists had one of the worst jobs in country. In fact, according to CareerCast.com, only four jobs are worse that being a journalist – oil rig worker, enlisted military soldier, dairy farmer, and lumberjack.
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Long hours, bad pay, stressful deadlines – these were all reasons that put journalism near the bottom of the list but these I’m willing to make a bet that 98.9 percent of journalists knew these things before penning that first news story. If you became a journalist for fame and fortune, then you’re going to be miserable.
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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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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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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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Paintballing with Hezbollah | VICE
We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match. The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears.
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Bulletins from the future
The internet has turned the news industry upside down, making it more participatory, social, diverse and partisan—as it used to be before the arrival of the mass media, says Tom Standage. Read more
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