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Future of Local Investigative Reporting
This is the first of two parts exploring the threatened state of local investigative reporting.
In the recently released movie, “Spotlight,” an investigative reporter for The Boston Globe, Sacha Pfeiffer, grinds away at her job. She gets doors slammed in her face in working-class neighborhoods, she cajoles sources in coffee shops, and she pores over phone directories until the library lights are about to dim.
Her colleagues on the Globe’s investigative team, known as Spotlight, put in their own long hours. The reporter Michael Rezendes (played with manic, twitchy verve by Mark Ruffalo) hangs around courthouses and lawyer’s offices, digging out information through sheer persistence.
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HP connects freelancers, fixers and editors
It’s more difficult than ever for U.S. media organizations to cover international events. Since 2003, the number of foreign correspondents working for U.S. outlets has fallen 24 percent. Yet as press freedom continues to decline around the world, the need for major news outlets to sustain a presence abroad is more vital than ever.
That’s why a team of journalists and developers recently launched HackPack, a platform to connect freelancers and fixers worldwide to the news bureaus that need them. In doing so, media outlets can maintain an international presence and publish independent, original stories. At the same time, freelance journalists can gain an outlet for their work that pays a fair wage.
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What’s the secret of good writing?
I first encountered Robert Boice’s name about three years ago, somewhere online; after that, it started popping up every other month. Boice, I learned, was a US psychologist who’d cracked the secret of how to write painlessly and productively. Years ago, he’d recorded this wisdom in a book, now out of print, which a handful of fans discussed in reverent tones, but with a title that seemed like a deliberate bid for obscurity: How Writers Journey To Comfort And Fluency. Also, it was absurdly expensive: used copies sold for £130. Still, I’m a sucker for writing advice, especially when so closely guarded. So this month, I succumbed: I found a copy at the saner (if still eye-watering) price of £68, and a plain green print-on-demand hardback arrived in the post. So if you hunger to write more, but instead find yourself procrastinating, or stifled by panic, or writer’s block, I can reveal that the solution to your troubles is…
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In the ‘Spotlight’: Movies On Journalism
Why is Hollywood so obsessed with journalists lately?
Spotlight is the latest—and best—in a string of recent movies about journalists and the work that they do. Aside from its many cinematic virtues, it’s the rare journalism drama that depicts the news industry both accurately and engrossingly.
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Turkey’s Troubling ISIS Game
By Roger Cohen
Sanliurfa, Turkey – ABOVE a restaurant specializing in sheep’s head soup, with steaming tureens of broth in the window, two young Syrian journalists took up residence in this ancient town in southeastern Turkey. They had fled Raqqa, the stronghold in Syria of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and devoted their time to denouncing the crimes of the barbarous jihadi group. Today, their second-floor apartment is a crime scene, with a red police seal on the door.
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World needs to know about Yemen’s war
One Friday in Old Sana’a, while filming the aftermath of the Saudi-led coalition bombings, I found myself surrounded by a group of militia who were trying to take hold of my camera. I was detained for a few hours in the ruins, confused and unnerved. The interrogation I received from the Houthis was relentless. But the problems didn’t stop here. For a week, I was harassed with regular phone calls and visits from National Security officials at my hotel. All this despite having a press visa issued in London.
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Consequences of media crackdowns
The recent awarding of the EU’s top human rights prize to imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi is shining the spotlight once again on the rampant abuse of freedom of expression in the Middle East and North Africa. Although Arab autocrats have long used control of the press to silence opposition, in recent months the state has turned up the heat on both traditional and digital media actors in some not-so-surprising places, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and some surprising places, like Morocco and Tunisia.
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Virtual Reality: A New Way to Tell Stories
“Until now, V.R. has been seen mostly as a revolutionary new platform for video games, but it has the potential to transform journalism as well. At the magazine, we first began experimenting with the technology in April, when we shot a short film with the V.R. production studio Vrse about the making of our “Walking New York” cover. We didn’t promote this project at the time, but we were happy enough with the results to begin making plans for the film that we’re releasing now, also a collaboration with Vrse: a 10-minute journey through the lives of three different children who have been driven from their homes by war.”
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“You are worth being paid for it”
A very nice editor at Huffington Post contacted me yesterday, and asked me if I would be willing to grant permission for the site to republish my post about the seven things I did to reboot my life.
Huffington Post has a lot of views, and reaches a pretty big audience, and that post is something I’d love to share with more people, so I told the editor that I was intrigued, and asked what they pay contributors.
Well, it turns out that, “Unfortunately, we’re unable to financially compensate our bloggers at this time. Most bloggers find value in the unique platform and reach our site provides, but we completely understand if that makes blogging with us impossible.”
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Humans of NY helps us go beyond headlines
Yet HONY borrows from long-standing journalistic and documentary practices. For example, the British social documentary movement, which started in the 1930s, was premised on the importance of telling the stories of “ordinary” people to counter the dominance of elite and upper class in the media. My own research on the role of emotion in journalistic story-telling demonstrates that the most highly regarded journalism – Pulitzer Prize winning reports – draw extensively on emotive and personal story-telling as a means of illustrating what are often very complex and abstract issues, ranging from the fate of the New Jersey fishing industry to breakthroughs in the use of DNA technology for medical treatments.
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Voices from Chernobyl
The Paris Review published excerpts from Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl:
“He started to change—every day I met a brand-new person. The burns started to come to the surface. In his mouth, on his tongue, his cheeks—at first there were little lesions, and then they grew. It came off in layers—as white film . . . the color of his face . . . his body . . . blue . . . red . . . gray-brown. And it’s all so very mine! It’s impossible to describe! It’s impossible to write down! Or even to get over. The only thing that saved me was that it happened so fast; there wasn’t any time to think, there wasn’t any time to cry.”
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Visual Content for Storytelling
It’s probably not news to you that effective visual content is key to success on social media. What you might not know, however, is just how important it is to expert marketers who are tasked with telling brand stories. Luckily, there’s an infographic for that. eMarketer recently reported on research from the CMO Council and Libris which uncovered some very compelling data about the way marketers are using visuals in marketing today.
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Slow Journalism in Age of Instant Info
As news cycles speed up, ‘slow’ journalists take months—even years—to report and tell in-depth stories.
“Everyone is going faster and faster and getting shallower and shallower,” says Salopek. “I said, ‘How about we slow down a bit to grab a little mindshare by going in the opposite direction.’ The rewards have been far in excess of my expectations, both professionally and personally. It’s a sense of narrative direction I never had before when I was flying around the world and telling stories of the crisis of the day that seemed disconnected.”
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John Hersey, The Art of Fiction No. 92
Early in his career—“before,” he says, “I was really even a writer”—John Hersey decided to restrict his public expression to the medium in which he was most comfortable; that is, to the written rather than the spoken word. He has kept to his decision. This is only the second interview he has ever granted; the first was with Publishers Weekly in 1984.
Read this interview with John Hersey in the Paris Review where he speaks about the writing process he follows, the relationship he sees between fictional writing and journalism, and delves into his life as a writer and journalist. Interview.
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Why NYTimes apps look different
“The battle will be won on the smartphone,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said at a tech conference last February.
The paper’s readers have increasingly been coming from mobile in recent years, and the Times has responded with a fleet of apps designed to draw in small, niche audiences to the paper. The NYT Cooking app, an opinion app, and NYT Now, which offers a single curated news feed, were designed mostly as evangelical products—to convert browsers into regular readers and eventually subscribers.
But these niche apps haven’t attracted the number of subscribers the Times was hoping for. The paper shuttered the opinion app in October, and last week it announced a retooling of its mobile apps. The NYT Now app, which had required a paid monthly subscription, will be free, while the paper’s comprehensive iPhone app is undergoing a transition to make it “more visual, more serendipitous, and to introduce a new mobile voice.” That new mobile voice will come from human editors, which the app is getting for the first time.
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Why Journalists Make Great Entrepreneurs
There is tremendous transition within the field of journalism. The number of full-time U.S. daily newspaper journalists now stands roughly at 36,700, according to the American Society of News Editors, down from 55,000 in 2008. I constantly receive calls from journalism colleagues who are in transition and grappling with how to move forward with their expertise. For any journalist who is in a state of transition, it is tremendously useful to know how to build on an idea and scale it into a business.
I am fortunate to teach entrepreneurship at the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Each semester I break the class into three teams and ask thought leaders in journalism, technology, and communications to share a real-life challenge they see within our industry. These thought leaders have recently included Chris Crommett, founder of CNN en Español; Louis Libin, former CTO of NBC and president of Broad Comm; and Marian Salzman, CEO of Havas PR.
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The value of news
This essay is adapted from Tales from the Great Disruption: Insights and Lessons from Journalism’s Technological Transformation, by Michael Shapiro, Anna Hiatt, and Mike Hoyt. The book offers a look at how new and old journalistic institutions are dealing with the digital revolution, published by The Big Roundtable, a platform for nonfiction narrative stories. Shapiro, Hiatt, and Hoyt are, respectively, its founder, publisher, and editor.
In March of 2011, The New York Times announced that it would start charging readers for digital content. The announcement came from the publisher of the Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who wrote that the shift away from offering all the Times’ online content at no cost was “an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times.”
The decision to erect a paywall had come after long and sometimes difficult debate, one that was taking place in news organizations around the world. There were, of course, the business considerations: Charging for access meant an inevitable drop in traffic. And with that drop would come a loss in interest by advertisers, who had become accustomed to being able to reach tens of millions of potential customers at a fraction of the cost of a print ad. But beyond the debate about the potentially catastrophic loss of digital ad dollars, something else was at play: an existential debate about journalism’s future.
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How To Fix American Journalism
It’s an age-old debate among journalists: which approach to covering the news is superior—the American, with its striving after objectivity and balance, or the European, with its frank embrace of slant and party? Should news organizations seek out all sides of an issue, or should they present the news with an unabashed tilt? By now, it seems clear that the Americans (at their best) have the edge. Newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, for all their shortcomings, offer a rich daily diet of news, from distant wars to local schools; analysis of events and trends; coverage of arts and culture; and opinion from both in-house columnists and outside contributors. Another top paper, the Financial Times, though based in London, follows an American-style approach. The European model has its own impressive exemplars, notably The Guardian, but overall the American way has, I think, shown its superiority.
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Arab states lag in extremists’ media war
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — As the Islamic State group battles across Syria and Iraq, pushing back larger armies and ruling over entire cities, it is also waging an increasingly sophisticated media campaign that has rallied disenfranchised youth and outpaced the sluggish efforts of Arab governments to stem its appeal.
Long gone are the days when militant leaders like Osama bin Laden smuggled grainy videos to Al-Jazeera. Nowadays Islamic State backers use Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms to entice recruits with professionally made videos showing fighters waging holy war and building an Islamic utopia.
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Michael Moore and Documentary Cinema
What Moore is responding to is a trend in documentary filmmaking – a certain strain that covers some, but not all, of the field – that turns documentaries into, essentially, visual works of journalism. Quite often, when watching a doc, one is struck with the sensation that some stock footage and a few talking heads are all that separate the experience from reading an article in the New Yorker – and if that’s the case, why not simply make the docs as journalism, since it’s so much easier to absorb written information you can take your time with? Well, I think documentary filmmakers are under the impression – entirely reasonable – that in order to create the greatest social impact with their work, they need to make films, not write non-fiction, since the readership in the United States is dramatically decreasing, whereas viewing content is dramatically increasing.
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HuffPost to launch Arabic edition
The Huffington Post has entered a partnership with a former director general of al-Jazeera Network to launch an Arabic-language edition aimed at the growing number of young people in the Middle East with mobile devices.
The AOL-owned company will launch HuffPost Arabi after teaming up with Wadah Khanfar, who is currently chief executive of Integral Media Strategies.
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Western Media Turn from Explaining World
Anjan Sundaram shared the lives of the Congolese to report one of the worst human disasters. Now, he says, journalists focus on an ever-narrower agenda … and miss the real stories
The western news media are in crisis and turning their backs on the world, but we hardly ever notice. Where correspondents were once assigned to a place for months or years, reporters now handle often 20 countries. Bureaux are in hub cities, far from many of the countries they cover. And journalists are often lodged in expensive houses or five-star hotels. As the news has receded, so have our minds.
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Technology Offer New Tools for Journalists
LOS ANGELES — The Internet and rapidly evolving technology is quickly changing how people receive news and how journalists deliver it. There are now more ways to tell a story than ever before. One school in Los Angeles is teaching the next generation of journalists with the help of a state-of-the-art newsroom.
When Faith Miller wanted to study journalism in college she didn’t realize how hands-on the experience would be.
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James Foley’s Truth
We all owe a debt to James Foley. He was killed in the effort to bring news of the wars in the Arab world to the rest of us, to make them more humanly comprehensible. Foley, who was murdered, on video, by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, was acting on behalf of two principles: the right to know and the need to know. In this sense, Foley’s father did not exaggerate in calling him “a martyr for freedom.” The more I learn about the man and his work, the more my admiration grows. His journalism was clear-eyed, empathetic, and without the bravado that can creep into war reporting as an anesthetic against fear. By the accounts of his former fellow-prisoners (those who happen to be citizens of countries that pay ransom to terror groups), he was generous, thoughtful, good-humored, unbreakable in spirit. If you had to be shackled with someone in terrifying circumstances, for months on end, you would want it to be James Foley.
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Guardian partners with more local news outlets
The Guardian partners with more local news outlets to tell under-reported stories – As the news organization gains footing in the US, more journalistic partnerships are being launched to tell stories from different areas of the country.
The digital age may have increased competition between news outlets as the online fight for clicks and eyeballs becomes ever more fierce, but this week goes to show that digital journalism also enables partnerships that once would have seemed unlikely.
Before the weekend comes around, The Guardian will feature two digital collaborations with smaller, local news outlets: The last of a four-part collaborative project with The Texas Observer about the US immigration crisis and the deaths of undocumented immigrants in Texas goes online today. Later this week, The Guardian and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will be launching a collaborative project about racial profiling in the wake of the events in Ferguson.
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