Sunday’s New York Times front page does something the paper of record has rarely, if ever, done before: It leads with a black box rather than an image, with zero photos taking up the top half of the page. It also downplays the suspect significantly. (ht @thomaskaplan)
Surely this New York Post cover isn’t as unapologetically appalling as the NYC subway snuff film that graced the cover eight days ago, and this won’t get the same instinctual rebuke that cover did. But what’s up at the Post? When did they become Faces of Death? Go back to sex sells — this is ugly.
The New York Post: You hear about the deaths we were unable to stop, twelve hours after they happen. Seriously, WTF guys?
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Union supporters attempt to blockade the Romney building, home to Michigan governor Rick Snyder’s office, in downtown Lansing across the street from the Michigan State Capitol to protest new Right to Work legislation. Calls of “Nobody in, Nobody out!” rang out after the buildings doors were closed and State and Lansing police took up position around other entrances to the building.
Right
Union organizers inflated “rat” effigies of the Michigan politicians behind the new Right to Work legislation in Lansing on 12/11/12.Left
Labor supporters cover their faces and move back after Michigan State Police used pepper spray to push back protesters from the entrance and first story windows around the Michigan State Capitol during a protest of new Right to Work legislation. — with Brian Laskowski in Lansing, MI.
Photographer Brian Laskowski sends along these shots from the Michigan Right to Work protests, which he covered in person.
Conservative Sen. Jim DeMint is resigning, and Stephen Colbert wants the job. All he wants us to do is tweet #SenatorColbert at Gov. Nikki Haley.
Want to help make #SenatorColbert a reality? Check out Colbert’s pitch here.Reblog/share/like this if you want Senator Colbert to happen.
“Tweet @nikkihaley & tell her why I belong in the US Senate. For one, I wouldn’t just block legislation, I’d body-check it! #SenatorColbert”
For our money, we want Alvin Greene back in. Here’s why:
Syria Deeply, Beat Page of the Future
It’s an incredible idea: one site, one beat. No front page. No sports, no business or finance, anywhere. It’s called Syria Deeply.
It’s about 25% original content, written by veteran Middle East correspondent Lara Setrakian and friends. The rest is aggregated and includes interactives, maps, and contextual material aimed to catch people up on the story without pointing them off site.
From FastCompany:
From a taxonomy perspective, Syria Deeply is the opposite of most news sites. In a traditional news taxonomy, information is divided by broad topics, like World News. Each topic is divided into subsections, like the Middle East. Each subsection is then often divided into even smaller subsections, like Syria. Each section gets smaller and smaller. Topic pages live in obscure ghettos on many news websites: auto-aggregated and ugly dumping grounds for content that happens to be tagged with particular keywords.
On Syria Deeply (designed by Brock Petrie and developed by Soumyadeep Paul and Arindam Biswas, who runs Collective Zen) the topic page is the homepage. Setrakian’s hope is that this site-wide focus on a single beat will allow for deeper, more thoughtful reporting.
FJP: Looks extremely promising.
Context, context, context. Bravo.
If you have not made it to this site, do so. This is how you cover single-topic news.
We were able to verify sourcing in many stories written by Jeffrey, mostly police and court news, political stories, and recently a series on returning war veterans. The stories with suspect sourcing were typically lighter fare – a story on young voters, a story on getting ready for a hurricane, a story on the Red Sox home opener – where some or all of the people quoted cannot be located.Cape Cod Times Publisher Peter Meyer and Editor Paul Pronovost • Discussing their findings regarding reporter Karen Jeffrey, a 31-year veteran of the newspaper whose stories have been found to use questionable sources. The paper found fabricated or nonexistent sources going back to 1998, where the paper’s archives end. “We must learn from this painful lesson and take steps to prevent this from happening again,” they write. “Moving forward, we will be spot-checking reporting sources more frequently; choosing stories at random and calling sources to verify they exist.”
CNN is proud of being nonpartisan, and makes a point that it doesn’t take sides like Fox or MSNBC. Problem is, you can’t define a strong network just by what it isn’t. And too often that’s been CNN’s approach: it still has great reach and strong reporting when it matters. But day to day it seems too driven by being the network that doesn’t bother anyone. There’s too much smileyness in its daytime programming, too much reflexive blandness on shows like Wolf Blitzer’s The Situation Room. CNN’s nonverbal message, too often, is “please don’t get mad at us.CNN Picks a New Boss: Will It Be Saved, or Has it Been Zuckered? | TIME.com (via markcoatney)
Local TV station’s anchors quit on-air after evening news broadcast
(Photo via YouTube)
Anyone who has been fed up with salary, management or other issues that have made a job unbearable has surely dreamed of a “take-this-job-and-shove-it” moment. For most, though, news of the moment likely wouldn’t make it outside the workplace walls.
That wasn’t the case for a TV news anchor duo in Bangor, Maine, who quit their jobs in front of thousands of viewers at the end of Tuesday evening’s newscast.
That’s gonna be one tough act to follow.
NPR Apps best practices for READMEs, HTML & CSS, Javascript, GIT, and more.
Not only useful for wannabe journo-coders, but also helps you get a sense of NPR tackling traditional journalism issues like style consistency beyond the written copy in the modern technology. And props to them for making it available on GitHub.
We love that NPR has made this available on GitHub. For design tips from NPR’s Digital Media Design Director, David Wright, check out the slides and audio from his ONA12 session, Design is How It Works.
Saw this in speech from NPR’s Wright in person last week. Stuff like this inspires you to work harder on your own site development. — Ernie @ SFB
Probability is counterintuitive.
The idea that the chance of something happening doesn’t change is hard for us to wrap our heads around. Understandably so—if I tell you that you have a 70 percent chance of making a putt, most people would expect that after ten putts, seven will have gone in the hole. This, however, is not the case.
That’s what’s hard to grasp about probability, the idea that one result has no effect on what happens in the future.
Related to this great piece (a topic which Stefan totally beat me to, because I had a half-written, not-as-good take hiding in my drafts) is the rebuke he got from his public editor on Thursday. If you ask me, the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, totally should have run a statistical model on whether that column was a good idea.
— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog
A very smart take on the political journalism topic du jour.
I’m moving back to New York in a few days. Unlike past...
OMG. I got so...
In this week’s Newsweek, a little...
Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
#@#$%!.tumblr.com
Here’s a hidden feature that shipped in...
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
Fair and Balanced: Here’s a handwritten note, circa-2005, wherein the president of Fox News writes to a Bush administration official—on Fox News stationary—and offers to “help off the record” if needed. The administration official in question was Condoleezza Rice, then-Secretary of State; Rice replied with a generic form letter. The note was obtained by Gawker’s John Cook, who wrote: “Please just imagine for a moment how Fox News would cover the publication of a private note from the editor of the New York Times to an Obama Administration official offering ‘help off the record.’” source
In which Mediaite’s taken down by a hurricane and mocked for it. But where will we go for our snarky comments about random cable news clips? :/
EDIT: OH GOD NO BUZZFEED IS DOWN TOO. AND GAWKER. AND HUFFPO.
Newspapers are essential to a functioning society. They inform; they provide context; they shine a spotlight on the shortcomings of bureaucracy, the overreaches of government (yes, this does happen — just perhaps not in the insidious manner that conservatives seem to think, or imply),…
This is the best thing inothernews has ever written. And he’s written a lot of good stuff.
When reading this, consider two recent stories that have shaken the core of two separate newspapers: 1) The Seattle Times’ recent controversy over political ads and 2) The San Diego Union-Tribune’s recent drama regarding its owner helping fund a controversial anti-Obama documentary. When these large papers cross these kinds of lines without the history allowing them to, nobody wins. Don’t forget that.
Hey.
My name is Michael Arrington. For newer readers who don’t know, I founded TechCrunch back in 2005.
Last year I was fired and began writing on Uncrunched.
Today AOL unfired me.
I am a venture capitalist and have all sorts of conflicts of interest. Many of you think that conflicts of interest are inherently bad and people with them shouldn’t be writing stuff for other people to read. A lot of people would agree with you. It was the reason AOL fired me last year, after they invested in my venture fund CrunchFund.
AOL now also disagrees.
Before everyone starts freaking the fuck out, just hold on a second and hear me out.
We don’t know how many of you are TechCrunch readers, particularly after last year’s AOL fiasco, but today brought some good news for longtime fans of the tech news site. In an open letter, posted on TechCrunch this afternoon, founder Michael Arrington has announced plans to return to the site he created as a paid contributor. Welcome back, Mike!
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