A couple ticks behind on this, but Newsweek’s redesign is really, really good.
[the entire article]
We shouldn’t publish full articles unless we have to (say, if the article gets taken down). A couple of key paragraphs is fine. People can click to read the rest. And the folks that don’t want to will just miss out.
You like Ezra Klein as a writer? Don’t take away his traffic. I don’t mean to pick on anyone, and this isn’t directed at anyone in particular, but it happens far too often on Tumblr. We have to start somewhere, right? So why not here? — Ernie @ SFB
The Obama administration asked Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) Wednesday morning to reintroduce legislation that would help reporters protect the identity of their sources from federal officials, a White House official told The Huffington Post.
The scope of the bill and how effective it would be remains unclear, however, given prior administration opposition to a “reporter shield” law.
The request is opportunistically timed, coming just days after it was revealed that the Department of Justice had subpoenaed telephone records of 20 AP phone lines and more than 100 reporters and editors. The White House has faced heavy criticism for the subpoena, though the president has said that he was unaware of it and Attorney General Eric Holder said that he had recused himself from the investigation.
While the timing absolutely can’t be ignored, it’s hard for us not to get behind any effort to further protect reporters and their sources from federal prosecution. Still, if the Obama Administration was hoping to save face with a new reporter shield law, we suspect we aren’t the only ones who think this is too little too late.
CNN’s Jake Tapper has managed to get his hands on the critical White House email suggested as the proof that the White House was more interested in removing references to possible terrorist attacks in the now infamous Benghazi talking points then they were in telling the truth to the American public.
The actual email, written in the days following the Benghazi attack, reveals something else entirely. We now know that whoever leaked the contents of the email to various media outlets last week seriously misquoted the document, choosing to paraphrase the content in a way that made it appear that the White House was focused on protecting the State Department’s back and covering up information.
And the plot thickens…
It put the American people at risk and that is not hyperbole. Trying to determine who was responsible required very aggressive action.U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder • Defending the Department of Justice’s decision to collect roughly two months worth of various Associated Press employees’ work and personal phone records as part of a criminal investigation. The DoJ is apparently investigating a leak which occured last year, revealing the existence of a failed plot to bomb a U.S. plane, during a time when the Obama Administration insisted the U.S. government was unaware of any terror attacks which might be planned to coincide with the annviersary of Osama bin Laden’s death. source
This was the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year, a shot of a number of casualties after a bombing in Gaza. The event itself wasn’t fake, but as one tech expert figured out, the photo was ‘Shopped.
UPDATE: World Press Photo is denying these allegations, and spoke to some independent experts, who found no manipulation outside of normal post-production.
There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.Associated Press President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt • In a letter, sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, denouncing the Justice Department’s decision to acquire the phone records of AP journalists as well as a number of the wire service’s offices over a two-month period. The move came as a result of a 2012 AP story which leaked the news of a foiled attack on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death. The move, which followed the Obama administration’s general policy of trying to shut down leaks, nonetheless was disowned by the White House. “We are not involved in decisions made in connection with criminal investigations, as those matters are handled independently by the Justice Department,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. “Any questions about an ongoing criminal investigation should be directed to the Department of Justice.” The move has been condemned by many journalists.
Imagine an industry where every single opponent worked in the same street, competing with each other by day—drinking, brawling, fornicating, night clubbing and cocaine-snorting with each other by night. A street full of the most ruthless and amoral people in the world existed, and it was called Fleet Street.Piers Morgan • Discussing his new Starz TV show, Fleet Street, a new dramatic series about his time working the tabloid journalism circuit in the ’70s. It’s a lot like working on ShortFormBlog now.
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Watergate: The Video Game
Journalists: It’s the game you’ve always wanted to play. Forget finding Carmen Sandiego. In Watergate: The Video Game, you’re on the hunt to expose Richard Nixon’s corruption. Here, the real sleuthing happens through interviews, document acquisition and hard-hitting reporting. This is the best way to celebrate the Pulitzer Prize that the Washington Post received 40 years ago today for its coverage of the Watergate scandal.
FJP: I like the 8-bit glory of it all. — Michael
If we’re a little bleary-eyed tomorrow, it’s because we’ve spent all night investigating Watergate.
If you hit “no”, you’re resigned to listening to the police scanner for the rest of your life.
This is not a ritual for me where you just come on camera and say you’re sorry and hope to move on. I’m truly sorry about what happened. I believe deeply in good journalism and fair journalism and I am determined to learn from this episode and minimize the chances of anything like this happening again.CNN “Reliable Sources” host Howard Kurtz • Apologizing, at extreme length, for his erroneous reporting about the Jason Collins story as well as his sloppy overall reporting in recent years. Kurtz, who left his job at The Daily Beast last week, said that his departure from the publication was amicable and mutual, and already in the works before the Collins situation broke. Kurtz, who also faced conflict-of-interest questions over his ties to a small-scale site called The Daily Download, spent a full fifteen minutes atoning for his journalistic sins this morning, according to Politico.
Typically on a big story with a lot of risk behind it, we tend to wait until there are as many as three different news organizations reporting it. In this case there were three reporting it, but we saw others saying that there were no arrests or that they had no knowledge of arrests. So there was enough conflict from other news organizations for us to wait just one more beat. At that point we made a very difficult and agonizing decision just to sit and watch. And for Breaking News that was a very difficult thing to do, and I have to give a big shout-out to our editors who made that decision under the pressure to go.Breaking News’ general manager Cory Bergman • Discussing how his team handled the mistaken reporting regarding the Boston bombing suspects — reporting that ensnared CNN and the Associated Press, among others. Describing the platform’s approach, he says, “With us it’s interesting — there’s pressure to be second.” The NBC-owned platform, which is on every major social network, recently launched native advertising in its mobile app.
Copyright 2009-2013 Ernie Smith • Ask us stuff! • E-mail us • Follow us on Twitter • Follow us on Facebook
kindofagiant:
Sure, let’s try a substantive critique. The woman on the left is talking to Nancy Grace, a major CNN Networks personality who once berated a woman on television just a few days before that woman committed suicide, then was forced to settle for $200,000 in a wrongful death suit. When asked if she felt sorry for what happened, she said of Melinda Duckett in the immediate wake of the news, “If anything, I would suggest that guilt made her commit suicide.” Despite this, Nancy Grace is still on the air seven years later, talking in the same parking lot as Ashleigh Banfield. If you had a job where you did that and had to settle over it, would you still be working there? Probably not. But Nancy Grace is still at HLN.
The problem with CNN is that they have lowered their standards significantly, thinking that a broad but unbiased approach will bring the ratings. (It hasn’t.) Moments like Howard Kurtz’s 15-minute mea culpa are so rare on the network these days that you have to cherish them as signs that a network that’s lost its way might find it again. It’s like they realized recently, hey, Twitter is faster than we are, and so maybe this breaking news thing isn’t quite as fun anymore. Let’s do another “lighter side of life” segment.
They don’t have a rudder anymore. For the first twenty years of their existence, they had a pretty good one: Covering news, being the first news outlet to report on a story, keeping the level of the conversation high. But sometime between 9/11 and now, something changed. They got sloppy. They blew two major stories within a year—first healthcare, then the Boston marathon suspect. For some reason, Fox News scared them a lot. And instead of deciding their mission was hard-hitting journalism, they decided they were more comfortable with “background visuals for airport terminals.” Their rudder could be BBC, American version. But instead it’s, The Weather Channel, but for news.
You may think that this is a stupid thing to make fun of, funny ha ha, oh they’re on split screens like this. But really, the reason this is coming up is because CNN has become so much about the spectacle—holograms, giant touch screens, never-ending cruise line sagas—that you can’t take them seriously, and moments like this bus moving by two anchors at the same time overshadow the news actually happening.
I snarked that this was “CNN’s problems, in animated GIF form,” and I stand by it. They were already seen as lightweight, but then they hired the fluffmeister himself. They’re so concerned with looking like a serious news outlet that they’d rather look the part by having split screens than actually focus on the kind of in-depth stuff that Al Jazeera English actually does. Do you think AJE’s producers are like “we must get our reporter on a split screen to make it look like we’re on the scene”? No. They’re at the big kids’ table, reporting the news.
That’s why this GIF represents CNN’s problems. Because while they were busy putting Nancy Grace on a split screen, they could have gotten someone other than Nancy Grace to talk about this story.