Twitter hates me. The Des Moines Register fired me. Here’s what really happened.
Essentially the story of a journalist hung out to dry by their publisher. Shameful behaviour altogether. #link
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Tag: journalism
Essentially the story of a journalist hung out to dry by their publisher. Shameful behaviour altogether. #link
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Some interesting tips, here. #link
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The magazine has long been criticised for othering, among other things, so for some this might be too little, too late. But it’s remarkable to see this kind of mea culpa from such an institution. #link
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Which is weird, as there’s an awful lot of good journalism being done about wrestling. Mind you, it’s not really being done by the likes of Dave Meltzer. There’s another question beyond this piece: about wrestling dirtsheets as a branch of entertainment journalism, not sports, and their closer relation to the kind of access and relationships between writers and PR in music and film. But I’d say the same about wrestling as I’d say about issues of potential compromise and conflict of interest in mainstream entertainment: ‘access journalism’ only gets you so far. Look how much it’s ruined political journalism in the US, after all. #link
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That Quincy interview (which everyone shared two months ago) is something else, but it’s lacking without this revealing conversation on how it came to be. #link
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The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that Facebook is a destructive, eroding force for banal evil in the world. The negatives outweigh the positives to an alarming degree. #link
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On a writer who understood wrestling as something greater than a mere ‘fake sport’. #link
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The ‘pivot to video’ is just a shiny new distraction from the real problem of advertisers’ quest for a holy grail metric that doesn’t exist. Also, the ‘music business’ is bullshit. #link
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It’s a profile of one class in one school in the US, but it’s not hard to universalise. Media literacy should be on every school curriculum. #link
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And by extension, this article is a tertiary source. But it’s still a revelatory insight into a particular brand of American feature writing. And it reminds me that I’ve still yet to see Page One, which alas is no longer on Netflix. #link
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Part investigative journalism, part musing on our cultural propensity to idolise inspiring figures: it’s simply great writing. #link
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Sigh. ‘Pivoting’ is great for start-ups and VCs, who must believe it’s a virtue to be so nimble. It’s not so good for their employees or contractors, those who supply the necessary labour, who can’t possibly be expected to follow suit. And it’s all in the service of an ad market that doesn’t have a metric for (and therefore, doesn’t understand) the way advertising works now. [c/o Kottke.org] #link
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There’s no good reason why TV news producers can’t make better use of the web and social media as channels. They’re brands people can and do trust, but their absence from Facebook and the like only leaves a void to be filled by the fakes. #link
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It’s something we’re still getting to grips with here, interpreting tragedy through an outmoded prism of what it means to be Irish, and particularly an Irish man: parishioner, sportsman, ‘pillar of the community’. We don’t much like self-reflection here; it’s reveals the lie of our theme-park culture. #link
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Accusation-driven reporting is typical tabloid journalism, though even tabloids often get to the truth beyond the sensationalist headlines and opening grafs. This shit’s just ethically dubious clickbait, the kind of stuff they used to call ‘yellow journalism’. #link
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Naivety plus a propensity to compartmentalise the world into easily classifiable categories (intersectionality does not equal mutability, ding ding) is a dangerous equation. Let me put it another way: the media is not the monolith some perceive it to be. You want to be the change you want to see? You can do it through existing channels too, not solely via your own — indeed, the latter is arguably best avoided, because you’re probably blind to your own biases. #link
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A podcast from NPR about going deep into news stories one might otherwise breeze over on a given site or in a given paper. Doesn't look like there's been anything new since June but hopefully it's just been on a summer pause. #link
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Ugh. It's all I can say. #link
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It all boils down to this, from the final paragraph: "King’s editors had a responsibility to ensure that his accurate sourcing was reproduced when published, no matter the vagaries of their CMS. (King, too, should probably have been reading his articles once they were published.)" #link
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Like anything else in media, infoviz must be subject to scrutiny. And the more sophisticated, the more it needs a closer look, 'cause everyone knows the trick about bar charts with a fudged x-axis, right? #link
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