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State of the craft
Journalism's mistakes, both serious and comical, have long been the focus of Craig Silverman's Recent the Error web site, which recently moved to the Romenesko-less Poynter Institute site. The Year in Media Errors and Corrections is his first big effort at his new home. It includes multiple Obama/Osama mixups, a rundown of year's plagiarists, and Salon's retraction of a 2005 article linking autism and vaccines, written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Read them and weep.
Journalists who survive layoffs tend to have a sanguine view of their situations and charity toward their employers, according to a Kansas journalism professor's survey noted on the new JimRomenesko.com blog. What's more, the older and more experienced the journalist, the greater the job satisfaction, Scott Reinardy's study said. The study “demonstrates that a large number have managed the stress of additional workloads and job responsibilities,” Reinardy wrote.
Dean Starkman argues in the Columbia Journalism Review that they are, and that crowd-sourcing will never be journalism's salvation. "No reader — no community of readers — knew more about Standard Oil than Ida Tarbell," Starkman writes. Also: "Seeing news as a commodity, and a near valueless one ... is a fundamental conceptual error." Some of his targets respond in the comments. More from Ken Doctor and Emily Bell.
An institution swept by scandal; an idol's reputation tarnished. It was a bad week for the Poynter Institute even if it was better than Penn State's. Star blogger Jim Romenesko got a public scolding from his boss and quit. Journalists arose in his defense. See the comments at Poynter. Also: Choire Sicha, David Carr, Poynter's responses, and the CJR editor who started it.
A class assignment gone wrong shows how the lines between journalism and public relations are blurred, Faye Flam writes on philly.com. The subject was a piece of pseudonews about a prehistoric creature resembling the fictional kraken. One student swallowed the story whole, leading Flam to lament that students "had no idea what a press release was or why it was different from a piece of writing done by a journalist." The professor comments.
"If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out," is a time-honored journalism maxim attributable to Chicago's late but legendary City News Bureau. Now it's one of "Eight simple rules for doing accurate journalism" from Craig Silverman of the Regret the Error blog. Another: "People will forget who got it first, but they remember who got it wrong." Also, from Steve Buttry, resources on accuracy and verification.
A long but worthwhile piece from Nieman Storyboard discusses how print narratives can be adapted to digital media. Pedro Monteiro suggests that writers can take their cues from television: "The main narrative of a story can be imagined as a string of scenes or episodes, like a TV series, where every added item is placed either at the beginning or the end of each episode. Every episode is structured so that it can be interrupted without breaking the narrative thread."
For Labor Day, the Nieman Journalism Lab has collected five varied takes on labor in the news business, starting with Jack Shafer's 2009 commentary on New York's 1962-63 newspaper strike. "When I consider the dead and dying newspapers of our time, and the post-newspaper world everybody is predicting, I can't help but think of the 114-day New York newspaper strike," Shafer wrote in Slate, which laid him off last month.
Just when England exploded in riots, a press release announced that scientists had discovered that concentrations of a certain neurotransmitter in the brain were related to a certain type of impulsive personality. That's when the trouble started, three Cardiff University psychologists write in the Guardian: "Let us be absolutely clear. Our research has almost nothing to say about rioting, and certainly can't be used to justify or excuse any type of behaviour."