Walter Cronkite is widely regarded as an icon -- and, to many aspiring journalists, a role model. He and his coverage of the Vietnam War are often referred to as a highpoint in journalism even today. Jonah Goldberg of the Los Angeles Times has a vastly different opinion. In today's column, he writes...
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I asked Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, whether his paper should have started Wikileaks. I wondered whether the Guardian was looking at WIkileaks the way it looked at HuffPo when it started (that is, ‘darn, we should have thought of that, so we will’ … and it started CommentIsFree). Is Wikileaks a tool...
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Is no secret safe?
That’s the moral to the Wikileaks war log story: you never know what might be leaked. Of course, that itself is nothing new: Whenever we reveal information to even one person, we risk it being spread. The ethic of confidentiality (and privacy) rests with the recipient of that information.
So what’s...
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I’ve been looking for a classic example of so-called, self-appointed “privacy advocates” gathered by the press going off the deep-end (if you have any, please send them to me).
And then this dropped in my lap: a reputed outcry by these putative privacy advocates against Wal-Mart putting RFID tags on pants.
What could possibly...
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If readers feel like online publications (or the online counterparts to print publications) are often poorly edited or have an unusually large number of typos, they aren't imagining things. In entering the digital age, copy-editing standards seem to have become more lenient. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal makes the case for why copy-editing might...
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One of my great joys researching Public Parts, my book about the benefits of publicness, is finding parallels between today and the early modern period of the 16th and 17th centuries (aka the renaissance) with the introduction of tools — the press, the stage, music, art, maps, markets — that enabled people to create...
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I just don’t understand Columbia University’s apparent obsession with handing over portions of the press to government subsidy, giving up on the free market. I haven’t given up on it. Have you?
The latest raised palm comes from Columbia President Lee Bollinger in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, of all places. This could send BBC-hater...
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Today Journal Register, a newspaper company, declared its freedom from old publishing methods and old journalistic methods. The company’s 18 dailies published today, July 4, using nothing but free, web-based tools. And they involved their communities in their journalism in new ways. They call this the Ben Franklin Project.Here’s their VP of content,...
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In the wake of Dave Weigel’s resignation from the Washington Post after a number of his emails were leaked to online news outlets, dozens of bloggers and journalists penned posts honoring and defending Weigel’s journalistic integrity. One such defense was written by Julian Sanchez for The Atlantic’s website and is notable not because it’s...
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The most dangerous defensive tactic parried by legacy news organizations today is their attempt to claim ownership of “hot news” and prevent others from repeating what they gather at their expense for as long as they determine that news is still hot. It is a threat to free speech and the First Amendment and...
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