Don't Quote Me On That

The Influencing Machine: A Brief Visual History of the Media

via Brain Pickings:

One of the coolest and most charming book releases of this year, The Influencing Machine is a graphic novel about the media, its history, and its many maladies.

Written by Brooke Gladstone, longtime host of NPR’s excellent On the Media, and illustrated by cartoonist Josh Neufeld, The Influencing Machine takes a refreshingly alternative approach to the age-old issue of why we disparage and distrust the news.

Gladstone (in the video above):

…what victims of the syndrome have lost: identity. They no longer know who they are. They have shattered themselves into fragments and projected the shameful bits onto the influencing machine. That is my metaphor for how we see the media. We feared the telegraph, the radio, the television, the computer. Heck, Socrates even disdained writing. But I believe the media are mirrors, a mess of mirrors. And what we fear is not the machine, but the reflection.

FJP: This just made my day! Wonderful, creative, exciting, intelligent, and so true. —Jihii

futurejournalismproject:

Alexa Kravitz, a j-school student at U Maryland, wrote this interesting piece debating whether or not having non-journalists host political talk shows is a problem. Here are some highlights we found thought-provoking:

Journalists: They are trained to minimize the impact of their bias.

Even though many of the cable political talkfests focus on opinion rather than reporting, Deggans says there’s value in having journalists at the helm. “I think if you are a trained journalist, part of that training involves being taught a process that will allow you to minimize the impact of your bias even if you are an opinion person,” he says. “When I make my arguments, I try to be fair to the other side and to present the information as accurately as I can, without leaving out information about the opposing argument.”

Non-Journalists: They offer expertise on specific topics from years of experience.

Jerome Groopman, for one, is a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and an author who doubles as a staff writer for The New Yorker. Although not inherently a journalist, his medical knowledge gives value to his contributions.

And well, journalists aren’t necessarily the best (or most dynamic) talk-show hosts.

Plus, a country that covets freedom of the press also doesn’t define journalist in a neat little box. NPR’s media correspondent, David Folkenflik comments:

Journalism is a profession, an avocation, in which nobody gets to license you; the government doesn’t get to say you get to be a journalist and you don’t, and that’s a good thing. That’s part of our tradition of freedom of the press and the openness of the field to those who seek it out.

So what’s the real problem with having non-journalists hosting political talk-shows? The fact the viewers don’t always realize these people aren’t journalists.

Broadcast Marvin Kalb weighs in:

Argument on cable TV is now the bread and butter of the media. You have someone from the left arguing with someone from the right, and everyone’s happy. But they are not in a classic sense reporting the news; they are moderating or even instigating an exchange of opinion about the issue at hand.

FJP: Agreed. We can’t assume that people know who is a journalist (or educated and adherent to media ethics) and who isn’t.

Baltimore Sun television critic David Zurawik says:

No, people don’t know that these are opinion shows during prime time, And one of the reasons they don’t is because cable executives are lying their butts off and putting out ads trying to present these people as journalists. There isn’t a clear line between the two.

It’s one of the things that helps confuse the public about what journalists do but, even worse, makes parts of the public think of journalists as frauds, phonies, biased, players in this sort of media game of cable TV news.

So good journalism can lose credibility too. Thoughts? —Jihii

futurejournalismproject:

shortformblog:

With these words, NPR commits itself as an organization to avoid the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth,” which as we know is not always evenly distributed among the sides in a public dispute.

Maintaining the “appearance of balance” isn’t good enough, NPR says. “If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side…” we have to say so. When we are spun, we don’t just report it. “We tell our audience…” This is spin!

shortformblog: Rosen took a particular liking to lines like these: “Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.” Read NPR’s ethics guidelines and consider it for yourself.

(Source: shortformblog)

npr:

keithwj:

New NPR leadership team! (Taken with Instagram at NPR Headquarters)

NPR Promotes Two Executives To Key Posts

futurejournalismproject:

Survey Says! #whyJournalism

A recent question in our inbox asked, “What is it about journalism that you love? Why did you become a journalist?”

I began replying, looked at what I was writing, decided it was pretty dull and cast my net on Twitter where I asked #whyJournalism and linked to a simple Google form for people to answer.

Above is a collection of some of the answers we received. Some interesting replies not shown here include people motivated by specific events. For example, NBC’s Craig Kanalley points to 9/11 and his inspiration about how the press covered it. He posted about it on his Tumblr. Jay Corcoran, a documentary film maker, writes:

Inspired? The AIDS epidemic. I spent years watching my young talented friends die, shrouded in secrecy and shame, from complications from AIDS. To deal with my sadness, confusion and rage, I picked up a camera and documented the death of my dear friend, Tom McBride. The result became my first documentary film, Life and Death on the A-List, and I have never looked back.

What I love? To have people share their thoughts, ideas and intimate feelings with me on camera, and then shaping what they said or did and hopefully make something that is useful to others. There is nothing that fills me with more satisfaction and gratitude.

Many point to journalism as a calling or a mission. For example, Kenneth Rapoza writes:

I became a journalist before I became a journalist. Late 90s. Unemployed. Father unemployed. Mother, low skill worker. I had to leave college. I became angry and frustrated and heard a lot of people talking about how life just wasn’t fair. I became curious, asking why is that? I developed a sense of injustice and empathy for the underdog, because the underdog, I felt, was me. Fast forward to a college degree and adult life. You become a journalist because you are a sympathetic ear. You want to know what makes things tick. You’re intellectually curious. Journalism, done well, reminds me that I am part of this world.

Rayyan Sabet-Parry, a multimedia journalist at North Wales Weekly News, echoes this somewhat when he writes that journalism holds “up a mirror to the beautiful and the corrupt. It promotes transparency, openness and justice! It can change the world!”

Some seem to simply like the creative company and the opportunity to constantly learn each day.

Mashable’s Todd Olmstead writes, “Creative people inspire me and I’ve always wanted to be around them and learn from them as much as possible. Being a journalist allows me to do that and allows me to always be exploring.”

CBC Radio’s Jennifer Chen says, “I feel it’s a privilege to learn every day and be able to pass on that knowledge to others.”

And Lam Thuy Vo sent in this video about the world that opened up to her through her journalism career.

And then, there are and were the few who were inspired or pushed into journalism by their significant others. FJP contributor Daedalus Howell writes about his college girlfriend making him answer an ad for a reporter gig while UK tech journalist Mary Branscombe had a tech journalist boyfriend and thought if he could do it, she could too.

As for me and what would have been a lonely, singular — and by comparison quite boring — response:

I wanted to travel. I wanted to ask questions. I wanted to discover. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.

And I wanted to somehow combine audio, video, images and text into compelling storytelling.

And what I love about journalism is that all of that’s possible.

If you’re interested in reading all responses, you can do so here.

Images: Selected answers (with some edited in length) to why people became journalists and what they love about it.

Select any to embiggen.

(Source: futurejournalismproject)

shortformblog:

imwithkanye:

‘Soup‘-er User, Anthony De Rosa, featured in Details:

“I think bloggers are tremendously important and are often vilified in an undeserved way. I think you lose credibility if people can’t rely on you for information. Mainstream media is not completely ready to embrace that other forms of media are doing real journalism. I don’t think the platforms you’re on or what company you are with matters—it really comes down to how much you care about trying to be accurate.”

It’s crazy to think about how one can build their profile with social media alone these days. But we have to dispute this whole talk of “magic bullets” here: Anthony is Anthony, and that’s a magic bullet all its own.