http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2009/02/27/come-back-tell-you-all-i-shall-tell-you-all-chicag Comments On: Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all: The Chicago Journalism Town Hall by Whet Moser en-us Copyright 2009 Chicago Reader. All rights reserved. This RSS file is offered to individuals, Chicago Reader readers, and non-commercial organizations only. Any commercial websites wishing to use this RSS file, please contact Chicago Reader. wil@desert.net (Chicago Reader Webmaster) Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:01 -0600 Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:30:00 -0600 Foundation http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Posted by Ethan Stanislawski]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2009 08:34:26 -0500 Chicago Reader not that easy to learn. (I'm still learning). Besides that, the world is full of technocrats and academics who specialize in microslivers of knowledge. I don't think the world needs more of that -- it needs more generalists who think in big pictures, who take information from many sources, translate if necessary, synthesize and present in a way that's actually useful to people. Or more fruitful cooperation between these two types. * It's bizarre, and kind of troubling, that the availability and visibility of information is now ruled by something called "Google," with its secret algorithms. * Interesting stuff from Trow about television. * Re: Daniel Larison: I'm actually an American Conservative reader, but somehow missed that Larison is from the Chi. * Information is going through the same technological shakeup that music has been going through since the '80s, when MIDI and then digital recording meant that everyone could become a "musician" in his bedroom. Suddenly, everyone was a musician. And a lot of that product sucked. But this also opened the doors to lots of innovation. * I agree that journalism needs more heart. Heart driving intellect, to be sure -- the engine that drives you to care enough to go get the facts, get them right, and present them appropriately. Sensationalism gets a bad rap. It's bad when it's about the latest celebutard getting a hangnail. But when it's warranted, I'd like to see more sensationalism. For example, we are getting hit up by Wall Street firms for some sensational amounts of money. What's a "trillion"? That's pretty fucking sensational. I want sensational coverage of that. Like you said, it's all about scale. For quite some time, too, I have thought that media covering wars should either show the whole war -- meaning brains and guts splattered all over the place -- or just shut up and run Pentagon press releases. We don't cover wars, we pretend to cover them.
Posted by david harrell]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2009 12:49:56 -0500 Chicago Reader Posted by ryanwc]]> Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:27:51 -0500 Chicago Reader Posted by Steve Rhodes]]> Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:13:37 -0500 Chicago Reader Posted by Sarah Toulouse]]> Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:33:37 -0500 Chicago Reader Posted by DeBartolo]]> Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:53:19 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Cronin]]> Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:35:27 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Daniel Honigman]]> Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:45:28 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Rohan Jayasekera]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 11:58:24 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Imran Anwar]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:38:01 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Brad Flora]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:31:49 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Orly Halpern]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:27:58 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Marty]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:44:32 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Jay Rosen]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:33:30 -0600 Chicago Reader attraction, a matter of desire. I refer to the attraction of being in the middle between warring extremes. Too many mainstream journalists think they are telling the truth when they do that, when actually they are blowing away the whole idea of truth. But this is going to be a very hard one to correct. From its origins in big market risk aversion (let's try not to piss anyone off) the "extremists on both sides" way of thinking has come to be seen as a virtue and even as a bizarre kind of guarantor of truthtelling authority. This would have been bad even before the Web, blogging and the onset of "we fact check your ass." Now it's deadly. Very often the symmetry production itself involves distortions or some dubious "false equivalence," which immediately alert bloggers to howl. Wait long enough and the howling will generate enough opposing reactions that a second round of fake symmetry can be won from the first. "Bloggers on the left and the right objected to our story on...." That's when you know it's really bad. Even a journalist as solid and informed as Andrew Revkin can be sucked in by this attraction, as with this story on global warming. He probably thinks it adds a little to his truthtelling credentials: "Hey, I dissed the big fella on climate change, Al Gore! How agenda-less am I? More agendaless than you are, sucka!" It's the appeal of narrative innocence we have to account for, not just an aversion to taking sides. Not only does Brad Delong know a lot as an economics professor at Berkeley and former Treasure Department official, but he isn't attracted at all to sentences like, "hyperbole is an ever-present temptation on all sides of the debate." Revkin and his editors are. They love those sentences. As with Jill Abramson. "I see a backwards vote of confidence in The Times’s reporting, given that every identifiable faction in this fractured collision of peoples and injustices believes so firmly that we are taking a side — someone else’s." That's the guarantor I was talking about. There's a thrill to this "vote of confidence" when there should be a groan. At some level they love the vote of confidence more than they love truthelling. They don't know they do, and they would obect wildly to my statement. They would say I don't know anything about how newsrooms work. But I've been tracking this one. If it's a choice between remaining non-aligned (not siding with the hippies, let's say) and telling the truth as best as one can--and there are such situations--even the top people in mainstream journalism will make the wrong choice. Risk aversion, which is real enough, doesn't explain it. There's something stronger and stranger involved.
Posted by Jay Rosen]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:22:56 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Mike Fourcher]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:05:30 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Kiyoshi Martinez]]> Sat, 28 Feb 2009 10:14:10 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by JoeBu]]> Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:42:18 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Levi Stahl]]> Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:58:12 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Andrew Huff]]> Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:29:21 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by whet]]> Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:29:11 -0600 Chicago Reader Posted by Andrew Huff]]> Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:00:29 -0600 Chicago Reader