PressEthic

Is it too soon to joke about Hurrican Katrina

Isn't Jayson Blair supposed to be holed up in his mother's basement?

First Lady Laura Bush will appear in the show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The sequence was taped earlier this week, during Ms Bush’s visit to Mississippi. What should journalists think about that?

Students love it. Professors hate it. But is it libel?

With the near-ubiquity of the Internet, are libel laws unnecessary? Media pundits Jeff Jarvis and Susan Crawford think so. But wouldn't killing libel laws tacitly support irresponsible journalism?

I spent part of last week talking to military recruiters in Queens. The intention was to have them talk about the current state of recruiting.

Four of the guys I spoke with had come directly from Iraq into recruiting and what they wanted to talk about was media coverage of the war.

They're not happy.

In a nutshell, all we see is the bad stuff, they said. All we see are the bodies.

We don't see the hospitals and schools being built, we don't see the lights coming on for the first time in months, we see the bodies.

They all wanted the news to reflect more of their personal experiences. Understandable.

The AP just released a news service specifically tailored to the whims of the 18-34 year old demographic. Is this the future of journalism?

I always thought it was odd that public relations was taught in the journalism school at my university. Not that it’s an inherently bad profession. Some of my best friends are PR students and they’re good people - even though we always joke that one day we’ll despise each other for making the other’s job a lot harder.

But, in several vital ways, PR isn’t really journalism.

New developments show that reporters should be wary of perfect stories.

Blogs are future! Blogs will revolutionize the way we consume news! Blogs will make newspapers obsolete! The sky is falling! How am I going to get a job! Or not. Let's all log out of BlogSpot, catch out breath and look at the 'Blog Revolution' with a clear head -- at this point, they simply don't exist without traditional media.

A New York Times article shows a new type of blowback against the US Administration.

No need to buy the book. Just read the review.

The Guardian reports today that Arctic ice is melting at record levels, and global warming is out of control. According to the article, this month an extra 500,000 square miles of ice were melted, “an area twice the size of Texas.”

TV shows that become infomercials.... what else is next?

I don’t usually think of National Geographic as a news magazine, but I really liked reading their online news coverage of Hurricane Katrina.