PressEthic

While changes in the media are seriously affecting newspapers on the East Coast, changes in the media are also seriously affecting media industries on the West Coast, more specifically, Hollywood.

The Internet beats newspapers hands down the day of elections.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert deemed "America's Anchors" by Rolling Stone.

The biggest lies from political camps, according to the fact checkers.

Not only has the media been saturated by nasty political advertisements and coverage of alleged political scandals in recent weeks, but the proliferation of blogging and the increased importance of the internet in general have had an enormous impact on this year's midterm elections. Case in point: Wikipedia.

One of my college professors once remarked that in a world where the pace is faster and technology rules, a so-called “third place”—that communal haven between work and home—has disappeared from our daily lives. While the town tavern used to play a crucial role in the exchange of opinions, the corner bar of the 21st century usually remains a somber place until it fills up on the weekends. Rather than being the everyday norm, places where everyone knows your name have become charming novelties of an era gone by.

The third place has, arguably, shifted into the cyberspace where faces are unknown and the population seemingly infinite. Political chatter that was previously confined to coffee shops and bars now takes place in an intangible medium where the narcissist in all of us has a chance to speak to a wide audience. We may physically have isolated ourselves in our move from bar counters to keyboards, but the real opportunity to affect the world beyond our communities makes us feel all the more powerful.

In yet another example of the merging of online and print media, the New York Times reported today that Google is partnering with 50 major US newspapers to sell ads that will appear in the print editions of these papers.

The former grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan Samuel H. Bowers died Sunday of a heart attack while serving a life sentence for the 1966 assassination of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. He was convicted in 1998 for a crime committed in 1966 which means he only spent 8 years in prison- hardly justified for what he did. The article on CNN.com as I know is supposed to deliver the hard facts but I think it is pretty relevant to state early on in the article the fact that it took so long for Bowers to even be convicted. In reading the article I was angry because as a journalist delivering hard news our opinions just do not matter.

A Fox News correspondent volunteers to undergo waterboarding and pronounces it an "efficient" torture method. Time for a paradigm shift?

In response to sagging newspaper sales and online competition, Gannet Co. Inc. has decided to change the way it reports news. This change, already implemented at other major news outlets throughout the world, may just save the industry.

Darfur. Usually followed by a noun such as 'conflict' or 'genocide,' or sometimes preceded by the clause 'ethnic cleansing,' I hesitate to use any of them. I am not sure if there are adjectives or nouns adequate to describe how blood clots in the dust, how many hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in just this one area within just a few years, or what it is like, daily, to live in the squalor for the thousands more who are trying to leave death behind. Technology brings the message home.

Newspapers and dailies that serve an ethnic minority may prove to be the bastions of paper circulation, although many also have an online presence. All paper-based media is currently threatened by spiraling circulation numbers and decreased newsstand sales, however, there are populations who turn more resolutely toward a press that reflects a linguistic and cultural affinity with their readership.

The New York Sun reported today that a Judge Claude Hilton, a Federal judge in Virginia, ordered the New York Times to reveal confidential sources related to a series of articles printed in 2001 about the anthrax scare.

In a recently published article, Fastcompany.com looks at a local journalist that is addressing the popular question, “what will print media do with dwindling subscription numbers?”

Is something a conflict of interest if inclusion is relevant to the article? I recently interviewed a marathon runner whose girlfriend happened to be a freelance journalist for the very paper I pitched the story to.