Posts under ‘Media Criticism’

Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel, riffing off a New York Times story about literary bloggers that ran several weeks ago, goes berserk in “Not everybody’s a critic,” an LA Times op-ed piece that adds to the amazingly uninformed backlash against citizen media: Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism […]

Mark Glaser (MediaShift): Hyper-Local Citizen Media Sites Learn How to Serve Small Communities.

At NewAssignment.net, John McQuaid looks incredulously into the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s decision to turn top-notch columnist James Lileks into a street reporter. We need all the street reporting we can get, but this is nuts. Quote: The Star Tribune’s decision to eliminate James Lileks’s column and reassign him to a beat as a local reporter is […]

If you missed the live program, as I did, you can watch “Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War” — a brilliant documentary that everyone who cares about the future of American journalism should see. The report examines the press coverage in the lead-up to the war as evidence of a paradigm shift in the role […]

UPDATED Wired News calls Jason Calacanis “cowardly” for refusing to do an interview except by email. Pretty thin-skinned response to Jason’s fuller explanation of why that’s his policy. Updates: Wired’s Fred Vogelstein posts the entire email exchange he had with Jason on this topic. (Fred didn’t write the item to which I linked above.) Also, […]

Dave Winer has created a smart mockup of what he calls MSNBC-of-the-Future. The viewers can use checkboxes to say what they’re interested in seeing covered, and what they’re not interested in seeing covered. (Update: Dave gets lots of responses.) Audience feedback is a fine idea. Until then I use a different kind of checkbox: the […]

Slate’s Jack Shafer writes “In defense of the Anna Nicole Smith feeding frenzy“: Perhaps the Smith coverage doesn’t advance democracy in quite the same way gavel-to-gavel C-SPAN telecasts do. But the demand for natural disaster, tragedy, crime, murder coverage, and other “sensational” news has always ranked at the top of reader and viewer preferences. Giving […]

The SF Chronicle’s David Lazarus, normally a terrific columnist, digs a deeper hole today in a surprisingly un-sharp response to criticism of another recent column. Here’s what started the debate: “Pay-to-play is one way to help save newspapers.” Please read it and then come back. I was one of the critics of that column. In […]

Jon Garfunkel, in The Talking Points Meme, challenges newly conventional wisdom about bloggers’ roles in reporting the federal prosecutor mess — and notes some sloppy journalism (and blogosphere self-congratulation) as the scandal developed.

Consumer Reports is a publication that works hard to get things right. In its February issue it ran a dramatically wrong review of children’s car seats — flawed due to poor testing methods — and seriously jeopardized the trust it had won from its readers. But the organization’s response since then has been the finest […]