Journalism

Forgeries or Not Forgeries

This entry was posted in bush Election 2004 Journalism on by

I haven’t said much about the Killian memos and won’t be saying much more. Primarily because I don’t think it makes much difference whether the memos are real or fake.
The only reason that even mention them now is this Matthew Yglesias post:

Assuming they are forgeries, we can conclude the following:
  • George W. Bush pulled strings to avoid combat service in Vietnam by entering the Texas Air National Guard, failed to complete his service in a rigorous manner and has lied about it repeatedly for years.

  • CBS News, like the United States of America, is run by some kind of idiots.

  • Other Texans, less fortunate than Dubya, died so that he could avoid service in a war he supported.
If they are real, remove the middle item regarding CBS News. The rest remain the same.
Update (9/14): Drudge reports that Killian’s secretary says:
I typed memos that had this information in them, but I did not type these memos.
If this holds up, then see all three points above.

Truth in Advertising?

This entry was posted in bush Journalism Marketing on by

The Economist sent and advertising insert in the paper this morning. One of those accept 4 free trial issues without obligation offerings. Ok, I thought, I’ll look through the rest of the 12 page flier.
Well, on page 2 is their big don’t you want to be like them pitch with a large headline reading: Leaders read it. Why? Hmmm, good question. Well it was a good question until I noticed the picture of the most prominent of the three displayed leaders. You guessed it: w.
You probably know that w is not a noted reader. Why does The Economist want us to believe he actually reads their magazine or are they simply conflating receiving the magazine (pg 3 of add) with actually reading the magazine?
Perhaps Jane Galt or someone else associated with the magazine could explain?

Page Layout and Blurb Structure

This entry was posted in Blogging Journalism on by

Here is some new research on page layout and blurb impact on news pages that might be helpful to some of you:

News websites have been with us for about a decade, and editors and designers still struggle with many unanswered questions: Is homepage layout effective? … What effect do blurbs on the homepage have compared to headlines? … When is multimedia appropriate? … Are ads placed where they will be seen by the audience?
Many blog entries are what the article describes as blurbs and there is some good stuff on catching the readers attention.
Via Dan Gillmor.

Olympic Bitching

This entry was posted in Journalism Sports Television on by

Well, the Olympics have barely started and world class complainers are already at it.
I admit to near hating the coverage of the past two Olympics. But early on I have no complaints at all about this one.
First, if I had not been at work this morning I could have watched the opening ceremonies live on CBUT. Since I wasn’t I watched large chunks on NBC/CBUT tonight. The two networks were enough out of synch with each other that if we missed something on CBUT we could switch over to NBC a bit later and see it. I thought the ceremonies were fine. Excellent music, fine artistry, great graphics and lots of athletes. It was just fine.
Second, I’m now watching live rowing. Hey, I’ve been watching live rowing for 1.5 hours now. This is more live rowing then, I think, have been shown in the last two Olympics combined. The announcers have been ok, if a bit slow keeping up with the action on the course. Oh, there has not been a single long human interest story yet.
If to today turns out to be exemplary of the rest of the coverage I’m going to be very unhappy about being on a traveling vacation over the next week instead glued to the TV. I will, though, enjoy the vacation.
PS: Yea, I agree with Tim Duncan’s assessment of the NBC announcers. But, hey, we just went to other coverage when they got too misdirected.

All the News that is Fit to Google

This entry was posted in Google Information Journalism on by

It’s not clear why Vin Cosbie is surprised about this:

But when I analyzed its choices of news sources, I was surprised by the results. Although Google spiders more than 7,000 news sources, only about a dozen sources account for the vast majority of stories displayed on Google News day to day, and two of those predominant sources are owned and operated by the U.S. and Chinese governments.
A commentor hits main point number 1: real estate. There is only so much space on a web page.
A second reason is that not all 7000 sources are going to be interested in every story and many that might be will not write about it as they have made other choices.
I suspect that these dozen or so sources are, in fact, the sources that rank highest in Google’s ranking methodology. This may be a self reinforcing result since most of us probably read and, if applicable, link only the first story or two thus strengthening rank for those sources. On a statistically meaningless note I have many times gone deeper into the source material and quickly tired of the repetitive and derivative articles.
Vin can do this as well. By doing just a bit more work he can click on Google New’s always available “and xxx related” link and find the dozens, hundreds or thousands of other sources that he was originally looking for.
Via E-Media Tidbits.