“ Our journalists need to get something straight, or at least learn to fake an understanding of the law. Candidates can now benefit from unlimited donations to their cause as long as they don’t formally coordinate with the Super PACs that collect the money. Asking them to coordinate is silly, trivial, idle, mindless, naive and stupid… a vacation from the facts in front of us.”
— Jay Rosen on David Gregory
tofias dot net
log | a bucket full of thoughts
Posts tagged with journalism
“ [P]olitical journalism—unlike war reporting—long ago stopped being about what is true or important. Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, reporters began covering politics like sports and entertainment.”
— George Packer
The Future of News Is...
Good and bad predictions and interesting ideas from Craig Newmark, Glenn Beck. Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, Mike McCue (Flipboard), and a bunch more folks too.
A Business Insider feature on news media with links to related stories (via Dan Frommer).
“ Making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.”
— Paul Krugman (via Marco)
Bare-Knuckles Pricing
David Warsh argues that the New York Times is overpriced.
“ News has to be subsidized, and it has to be cheap, and it has to be free.”
— Clay Shirky
Not So Suicidal
Matt Yglesias on the cohesion of congressional Republicans on the Ryan budget plan and Medicare reform:
One of the unfortunate things about the political media’s commitment to “balanced” coverage is that not only do reporters generally feel impelled to always act as if the two parties are normatively symmetrical there also seems to be a reluctance to explore the systematic asymmetries between the parties in an even merely descriptive sense. As a result, we know less about the differences in these disciplinary dynamics, their sources, and their implications than we really ought to.
This is a nice point.
But I don’t think his specific question of why the GOP would take such a knowingly unpopular position is any great mystery. Pundits are trying to make forecasts for this Medicare vote by using the Democrats experience with ACA as an analogy (on this see Seth Masket and Steven Greene who calculate that a vote cast for the healthcare reform cost Democrats 6-8 points in the 2010 midterm elections). But that’s not a great comparison because ACA passed. Republicans knew that the Ryan plan would not pass. And it is going to be really hard to whip up foment in the electorate over a discordant vote on a bill that died in the Senate.
You don’t get loss aversion without some tangible change.
“ What are people wanting to go back to? ….Of course social media isn’t going to be THE answer. It’s just one of those things that you can use to help make more people come to your website, which, of course, helps the bottom line. It can also help you brand your product and thus bring more people to your product, whatever it may be. So let’s all just once and for all stop discussing whether or not it’s worth using social media. Because it is.”
— Andy Boyle
Version Control and the New York Times
Henry Farrell makes the case that the New York Times’ articles need change lists.
114
How many went right to Instapaper and remain unread?
