Tag: JOURNALISM

By now, everybody knows that news is often broken on social networking sites like Twitter. But Mike Wise, a Washington Post columnist, tried to reinforce this point and teach careless journalists a lesson in an ethically irresponsible way: fabricating a story and posting it on his Twitter account. According to Fanhouse, Wise tweeted that Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be ...

As print journalism continues to die a slow death, consumers are flocking to the Internet to get their news. According to a recent study, though, people are still having a hard time trusting what they read online. A report from the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California finds that more than 75-percent of users rank the Internet as the most important source of ...

With the release of its Afghan War Diary, Wikileaks has just perpetrated what many are calling one of the largest leaks in military history. Comprising nearly 92,000 classified reports from Afghanistan, the Diary sheds new light on the challenges that the U.S. and coalition forces face on the ground, exposing the conflict as more dire than most may have imagined. The documents reveal, among other ...

As you may be aware, U.K.-based paper The Times recently put up a paywall for some of its online content, much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone who isn't named Rupert Murdoch. It should come as no surprise, then, that the paper's online readership has fallen off steeply since the wall was implemented. Still, the drop hasn't been as bad as some had anticipated. As Reuters reports, the ...

Reddit needs help. And it's asking its readers to provide it. In a recent, doleful blog post, programmer Mike Schiraldi implored the Reddit community to donate resources to the site in an effort to ease the workload of the four engineers who work around the clock "just to keep things going." Even as its traffic has ballooned to about 280 million page views per month, the site continues to function ...

We enjoy Nick Bilton as much as the next nerd, but why does the New York Times' tech columnist think that the main failure of digital magazines is their lack of social networking capabilities? Call us old fogeys, but back around the turn of the 19th century, when we were in our ramshackle grammar school barns on the outskirts of the Dust Bowl, the magazines we read didn't come with any sharing ...

Here's something you may not know about us editorial types. Remember those MLA books that your teachers made you purchase, and that inevitably wound up buried in the bottom of your locker? Well, such books, or style guides, are our building codes, if you will. Our unique problem, though, is that there is no single set of stylistic rules. Every publication has to decide for itself what is "correct" ...

Who is Horse-Boy? Internet mystery! You can debate your iamwhoiams all night, but Horse-Boy is a true conundrum. How do we know? Why, the BBC told us so. Britain's biggest news organization is baffled by Horse-Boy, a shadowy figure dressed in what could only be described as a perplexingly purple button-down shirt, who has a horse's head in his human head's place, and has made surprise ...

What began as an innocent bar-room hypothetical conversation soon became a reality -- and now, it's become the centerpiece of a brewing legal storm. Back in April, journalists Matthew Honan, Sarah Rich and Alexis Madrigal were drinking together at a San Francisco bar, when they suddenly found themselves wondering about whether it'd be possible to start a new magazine over the course of a ...

After covering everything from The Beatles' invasion of America to Lil' Wayne's rise to hip-hop royalty, Rolling Stone is now offering 43 years' worth of published material on its Web site -- for a price, of course. That's every issue ever printed of the legendary magazine at your fingertips, amounting to a digital roadmap of music's journey from the blues to rock-and-roll and beyond. This "All ...

Sometimes, as we report and thus publicize certain technological advancements, we tech writers feel like a reptile farmer who will one day be gobbled up by his prize gator. Thanks to Tokyo University's Intelligent Systems Informatics Lab (ISI) and its new robotic reporter, we've stumbled upon yet another one of those advancements. According to Singularity Hub, the mechano-journalist is able to ...

Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released a report outlining the organization's findings on news sites' pay walls and consumer behavior. Unsurprisingly, users prefer ad-financed free news to subscription or pay-per-article models. (After all, why pay if you don't have to?) But online ad revenues fell in 2009 -- for the first time since 2002. While the recession ...

A recent poll conducted by Harris Interactive, and cited by CNET, puts forth an ominous conclusion: a mere 23-percent of Web-surfing U.S. adults are willing to pay for their online news. As the death knell of print journalism reaches a deafening clamor, the statistic does not seem to bode well for news outlets -- or for those of us who like to stay informed. Fortunately, though, the inquiring ...

HuffPo reports that a man in St. Louis lost his job at a local school after posting a vulgar response to an online poll, when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last Friday asked readers the following question: "What's the craziest thing you've ever eaten?" Spotting a hanging curveball, the employee posted a one-word vulgarity, alluding to a certain female anatomical feature. Web site administrators ...

"The Death of Print." We remember a few years back when this phrase just signified some impending yet inconceivable nightmare, like Y2K or 2012. Now, of course, we live in a world where newspapers are shrinking from sight, and Roland Emmerich rakes in $65 million in one weekend by peddling more visions of the apocalypse. For those of us who have worked in print, or have colleagues who still do, ...