I’ve been updating a newsroom policy guide for a project some of my students will be working on, with a particular section on objectivity and impartiality. As this has coincided with the debate on fact-checking stirred by the New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane, I thought I would reproduce the guidelines here, and invite comments on whether you think it hits
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In the first of three extracts from the 3rd edition of Magazine Editing, published by Routledge, I talk about some basic considerations in drawing up social media policies. If you are aware of any particularly good or bad examples of social media policies in the magazine industry, I’d love to know. Social media policies A policy need not be particularly restrictive
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UPDATE: Readers of this blog can now get a 20% discount off the book by using the code ME1211 when ordering on the Routledge site. Magazine Editing is one of those books that I’ve used for years in my teaching. Unlike most books in the field, it has a healthy focus on the less glamorous aspects of running magazines, such
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If you read the literature on journalism’s professional ideology – or just follow any argument about journalists-versus-the-rest-of-the-world – you’ll notice particular themes recurring. Like any profession, journalism separates itself from other fields of work through articulating how it is different. Reading Mark Deuze’s book Media Work recently I was struck by how a similar, parallel, ideology is increasingly articulated by bloggers.
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This is the fourth part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three here. Human capital So here’s person number 4: Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist. Fifty years ago he used the phrase ‘human capital’ to refer to the economic value that companies
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The following is the first part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. The total runs to 3,000 words so I’ve split it and adapted it for online reading. The myth of journalism and the telegraph Samuel Morse was a portrait painter. And he invented the telegraph. The telegraph is probably one of the most
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The following is cross-posted from a guest post I wrote for Wannabe Hacks. Objectivity is one of the key pillars of journalistic identity: it is one of the ways in which we identify ourselves as a profession. But for the past decade it has been subject to increasing criticism from those (and I include myself here) who suggest that sustaining
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There’s a fascinating study on newspaper bias by University of Chicago professors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro which identifies the political bias of particular newspapers based on the frequency with which certain phrases appear. The professors then correlate that placement with the political leanings of the newspaper’s own markets, and find “That the most important variable is the political orientation
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Much has been said about the Washington Post’s now-infamous incident with issuing restrictive social-media guidelines after Managing Editor Raju Narisetti expressed his not-so-subtle views on war spending and public-official term limits on his Twitter page. Narisetti’s own first reaction to the policy was another tweet: “For flagbearers of free speech, some newsroom execs have the weirdest double standards when it
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