NewsTrust - For Review

Occupy PressThink: Tim Pool

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Press Think - By Jay Rosen, Alexis Madrigal - Nov. 21 (Opinion) - “Being a livestream he acts as ‘eyes and ears’ for the viewers. Literally. People will tell him to move the camera somewhere and he’ll do it. They’ll ask for interviews with someone, and Tim will go over and do so… The viewers will ask him questions and he won’t rest until he gets them their answers.” Recently, Alexis Madrigal, the technology editor of The Atlantic and pretty much the smartest young journalist ’round these parts, re-described occupy Wall Street as an API, or Application Programming Interface.

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"CNN Leaves it There" is Now Officially a Problem at CNN

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Jul. 03 (Opinion) - You can’t have a "he said, she said" brand and yet stand out as the only real news network. There are signs that the new boss at CNN understands this. Shocking developments in a story I have been following for a long time. It’s the CNN Leaves it There problem, which is illustrated to comic perfection in this Jon Stewart clip.

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Fixing The Ideology Problem in the Political Press

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Jun. 22 (Opinion) - Is there a distinction between journalism and ideological argument? Yes, there is. Or to put it another way: journalism is not just “politics by other means.” The simplest way to illustrate this is to picture a journalistic situation like a labor union newspaper, where the reporter and editors are likely to share with members and leaders a strong commitment to the labor movement and a general suspicion of its traditional adversaries— companies like Wal Mart, legislation like right-to-work laws, and politicians like Mitch McConnell. If they were in dramatic philosophical conflict with the union publishing the newspaper, they probably wouldn’t get the job. Shared ideology is a condition of employment. Once hired as journalists, however, their job—if they are real journalists—is to tell the members what is happening and cover the issues union people care about and ought to know about, regardless of whether the news so reported supports the arguments leadership is making at the time. If, say, Walmart, aware of its poor reputation, has recently shown some openness to union organizers or dealt fairly with them, a good union newspaper would report that (in proportion) even if it makes for some cognitive dissonance among the membership.

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Rosen's Flying Seminar In The Future of News

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Mar. 26 (Opinion) - The pace quickened after Clay Shirky's Thinking the Unthinkable. Here's my best-of from a month of deep think as people came to terms with the collapse of the newspaper model, and tried looking ahead. I know these twelve links work. I tested them on Twitter. As the crisis in newspaper journalism grinds on, people watching it are trying to explain how we got here, and what we’re losing as part of the newspaper economy crashes. Some are trying to imagine a new news system. I try to follow this action, and have been sending around the best of these pieces via my Twitter feed. It’s part of my experiment in mindcasting, which you can read about here. Lately, the pace has picked up. A trigger was the March 13 appearance of Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. That essay went viral; it now has a phenomenal 686 trackbacks, making it an instant classic in the online literature about the fate of the press. As good as Shirky’s piece is (very very good, I think) “Thinking the Unthinkable” is only a piece of the puzzle, and mostly backward-pointing. That’s why I’ve collected the following links. Together, they form a kind of flying seminar on the future of news, presented in real time. (They are all from the month of March 2009.) Read all twelve and you’ll be caught up on your newspaper big think. Here they are in the order I think you should read them. If you take the seminar, feel free to leave your impressions in the comments. The “flying” part is simple: go ahead, steal these links. Spread the seminar. Get your people up to speed.

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Just How Did John McCain Obtain What He Has in the Bank with the Press?

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Mar. 26 (Opinion) - When you're "waiting for him to stumble," and he doesn't after hours of questioning, then it's easier to forgive it when he does. Whereas a gaffe from a candidate who is always on message, and rarely available to reporters, is a chance for the press to pounce. As the Daily Howler noted in a post from 2000: "It's become a standard part of the tale: reporters get so much access to McCain, they simply run out of questions... Why shouldn't McCain get good coverage, scribes say, if he's willing to take all our queries?"

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Who's Ahead? No, Seriously...

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 07:15:06 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - Because they're handy, known to all, and they make almost any story more immediately writable, existing master narratives are hard to change. Even when they stop making a lot of sense culturally they may still make for consensus within an occupational culture, and thus prevail past their date of expiration. Carroll knows this: "It's not that the media are unaware of the inadequacies of horse-race coverage. That's a pretty common conversation in newsrooms." (True for more than 20 years.) "The question that has so far not been answered: If not that, then what?"

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