NewsTrust - Most Recent Stories

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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The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Jul. 26 (Opinion) - In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.

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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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Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - What is the actual ideology of our political press? There are two camps on this question: one is huge and includes almost everyone who has declared a position. The other is tiny; it includes almost no one. I’m in the tiny camp, not completely alone but— well, there aren’t too many of us. (And if you’re one, raise a hand in the comments.)

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What CNN Should Do With Itself in Prime-Time

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Mar. 31 (Advocacy) - A media beat reporter asked me if I had any advice for CNN about what to do in prime-time. Just so happens I do. Ditch the View from Nowhere but don't go aping your rivals. Here's my alt line-up for CNN from 7 to 11 pm.

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The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Feb. 21 (Editorial) - This sounds like politics the way our journalists narrate it, but as Packer notes, “A war or an economic collapse has a reality apart from perceptions, which imposes a pressure on reporters to find it. But for some reason, American political coverage is exempt.” Exactly. This was the exemption Barstow was calling on when he wrote. “It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.” Somehow the reality that this narrative exists as a binding force within the Tea Party movement is more reportable than the fact that the movement’s binding force is a fake crisis, a delusion shared. I leave you with a question: how the hell could this happen?

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He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Apr. 13 (Opinion) - Any good blogger, competing journalist or alert press critic can spot and publicize false balance and the lame acceptance of fact-free spin. Do users really want to be left helpless in sorting out who's faking it more? The he said, she said form says they do, but I say decline has set in.

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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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Filter the Best Stuff to the Front Page

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jay Rosen - Jun. 16 (News Analysis) - Sites like NewsTrust take it for granted that expansion of the media space is a good thing. But filtering and forwarding systems must keep pace. The better we are at that--finding the good stuff, forwarding it to eager users--the easier it is to relax and accept that anyone can be a producer, or that good contributions can come from anywhere. [Disclosure: This article is about NewsTrust and its recent partnership with Huffington Post's OffTheBus project, which the author is associated with]

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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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Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 10:54:49 -0700

Press Think - By Jay Rosen - Jun. 04 (News Analysis) - I hope the San Francisco Chronicle keeps Neil Henry's essay--Google Owes Big Journalism Big Time--free and clear of any pay walls. Link rot must not be allowed to set in, for this is a document. Henry teaches journalism at UC Berkeley, after a distinguished career at the Washington Post. He has a new book out, American Carnival ("Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media.") According to this account, Henry almost became dean at the Berkeley J-School. Neil Henry has a grievance: I see a world where corporations such as Google and Yahoo continue to enrich themselves with little returning to journalistic enterprises, all this ultimately at the expense of legions of professional reporters across America, now out of work because their employers in "old" media could not afford to pay them. And for that grievance there is to be redress: It stands to reason that Google and corporations like it, who indirectly benefit so enormously from the expensive labor of journalists, should begin to take on greater civic responsibility for journalism's plight. Fund our journalism schools. Our professional associations. Maybe our newspapers. We're on life support because of you, and others like you. So... support! He suggested that the Society of Professional Journalists, keepers of this code, get Google money. (Same society gave a First Amendment award to Judy Miller.) Romenesko did his part, running superb replies from Douglas McLennan, editor of ArtsJournal.com and Matthew R. Baise, online editor of the Baltimore Sun.

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