Feral Beast: Dirty Digger: charm offensive or just plain offensive?

Saturday, August 4, 2007

Dirty Digger: charm offensive or just plain offensive?

The Bancroft family, who sold out Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, comes off as "dysfunctional as the Windors", writes Andrew Clark in the Guardian. Christopher Bancroft, the seller, is shown left.
Clark recounts a family farce almost as bad as Queen Elizabeth's annus horribilis, where one bitter relative shows up at the corporate meeting wearing a fishing cap emblazoned "Bite me."

The tycoon's brilliant business strategy just took a bit of time

"like a parent waiting for a baby to cry itself to sleep, Murdoch simply waited for the Bancrofts to exhaust themselves with in-fighting."

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Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.