Feral Beast: Casualwear for the urban Feral Beast?

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Casualwear for the urban Feral Beast?

Always-alert Asia correspondent Vaudine England emailed The Beast from Hong Kong with sartorial tips: "I was delighted to find an ad for a t-shirt displaying "feral beast" in large letters behind what might be a garden fence. This 100 percent cotton t-shirt will only be available in large sizes "to accommodate those media egos". The shirt, designed by the hack John Curran for sveltecelt and modelled above by his cover-bitch Labrador, was featured last autumn on the Axe-Grinder Blog, posted on the UK Press Gazette website. The same blog was offering feral beast masks to journos in a competition last summer.

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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.