Feral Beast: Extra, extra - old media keeps reporter on for 49 consecutive years

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Extra, extra - old media keeps reporter on for 49 consecutive years

Hard-boiled reporters still exist. There's another legendary newspaper hack named Pyle, not Ernie but Richard, who was a mainstay of the Associated Press and is due to retire at age 75 before the ultimate deadline. Half a century of service, minus a year and four days! It's worth reading Dana Kennedy's Q/A with this veteran reporter, over on the blog-heavy Huffington Post. Irascible, gruff newsmen like him are getting scarce. The guy doesn't tweet, apparently

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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.