Feral Beast: Canuck tweets while Bangkok burns

Friday, May 21, 2010

Canuck tweets while Bangkok burns

/> The photo above courtesy of Kees

Is this a good idea? Tweeting while Bangkok burns... Mark MacKinnon, an earnest Canadian journalist from the Globe & Mail, breezed in from Beijing and might have been more alert to the nuances of the situation in Thailand if he weren't thumbing his blackberry every few minutes. The chaos unfolded right outside the Foreign Press Association (at Chidlom station on the fabled skytrain) and more and more, one of Asia's great capitals looks ripe for revolution, especially if the revered King expires. Still, in retrospect it's instructive to see the chaos unfold in real time, and the rumors affirmed or supplanted. MacKinnon even photo-tweets during an ambulance ride!

(hat tip to Kees for final photo; middle one tweeted by Mark MacKinnon.

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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.