Feral Beast: Wikileaks filtering needed! Can't staunch em

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Wikileaks filtering needed! Can't staunch em

It's been Wikileaks frenzy all this week, and may well be all the way til Christmas, the way things are going. Some wag said Wikileaks had done to investigative journalism what Napster did to the music industry, but Times of London correspondent James Hider says that it shows we all have just become incredibly lazy, feasting off this giant beached whale. A quarter million uploaded State Department cables, whew! He quipped:

It's more like Napster hacked into the songbook of the world's most successful musicians, stole their music and now we're playing it, pretending it's ours.

Now that Amazon is not hosting anymore, try here, or search the websites of Der Spiegel, El Pais, or The Guardian.

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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.