Oops. AP publishes sketchy notes about pedophile celeb instead of article

Life is not going swimmingly for the director and persona-non-grata Roman Polanski.
To be first with the news requires a little oversight, and the Associated Press embarrassed itself when the initial notes between two wire reporters covering Roman Polanski's latest arrest in Switzerland were published instead of a more polished article. The mistake was rectified, but not before these speculative notes ran online and on the googlenews portal, due to aggregate 'bot feeds. It could have been worse, though. No egregious f-bombs were sent into cyberspace.
Click the BBC tech website for a matter-of-fact report. Would Reuters or AFP have gloated more ?

Newspaper runs apology for Palin headline

"A broad in Asia". Would you read bother to read that piece? A Fairbanks Alaska newspaper, which ran that headline over a short report about the ex-governor Sarah Palin's speaking jaunt to Honk Kong, had second thoughts about the misogynistic overtones of the word "broad". It was punning , not cunning. And not even current slang. See their apology here. Hat tip to Politics Daily for the link.

Controversial Covers

Back when people actually cared about the covers of magazines, a certain buzz arose when editors offended public decency and needed to be put a notorious cover under brown paper wraps because of complaints at the news stand or checkout counter.
Click here for a glimpse of the ten which raised the most eyebrows and lifted the profiles of the daring magazine issue.

Numbers Game - do the math, hacks!

The big brouhaha over the number of anti-Obama rally-goers in Washington on 9/12, with media estimates varying from "tens of thousands" up to "a couple million", is worth examining. Particularly because these days tweets can repeat and recycle erroneous estimates and the real number of aggrieved folks who attended these tea-parties gets lost in cyber-cobwebs of misinformation. The result is hysterical, not historical, statistics. Experienced reporters know that organizers tend to overestimate the turnout, while officials often underestimate crowds, at least at unticketed events.

Consider this Journalism 101 hint from the Slate website:

How do you measure a crowd?
Basic arithmetic. Estimates depend on three variables: the area of the available space, the proportion of the space that's occupied, and the crowd's density. While the first measurement is objective, and the second fairly easily determined with aerial photography, the third is a little trickier. It's customary to assume that in a very crowded place (like a commuter train during peak hours) people occupy 2.5 square feet, whereas in a looser gathering each person takes up more like 5 square feet.

For better accuracy, you also ought to consider how long the event lasted, because not every protestor stays for the duration. And a separate estimate for the security presence is helpful.
For example, at a Gay Pride march in Jerusalem in 2006, police outnumbered marchers almost two to one.

Moonbats and wingnuts exchanged vitriol and snark over the disparate numbers last weekend. Most amusing was blogger Nate Silver's assessment (picked up by the Columbia Journalism Review:

There is a big difference, obviously, between 70,000 and 2,000,000. That’s not a twofold or threefold exaggeration — it’s roughly a thirtyfold exaggeration.”
The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn’t “in error”, as Malkin gently puts it [in her update to her 9/12 tea party post]. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.

Well that last statement is also hyberbole, one assumes. To reach that figure, the male apparatus under discussion would measure 1.7 inches!

Murder of 2 Wire Reporters recounted

How the military targeted two Reuters reporters and killed them in Baghdad is outlined in a new book, according to today's Washington Post. The book presents

a graphic, second-by-second description of the U.S. military's 2007 killing of two Reuters journalists in Baghdad, an incident that the news organization says it cannot investigate fully because ...the Pentagon has withheld key records of the event.

Chilling stuff. The photo shows Reuters reporters following a strafing of them in Gaza by the Israeli Air Force three years ago. No deaths resulted, but there was little publicity over the outrage, which injured two journalists

Robohack's dilemma due to multi-tasking?

Colleagues are wondering about Stephen Farrell,pictured left in Jerusalem,sans beard and Pashto cap. The abducted NY Times reporter wwas recently freed by a controversial paratroopers' raid that left at least 4 dead, including his late right-hand man, Sultan Munadi.

Is the reason they "stayed too long" at the riverside because Farrell isn't really adept yet at working with a camera? That's a rookie's mistake and Farrell isn't a rookie--at least at being a war correspondent. But he is rather new to the all-in-one videographer-cum-investigative reporter schtick which the NY Times is promoting. Farrell underwent initial tech training in the summer, to prepare him for filing video and audio files to the At War Blog (notes from the front lines). Robohack has earned a reputation as a relentless Gearhead who can move quickly.

Although a veteran reporter, he's not like a TV news cameraman who's been doing it for years....it is likely that Steve is trying to get too much, and work like a print journalist to get more facts, despite all the extra attention that camera equipment
brings...

The art of being a good broadcast journalist is knowing how little you
actually need, ie when you have enough to wrap and get out of there... doing tv and radio together, even tho they are similar, slows you down considerably. Patrick Cockburn's wonderful war reporter's diary talks about his modus operandi in Baghdad, staying in places no more than 10 minutes, which won't work if you must get the pics and tape the interviews too.

Jon Swain, a notable Times of London correspondent, examines the incident too., as does ex-Observer editor Donald Trelford, who still is haunted by risktaking after one of his foreign correspondents got beheaded in Iraq. It's distressing to see that the Times has cropped the late fixer/interpreter, Sultan Munadi, completely out of the photo!

Pictures of war can carry more moral meaning than thousands of words

Pictures of war can carry more moral meaning than thousands of words | Ben Macintyre - Times Online

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Publishing the controversial photo of the dying Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard, aged 21, over the objections of his family drew widespread condemnaiton of the Associated Press as well as a tongue lashing from Alaska's ex-governor, Sarah Palin, on her Facebook page. OMG. The thoughtful article referenced above puts this photograph into perspective.