Feral Beast: The Shape of World News

Thursday, April 3, 2008

The Shape of World News

Here's brilliant graphic concept by Nicolas Kayser-Bril and Gilles Bruno , first featured on the French website L'observatoire des Medias. It's worth clicking the link to compare dailies and websites to contrast the scope of their reporting throughout a full year. The maps swell and contort according to the attention given each country, as shown in the samples below of The Australian and London's the Daily Mail. (Hat tip to Online Journalism Blog for the link.) It would be enlightening to also have a map that shows the attrition of foreign news bureaus.

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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.