Story Killers

 

Killing the journalist won’t kill the story. We are a network of journalists whose mission is to protect, pursue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder. It is the only existing program with this mission. Story Killers

si tratta di un sito molto interessante e inquietante che presenta le indagini di un centinaio di giornalisti provenienti da tutto il mondo sulla disinformazione  e l'uso che se ne fa in politica, finanza e altri settori. 

What we got wrong

Il Guardian festeggia i suoi 200 anni raccontando i suoi peggiori errori. "But the most noticeable missteps stem not from the news pages but from the editorial column. For it is here that readers find out what the paper thinks about the great issues of the day. And it is here that mistakes are inked most indelibly into history, whether they relate to suffrage, reform or, most notably in recent years, the debate over Brexit." Randeep Ramesh, Guardian

New York

I walked to Central Park. It had suddenly become warm and I was so jet lagged I thought I might faint. I found a place near the entrance to the park under a tree and collapsed on to the grass. Lying on my back, looking up at the big American sky between the leaves, I saw something hanging from the branches. It was a key. A key on a red ribbon that someone had hung on a branch and forgotten to take with them. I wondered if they had deliberately left it behind because they were never going to return to wherever the key belonged. Or perhaps they wanted to close a door on a chapter of their life and leaving the key behind was a gesture of this desire. There is always something secret and mysterious about keys. They are the instrument to enter and exit, open and close, lock and unlock various desirable and undesirable domains. Deborah Levy sulle case che ha sognato e sogna, sempre sul Guardian

Come parlare di cose difficili, tipo la morte, i soldi e il sesso: ce lo spiega Anna Sale in questo podcast del New York Times

 

Academic Freedom

In the 21st century, however, academic freedom’s most determined adversaries are inside rather than outside academia. A growing army on college campuses would like to restrict the scope of intellectual debate by subjecting academic inquiry to political litmus tests. Over the 20th century, American universities’ students and faculty pushed to make them havens for heretics, dissenters, iconoclasts, and nonconformists. In the wake of their success, many scholars now demand that campuses adhere to their own orthodoxies. Until recently I would have said that many students and faculty want the range of intellectual debate on a college campus to be narrower than the offerings in the New York Times’s op-ed pages. But now, of course, the college graduates hired by the Times are scrubbing its op-ed pages of heresies as well. Keith E. Whittingtoh, Claremont Review of Books

Finalmente cominciano a levarsi voci contro la "cancel culture" nel mondo accademico americano.

Anche molto interessante l'articolo di Mattia Ferraresi sulla campagna giornalistica contro Astra Zeneca: On March 12, 2021, La Repubblica, Italy’s most widely circulated and trusted newspaper, placed a chilling headline on its front page: “AstraZeneca, Fear across Europe.” [...] 

The scare was amplified by the media, and La Repubblica’s headline stood out. Its language suggested to readers how they should feel, instead of describing the facts upon which readers should base their feelings. NiemanReports

Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times?

Participating in Facebook News doesn’t appear to deliver many new readers to outlets; the feature is very difficult to find, and it is not integrated into individuals’ newsfeeds. What Facebook News does deliver—though to only a handful of high-profile news organizations of its choosing—is serious amounts of cash. The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year, and a Facebook spokesperson told me that number is “not too far off at all.” But in at least one instance, the numbers are evidently much larger. In an interview last month, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year—“very much so.” [...]

And Facebook and Google money is, admittedly, all over journalism already. Virtually every major media nonprofit receives direct or indirect funding from Silicon Valley, including this one. When the Monthly gets grants from do-good organizations like NewsMatch, some of the funds originate with Facebook. [...]

But these three points are beyond dispute. [...]

First, the deals are a serious breach of traditional ethics. [...]

Second, these deals help Facebook maintain the public appearance of legitimacy. [...]

Finally, these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help. Dan Froomkin, Washington Monthly

Come altre volte, le notizie sul giornalismo le prendo dall'interessantissima newsletter del Post, Charlie.

Altre notizie della settimana:

The vital role of war, Linda Colley,The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World (Profile), recensito da Miles Taylor, The Guardian

Sempre sul Guardian i finalisti del Booker Prize. 

 

 

Inside America’s Most Interesting Magazine

Now, Harper’s is the weirdest place to work in New York media and yet an unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out in part because of its wide range, in style and substance, amid a homogenizing media landscape. Ben Smith, New York Times

Nella foto: John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s.

 

Ho trovato questo interessante articolo, sull'estremamente interessante newsletter "Charlie" del Post.

Fantastic Journalism

Su The Atlantic è uscito un elenco dei 100 migliori articoli di fantastic journalism dello scorso anno. Tipo "Thanksgiving in Mongolia" di Ariel Levy: "People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself. I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself." theatlantic.

The Invention of News

Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (Yale University Press). "Newspapers themselves were once new media. Yet as Andrew Pettegree explains in an elegantly written and beautifully constructed account, it took several centuries before they became the dominant medium for news. This was not solely because producing up-to-date news for a large readership over a wide area became practicable and economic only with the steam press, the railway and the telegraph. Equally important was the idea that the world is in constant movement and one needs to be updated on its condition hourly (or even monthly) – a concept quite alien to the medieval world and probably also to most people in the early modern era. ..." Peter Wilby, newstatesman.

The Duke in His Domain

"The Duke in His Domain" è il titolo del profilo di Marlon Brando scritto da Truman Capote per il New Yorker e uscito sulla rivista il 9 novembre del 1957. 
"What transpired between Brando and Capote over the course of their hours alone together in that hotel room has long been a subject of historical curiosity. Just how did Capote get the taciturn Brando to talk? Was Brando (as he later claimed) tricked by the devious Capote? Or was the star a willing participant in the unmaking of his own image? Was there (as Capote dubiously claimed) some sort of sexual history between the two? What is clear is that more than a half-century after it appeared, "The Duke in His Domain" remains the yardstick by which celebrity profiles are measured—an early harbinger of the New Journalism that would come into full flower in the 1960s. With its profusion of intimate details, confessional tone, and novelistic observation of Brando’s character, the story marked a clear evolution of celebrity journalism and heralded the arrival of the invasive, full-immersion pop culture of today", dice Douglas McCollam in "In Cold Type", uscito sul numero di novembre-dicembre della Columbia Journalism Review (v. il post di ieri). 
Per leggere "The Duke in His Domain", cliccare qui.

In Cold Type

Una lezione di giornalismo: Douglas McCollam parla di come Truman Capote sia riuscito a intervistare Marlon Brando, in Giappone, sul set di Sayonara, nel lontano 1957, e di come il profilo della star - apparso sul New Yorker del 9 novembre 1957 - abbia cambiato il giornalismo.

"Two nights after arriving in Japan, Capote showed up at Brando’s door wearing a tan cardigan and carrying a bottle of vodka for what in Brando’s estimation was to be a quick dinner and an early night (indeed, Brando instructed his assistant to call in an hour so he’d have an excuse to get rid of Capote). Instead, when Capote left Brando’s room six hours later, he was convinced that he had the raw material for a groundbreaking profile of the reclusive star".

sorpresa, sorpresa... Anche Marella Agnelli era un'amica e confidente di Truman Capote. "One of his female confidants, Marella Agnelli, would later recall how Capote observed people, probing for their soft spots. “I found myself telling him things I never dreamed of telling him”. columbiajournalismreview.

He Said, She Said

Simply put, false balance is the journalistic practice of giving equal weight to both sides of a story, regardless of an established truth on one side. And many people are fed up with it. They don’t want to hear lies or half-truths given credence on one side, and shot down on the other. They want some real answers. Margaret Sullivan sul nyt.

Chi legge che cosa negli USA

La mappa dei giornali  letti negli Stati Uniti, aggiornata al gennaio scorso. flowingdata.

Jill Abramson

At nine o’clock on the morning of September 6th, Jill Abramson was riding the subway uptown from her Tribeca loft. It was her first day as executive editor of the New York Times, and also the first time in the paper's hundred and sixty years that a woman's name would appear at the top of the masthead. Abramson described herself as "excited," because of the history she was about to make, and "a little nervous," because she knew that many in the newsroom feared her.

Abramson, who is fifty-seven, wore a white dress and a black cardigan with white flowers and red trim. Her usually pale complexion glowed from summer sun, but there were deep, dark lines under her eyes. ... e segue un interessante profilo della nuova direttrice del NYT e dei suoi piani di rinnovamento del giornale. Ken Auletta sul newyorker.

Com'era il New York Times Magazine 100 anni fa?

sundaymagazine.