Town Hall

Clark Hoyt, public editor of The New York Times, questions the transparency and fairness of the "Questions For" column in the Times magazine. His concerns shine a spotlight on the fuzzy standards that apply to the "Q&A" interview form that's a stock-in-trade for magazines, and it's not a long road from there to the question of how much latitude feature writers should have in mixing and matching quotes taken from longer and multiple interviews. It's probably less than surprising to any one who has dabbled with the Q&A form -- but probably surprising to most readers -- that Deborah Solomon's reliably entertaining, brisk and edgy 700-word offerings turn out to be, as Hoyt found: 
The Public Editor: Questions and Answers, in No Particular Order. The New York Times, October 14, 2007.



          

Get ready to hear what a US panel considers to be the most important and under-reported stories of the past year. The conference announcement states:

Project Censored holds its annual conference Oct 26 and 27, at Sonoma State University, California.  

Throughout the day on Saturday, October 27, panelists will present
and discuss some of the great investigative reports featured in the
Censored 2008 Top 25 under-covered stories of the year (see web site
for details). Project Censoreds popular Top 25 AWARDS CEREMONY will take place during a buffet-style luncheon on Saturday.

After the conference and the news release, there's usually some buzz about the top ten winners, at least in the alternative media.   

Reporters Without Borders and "Chinese Human Rights Defenders" says their new joint study "reveals how that country's government censors the Internet and how the Internet Information Administrative Bureau controls the leading news websites."

Reporters Without Borders calls China the world's biggest prison for journalists and cyber-dissident. Reporters Without Borders also has a petition, announced in 2001, to boycott the 2008 games in Beijing.)

Also this week, Bob Dietz of the Committee to Protect Journalists gave a speech in which he called on the Chinese government to release the 29 journalists now imprisoned in China and to begin dismantling the country’s vast censorship system. Dietz, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, urged China and the International Olympic Committee to meet the free-press promises made when the 2008 Games were awarded to Beijing. The Games are less than a year away. Here's a link to the speech, before the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Today's New York Times has a piece about how American broadcaster ABC is reshaping its news cast for the Internet. There are some differences, and some innovations. Excerpts:

Executives at the broadcast networks know they have opportunities online that they do not have on television — namely, to take chances by testing new forms of news delivery and new types of storytelling. They are also mindful that making their content relevant online is a good way to attract the younger audiences who are less likely to tune in to the evening news on television.

But ABC is the only major broadcast network that is using the staff of its evening newscast to produce a separate and distinct daily program for a Web audience. The 15-minute Webcast often features (Charles) Gibson in the anchor chair, but the similarities end there: the segments can run long, and they purposely look raw and personal, as if they were made for MTV rather than ABC.

Over the course of 20 months, the Webcast has evolved from a basic distillation of the day’s news into an original program that incorporates video blogs, first-person essays and interviews. It covers many of the same stories as its television sibling, but often in a different way: in one example, the day after President Bush announced gradual troop cuts in Iraq, Mr. Gibson was shown debriefing the network’s chief White House correspondent, Martha Raddatz, in the Webcast for a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds — an eternity on a half-hour television newscast.