There’s more to the story of sexual abuse by clerics than victims, abusers and self-protecting bureaucracies, writes Joyce Smith. Part of the challenge of reporting on religion is recognizing the spiritual element in the story and following the impact of events on relationships and faith.
An ITZ/Belden Interactive study of reader sign-up rates at 26 U.S. dailies that put their online versions behind a paywall found the average number of online subscribers amounted to just 2.4 per cent of print subscribers, Alan Mutter reports on his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.
Although the Internet has spawned a vast increase in news sources, almost all news is still gathered by traditional media, suggests a study by the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The study, which tracked how news was gathered and circulated through more than 53 news outlets during a week last year in Baltimore, discovered…
A Los Angeles Times column, “Freelance writing’s unfortunate new model,” warns that while everyone has been riveted on the loss of staff jobs, freelancing has been taking a quiet nosedive, compounding the loss of journalism. Excerpt from the piece by James Rainey: “Freelance writing fees — beginning with the Internet but extending to newspapers and…
Montreal’s Le Devoir reached the century mark today. CBC reported that the French-language daily was founded in 1910 under the promise, paraphrased, to “support honest people and denounce the villains.” As Metro Montreal noted, quoting founder Henri Bourassa, it also promised depth and intelligence: “Sans doute nous ne donnerons pas à nos lecteurs le genre…
Finally, Canada’s largest newspaper chain is officially for sale. Senior lenders to struggling Canwest Global Communications Corp, made up of a consortium of Canadian banks, made a bid. It follows a voluntary court filing for protection from creditors, which covers Canwest Publishing, Canwest Books and Canwest Canada Inc. — all of Canwest’s newspapers, digital media,…
*Vidéastes Leslie Doumrec et Émilie Fondaneche.
Say farewell to the TV generation. The Internet is our new addiction. In a recent survey by market researcher Synovate, 88 per cent of Canadian respondents said they could not live without Internet access or would miss it a lot, compared to just 70 per cent who felt the same about television. What would Neil Postman say?
A study of Twitter usage by the top 100 U.S. newspapers found that while all hosted feeds, almost 40 per cent didn’t link to those feeds from their websites. The Bivings Group study also reported many newspaper tweeters did not make effective use of the social media application’s reply capabilities to interact with readers.
Hundreds of reporters have briefly embedded with Canadian forces in Afghanistan and, in most cases, returned to their regular beats at home. After the tragic death of Calgary health reporter Michelle Lang, former military journalist Bob Bergen questions whether this is the right approach to covering the armed forces at war.