Journalists in Gaza staged a boycott of news about Israelis in Gaza on June 16. The reason was sound: journalists want to hold Israel to account for its apparent slaughter of Reuters camerman Fadel Shana this spring. But boycotting the reporting of news strikes me as bizarre, at least. Perhaps someone can convince me that…
Montreal radio station 940 AM will lay off 18 employees and switch to an oldies/greatest hits format from an news-talk format, reports CBC, because “owner Corus Entertainment announced the station’s news format was not profitable enough to stay on air.” A response from the Canadian Media Guild demands that the CRTC “ensure that local news…
American journalist Tim Russert has died at age 58. The Washington anchor of the U.S. NBC network and host of “Meet the Press” was “a towering figure in American journalism,” said the New York Times, who “revolutionized Sunday morning television and infused journalism with his passion for politics,” said the Washington Post. The NBC report…
Coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid has renewed debate in the U.S. about how journalists deal with women. A piece in the New York Times looks at the issue, and how most media organizations contend their coverage was fair. An excerpt from the New York Times piece: Angered by what they consider sexist news coverage…
Globe and Mail columnist Gary Mason has some strong words for the Conservatives who claim reporter Tom Zytaruk “doctored” a tape to make prime minister Stephen Harper look bad, in the Chuck Cadman/insurance scandal. The Conservatives have gone to court to try and force the Liberals to stop making political hay of the issue by…
“Whatever happened to Iraq,” an analysis in the American Journalism Review, examines what it calls a “dramatic dropoff” in media coverage of the Iraq war. Among the main reasons cited in the piece: the enormous danger for journalists on the ground in Iraq; war fatigue; efforts to “sanitize” the war by the Bush administration; plunging…
Reports the Globe and Mail: “The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. is behind an unprecedented flood of complaints to Canada’s information watchdog.“The latest annual report from Information Commissioner Robert Marleau says his office received 536 complaints about the public broadcaster in 2007-2008, more than any other department or agency of government.“And more than 90 per cent of…
A tidbit in a Guardian blog ponders a new trend — APIs — in big media. In the next few weeks, notes blogger Jemima Kiss, The New York Times API “will make the whole website “programmable, organisable”, adding layer of mash-ups to NYTimes content,” while Telegraph.co.uk and guardian.co.uk are also in the game. “There’s an…
Here’s a good-looking headline we don’t see every day: “Foreign journalists free to report on China quake”
In the category of scary corporate big brotherism: “Germany was engulfed in a national furor over threats to privacy on Monday, after an admission by Deutsche Telekom that it had surreptitiously tracked thousands of phone calls to identify the source of leaks to the news media about its internal affairs,” reported the New York Times.