Category / Read / Commentary

Very cool video on communicating data, on visualizations and how to make data more accessible.

And are we surprised? A brief posting by British J-techer Roy Greenslade shows they think they’ll work in print but they don’t read it. So, where do they get their news? 

Rescuing the Chilean miners has become a “made for TV” event. For some reason, that just seems wrong to me.

Elsewhere on Town Hall is this post about Murray Brewster receiving the Ross munro Media Award, given out by the Conference of Defence Associations and Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute — and the inevitable “wow, there goes his ability to be objective” undercurrent. There’s one comment on it right now, a concise observation by…

Proving political comment need not be dry, the often hilarious Heather Mallick, in the Toronto Star, imagines how Toronto will feel about “waking up” with a suddenly, incredibly, apparently landslide-bound wild-card wild-man mayoral candidate in office: “…Voting for Ford is like sleeping with someone to get revenge on your spouse. It seems like a good…

Journalism.co.uk is publishing extracts from Afghanistan, War and the Media: Deadlines and Frontlines by Vaughan Smith. It’s an interesting read.

Joshua Benton of the Niemen Journalism Lab takes a peek at the words New York Times readers looked up most often this year and sees evidence of a time that’s dark and depressing, if not downright desultory. 

In Pakistan, a disaster of epic proportions has unfolded. The Times of India reports it will take years for the country to recover. Yet media coverage has been relatively muted. In a Global Journalist panel discussion, journalists working in the region agree coverage of the flood lacks urgency. To illustrate the situation closer to home,…

Harvey Cashore has a new book on the stands about the Airbus Affair. It’s called : The Truth Shows Up: A Reporter’s Fifteen-Year Odyssey Tracking Down the Truth About Mulroney, Schreiber and the Airbus Scandal. I have reviewed it in the July/August issue of the Literary Review of Canada. Here is a portion of that…

When Omar Khadr’s trial resumes, the issue of interrogation methods and torture techniques will once again be canvassed. Not well-known is the role played years ago by a Manitoba professor in the field of sensory deprivation, a technique that figures prominently in various manuals of interrogation.