Category / Read / Commentary

Thought for the week: “Perhaps a nation can function without newspapers. But it would be a confederacy of dunces.”

Reporters were interrupted in their sipping of wine and eating of canapés at Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s s annual summer garden party June 26, by an email from Harper’s director of communications, Sandra Buckler, announcing her resignation. The pros were appropriately restrained in their reports: Andrew Mayeda reported for CanWest that Buckler’s resignation ends “a…

Apropos of nothing — or just because it’s Monday: Journalist suspected of murdering women in Macedonia Story of a journalist Stripping His Way to a Ph.D. Reporter breaks back after riding inside inflatable ball

“Journalism is broken,” said a speaker at a lecture series put on by the U.K. Guardian. The series, which is partly available online, asked, “Is it?”

The explosion of news about deceased U.S. broadcaster Tim Russert (at one point in the week a Google news search returned some 10,000 hits) reminds me of how O.J. Simpson burst into the global public consciousness in 1994 via a live televised police chase of Simpson in his white Bronco. Simpson, I maintain, was previously…

“Why,” asks the Globe and Mail, “are newshounds around the world so enraptured by a grim West Coast story about human flotsam?” OK, it’s a rhetorical question — every reporter and reader knows it’s an engaging story; the fact that it’s engaging is why the Globe devotes yet more ink to a story about the…

The American National Council on Public Polls has a piece on its website that looks like a worthwhile read: 20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results. Hat tip to the U.S. discussion list,IRE-L, of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

A free paper published by former journalists at the Journal du Québec has survived (thrived?) for 15 months. The paper was started to protest against the tabloid’s plans to integrate and boost the workload of reporters, with multimedia job requirements. Hey, we CAN be independent! The original story by Agence France-Presse, in French, is here.…

From the BBC: A soaring glass and steel cone on top of BBC Broadcasting House in London, England, will shine a beam of light into the sky every night at 10 p.m., as a memorial to journalists and assistants killed on the job. The light sculpture, called Breathing, was created by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa…

“Copy editors are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance.” Nice. Most copy editors never see elegant sentences like this published under their own bylines. Copy editor Lawrence Downes represents his kind well, in an op-ed in the New York Times. Too bad he does…