Human Rights Watch has released a new report, “China’s Forbidden Zones: Shutting the Media out of Tibet and Other ‘Sensitive’ Stories.” It said China’s government “continues to block and threaten foreign journalists despite repeated promises to lift media freedom restrictions ahead of the Olympic Games.” Excerpts from the press release: — Local Chinese-language media is…
Canadian Press reports that a former energy-industry lobbyist and Reform party activist is expected to become Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s new communications director. An excerpt of the CP story: “Highly placed sources tell The Canadian Press that (Kory) Teneycke will take over Monday from Sandra Buckler, who announced her resignation June 26.” Kory Teneycke seems…
A release from the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada said online ad revenues in Canada rose some 38 per cent, to more than $1.2 billion, between 2006 and 2007. A hopeful sign? Or such a drop in the bucket that it’s really water torture for journalists suffering the transition from print to web.
I feel a little bit mean posting this, but it’s such a perfect example of why journalists have lost respect with the public (in this case anyone with basic science knowledge) that I’m going to post it. I had an email from This magazine, asking for donations to fund This’s investigative journalism. An excerpt: Dear…
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…