Posts tagged with ‘journalism’

Writers and video producers live in dread of the wandering eye. Audio producers live for it. That’s what makes us, in our secret hearts, troublemakers. We want you to lose sight of everything in front of your face: to stare through that dish in your hand, ignore your children, drop into a glazed-over trance of our making. Maybe don’t drive off the road, but please do miss a few exits or get stuck in your car. Good audio should be dangerous that way.
Julia Barton on Nieman Storyboard (via mialobel)

This is the kind of radio I want to make.

theatlantic: The Day Yahoo Decided I Liked Reading About Child Murder On February 8, 2012, I was on Yahoo’s homepage when a headline caught my eye: “Mo. teen gets life with possible parole in killing.” Curious, I clicked to see what atrocity had transpired in the state where I live. Alyssa Bustamante, a teenager from Jefferson City, had strangled and stabbed her nine-year-old neighbor for the sheer thrill of it, later describing the event in her diary as an “ahmazing” experience. Horrified, I closed the page. Like many whose homepage defaults to Yahoo, this quick scan of a story was a rote action, information via procrastination, almost subconsciously performed every morning before I move on to other things. In this case, the story was so awful that I wanted to get away. Except, it turned out, I couldn’t. For the next month, I woke up to a barrage of horrifying stories that seemed to signal an epidemic of child torture in America. “3-year-old recovering after swallowing 37 powerful magnets,” Yahoo solemnly informed me on March 5; “Police: Alaska girl locked in frigid bedroom dies” on March 6. Occasionally the child in question survived their ordeal (“7-year-old boy survives brush with tornado in North Carolina”, March 4) but more often than not they were the adversary (“Boy, 9, charged in shooting of third-grade classmate”, February 23; “11-year-old California girl dies after fight with classmate”, February 26; “Texas boy, 12, accused of brandishing loaded gun”, February 27; “10-year-old girl’s death in fight with student ruled homicide”, February 27).   I rarely clicked on any of these headlines, and at first, I didn’t notice the way they had crept into my Yahoo homepage — and into my mind — until their pervasiveness became impossible to ignore. That’s when I realized: Yahoo had decided I liked child murder. Read more. Be careful what you search for.

theatlantic:

The Day Yahoo Decided I Liked Reading About Child Murder

On February 8, 2012, I was on Yahoo’s homepage when a headline caught my eye: “Mo. teen gets life with possible parole in killing.” Curious, I clicked to see what atrocity had transpired in the state where I live. Alyssa Bustamante, a teenager from Jefferson City, had strangled and stabbed her nine-year-old neighbor for the sheer thrill of it, later describing the event in her diary as an “ahmazing” experience. Horrified, I closed the page. Like many whose homepage defaults to Yahoo, this quick scan of a story was a rote action, information via procrastination, almost subconsciously performed every morning before I move on to other things. In this case, the story was so awful that I wanted to get away. Except, it turned out, I couldn’t.

For the next month, I woke up to a barrage of horrifying stories that seemed to signal an epidemic of child torture in America. “3-year-old recovering after swallowing 37 powerful magnets,” Yahoo solemnly informed me on March 5; “Police: Alaska girl locked in frigid bedroom dies” on March 6. Occasionally the child in question survived their ordeal (“7-year-old boy survives brush with tornado in North Carolina”, March 4) but more often than not they were the adversary (“Boy, 9, charged in shooting of third-grade classmate”, February 23; “11-year-old California girl dies after fight with classmate”, February 26; “Texas boy, 12, accused of brandishing loaded gun”, February 27; “10-year-old girl’s death in fight with student ruled homicide”, February 27).  

I rarely clicked on any of these headlines, and at first, I didn’t notice the way they had crept into my Yahoo homepage — and into my mind — until their pervasiveness became impossible to ignore.

That’s when I realized: Yahoo had decided I liked child murder.

Read more.

Be careful what you search for.

drewvigal:

Adding context to content.

dreamlectures:

Knight Fellowships Talks - Jigar Mehta (by KnightFellowships)

18 Days in Egypt is a crowdsourced, interactive documentary project launched by 2011 Knight Fellow Jigar Mehta. In this short talk, he explains what motivated him to set out to help Egyptians capture and preserve the media they had created during the revolution.

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Very cool.

NPR: How many people would bother to impersonate a reporter? Enough, apparently, to cause some government officials to do preliminary background checks on people to whom they grant interviews.

newsweek:

A Strange Animal: The U.S. troops are leaving, but the journalists are staying in Iraq, working under deadlines and death threats. In a short documentary special for Newsweek & The Daily Beast, filmmaker Richard Pendry reveals the new techniques — more John LeCarre than J-school — reporters have devised to get the story in Iraq. Fascinating viewing for anyone interested in the intersection of war, conflict, and journalism.