Blogging versus reporting

Two recent reports from the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent Riazat Butt show the way mainstream journalists are using bogs and traditional reports to cover their beat. Butt filed two reports of the Vatican communication’s director Federico Lombardi’s defense of recent Vatican press gaffes. What is interesting is that her blog report and her news item [...]

Next Gen Evangelicals

A surprisingly detailed and measured look at the changes in the evangelical landscape from gay magazine The Advocate raises some of the same points covered in the Newsweek article I wrote about a few days ago. It notes that young evangelicals are more likely to be concerned about the environment and more likely to believe [...]

The death of Christian America?

Amidst the proliferation of religion stories to coincide with Easter, the Newsweek cover story is a fantastic piece that has depth and currency. Written by the magazine’s editor, Jon Meacham, it is beautifully researched, engagingly written and strongly argued. It draws out a number of different points of view and possibilities around the theme of [...]

The final edition in Denver

The Rocky Mountain News, has become a regular example in my lectures to young journalists because of their commitment to great story telling, creative multimedia approaches and pulitizer prize winning features. Unfortunately they are about to become an example of a completely different kind: of the difficulties of sustaining a profitable model of journalism in [...]

Charlie Rose Interview with Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer talks about Christopher McCandless and what drew him to the story of the young man who went “into the wild”. He says he felt a visceral tingle when he first read reports of the hunters who had found the then unidentified body of the young adventurer.

Billy tells nothing

Pastor in Chief from Time’s Nancy Gibbs and Michel Duffy has a perfect anecdotal opening:
You have to climb a steep and narrow road, past the moonshiners’ shacks and dense rhododendrons and through the iron gates to get to the house on the mountaintop that Ruth Graham built after her husband Billy became too famous to [...]

Why do men kill their wives? – The Boston Globe

Why do men kill their wives? from the Boston Globe provides a great example of an effective anecdotal lead:
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, LISA HARTWICK WAS RIDING IN AN elevator in Boston when she overheard a conversation between two men. One of the men was going through a divorce, and he was venting to his [...]

Fearsome foodie

Shelley Gare’s Weekend Austraian Magazine cover story on Melbourne Chef d’jour Shannon Bennett isn’t a ground breaking piece of literary journalism but it is a very good example of a lively, meticulously researched and well structured profile that also tells a wider story.Gare inserts a bit too much of herself into the feature for my [...]

But that’s Crazy Talk

Sharon Weinberger’s extraordinary feature for the Washington Post Magazine about “TIs” – people who belive they are “Targeted Individuals” of government mind control experiments – is a fine example of suspending judgement and allowing a sympathetic portrait to emerge from an unusal story. She does not avoid the humour in the story but she never [...]

Grizzley attack

Thomas Curwen’s narrative about Johan Otter’s encounter with a grizzley bear is one of those features that grabs you and wont let you go – just like the grizzley in attack mode:
JOHAN looked up. Jenna was running toward him. She had yelled something, he wasn’t sure what. Then he saw it. The open mouth, the [...]

Images of death

The Saddam hanging videos have raised key questions about the changing power of circulated images. The brutality of the incident is emphasised in the dirty grain and jerky focus of the mobile phone images. the release of the second video apparently posted on a pro-baathist news site and apparently showing the ugly state of Saddam’s [...]

At Reuters, a New Book and a Lost Job – New York Times

New York Times reports that Joe Maguire, one of two editors in charge of markets coverage at Reuters, has apparently been fired because his new book on right wing commentator Anne Coulter: Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter. A clear case where a commitment to objectivity principles quash argued critique.

On Wednesday, Mr. Maguire [...]

Reviews in on Woodward

Editor and Publisher summarises the none to glowing early reviews of Bob Woodward’s Deep Throat book, The Secret Man:

One of the leading political writers of today, Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times, declares: “If Bob Woodward were in journalism school, his professor might have handed back his new book, ‘The Secret Man,’ as [...]

More Maps

Thanks to Matt at Kairosnews for pointing to this set of alternative maps of the US elections which extends the idea of the purple map that I posted yesterday.
Barry Ritholtz has posted a series of election maps and graphics on his blogs.
The most disturbing one is the comparison of the old free states versus slave [...]

Purple Hearts

US Graphic designer Jeff Culver has come up with a far more informative electoral map than those published by mainstream media.
It is an interesting example of how the graphic devices and rhetorical frames that we use actually construct very different narratives. While the election maps which show the blue and red states (say this example [...]