CJR’s langauge corner on the proper use of well. The superstition about “well” seems more widespread than common sense might suggest. Why? A craving for absolutes, perhaps, leading to misguided pedantry. It is well to resist such temptations. Another way…
Month: October 2003
SacBee shoutout
Nat Henthoff says the Sacramento Bee deserves a Pulitzer for its coverage of the Patriot Act. Among the specific illuminations of how government databases are being filled with the names of Americans unaware they have landed in converging surveillance systems,…
Ahmad Shawkat, former newsie
Iraq’s no place to go around writing stories people don’t like. Sometimes they put a bullet in you. Shawkat ignored letters warning him to close the paper after he published articles criticizing radical Islamists. On Tuesday morning, he paid the…
Heisel posting again
Chris Heisel, who started his new job as an online editor/producer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last month, has started updating his blog again. Whenever I have html design riddles, I go to his page first and look at his source…
New stuff at the Hammock
Jeff Houck has some interesting new stuff, including a report from a conference where they said journalists show post-traumatic stress symptoms similar to those experienced by cops and firefighters. See, that means we’re heroes too, right?
Sound familiar?
Tim Porter on newsroom culture and the paucity of training we receive: The culture in most American newsrooms is toxic, dominated by a defensive hierarchy of middle managers who are not rewarded for risk-taking and sustained by systems of reflexive…
Count your blessings dept.
When you think you’ve got it bad, imagine yourself on assignment to Liberia. Tech writer David Carr is over there, reporting on how U.N. peacekeepers use technology in the midst of pervasive ruin. He’s got a journal of his travels…
War: who decides the winner
From a WashPost Op-Ed piece, if you missed it the other day: It’s war because our undefeated enemies say it is and behave accordingly. In that stubborn resistance lies a fundamental truth that seems too often to have eluded American…
‘Q&As are more stenography than journalism’
Blanp and company muse on the question-and-answer format, which seems to be infecting a lot more of our pages these days.
My kinda last request
Snopes.com reports on an obit in the New Orleans Times-Picayune requesting that memorial gifts for the deceased “be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George Bush from office.”