Category: Industry commentary

Why we do this, part #134

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who says there’s never been a famine in a country with a free press, describes the connections between a free press and a just society. The first – and perhaps the most elementary – connection concerns…

Required reading for newsies

William Greider on our inability to remember. The war in Iraq is different from Vietnam in one fundamental respect: A substantial portion of Americans (and others around the world) were in the streets protesting this venture before the shooting started.…

Newsies in the movies

Here’s a fun exercise for a Friday: Favorite movie scenes featuring journalists. The scene where the reporters all run into phonebooths and knock the phonebooths over has got to be up there (is that from “Airplane” or one of the…

JD on copyright run amok

Herr Lasica profiles a filmmaker who got stamped under Disney’s heel. The closing quote: “This all comes down to whether you believe culture should be bottom up or a top-down approach imposed by the corporations,” Horowitz says. “As it is…

Why Dan Neil won a Pulitzer

He’s the L.A. Times car critic who must’ve caused furrowing of brows among the Capital-J Journalism crowd. Who wants to encourage people to think cars might, you know, occupy a place in our culture or anything? I got around to…

Quote of the day

“If bankers gave themselves prizes (‘the most reckless Third-World loan of the year’) with the same abandon as journalists, you may be sure that the public ridicule would soon force them to conduct the proceedings in secret.” — Alexander Cockburn…