Bush swore to do “everything in [his] power” to undo the damage wrought by Clinton’s two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
“You better believe we’re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,” said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. “Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?”
For this coming weekend’s NY Times Magazine, journalist Jose Antonio Vargas shares the story of his Life as an Undocumented Immigrant.
One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”
At the center of Simmons’s columns is not the increasingly unknowable athlete but the experience of the fan. His frame of reference is himself. He might not be able to tell you how a ballplayer felt performing a particular feat, but he can tell you how he felt watching it, what childhood memories it evoked, the scene from the movie “Point Break” it brought to mind, which one of his countless theories — newcomers to his column can consult a glossary on his home page — it vindicates.
An intimidated verbal threat of abuse in the workplace, by this thug. Never work in its satan life and this is why America is being destroyed. satan hates truth. satan is lies, hate and kills anyone that gets in its way to continue to lie to America & it’s idiot followers.
Thug…that’s some sort of code word, right? (via ★vuokko)
Breaking news — a bank holdup, a bus accident, the death of FDR — was quickly featured on the storefront (NB: usually in 140 characters or less). The storefront even offered streaming multimedia of a kind: telegraph dispatches of boxing matches and baseball games were shouted out play by play through a pair of loudspeakers.
Different “layouts” were used. During World War II an outsized map of Europe loomed over the storefront. For Red Sox World Series appearances, a scaffold was built. Sports desk hacks stood on it to chalk up the scores for bowler-hatted crowds numbering in the hundreds.
The signs even contained advertising. Here’s a photo of hundreds of people following the Red Sox in the 1912 World Series:
I’m neither Woodward nor Bernstein. This doesn’t mean I am a lousy journalist. This means that I am a certain kind of journalist. Basically, who I am as a journalist is who I am as a person. I am an observer. I am not a run-after-you-with-a-mic-in-your-face type of journalist. I am a get-out-of-the-way-and-the-story-will-present-itself-to-you type of journalist.
Designers are clearly thinking about the way two facing pages work together, whether the stories are related or not. This creates a flow that encourages reading without interruption.
i is composed like a beautiful piece of music. It has the discipline to play only the high notes that matter most. For example, it uses its full bleed capability sparingly. It creates strong impact, even with small things. The surprise of occasional whimsy makes the content inviting.
On NYTimes.com, you can view 20 articles each month at no charge (including slide shows, videos and other features). After 20 articles, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber, with full access to our site.
Cheapest plan is about $180/year and the most expensive is $420/yr. Access is free to paper subscribers.
If you haven’t already heard, Al-Jazeera had (and continues to have) some of the best coverage of earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Here’s a clip from earlier showing the tsunami rushing through a populated area.
Contrast with CNN, which was apparently home to giggles and Godzilla jokes as the quake was being reported. In the last three or four big events in the world, Al-Jazeera has had the best coverage…is this a changing of the guard?
We did find an example of an American in Japan that made a reference that it was like a “monster movie” (which is included below) but Church handles herself completely appropriately.
Update: Mediaite found a video of the CNN broadcast in question where the anchor chuckles at something her interviewee says. And her whole tone sounds a bit more chipper than it ought to. The sing-song anchor voice might suffice when reporting non-news filler but fails when watching video of dozens of homes (possibly with people in them!) being swept along by a massive wave of water. (via @somebadideas)
Alan Taylor, late of The Big Picture, is up and running at The Atlantic with his new site, In Focus.
In Focus is The Atlantic’s news photography blog. Several times a week, I’ll post entries featuring collections of images that tell a story. My goal is to use photography to do the kind of high-impact journalism readers have come to expect on other pages of this site. Along the way, I’ll cover a range of subjects, from breaking news and historical topics to culture high and low. Sometimes, I’ll just showcase amazing photography.
Writer Rob Neyer recently left ESPN for SB Nation and in his first column for SBN, he articulates the difference between “us” (professional journalists) and them (readers).
I’ve never thought of myself as a member of us rather than them.
I’ve got a lot of passions, and generally I won’t bore you with them. But the passion I indulge almost every day of my life is good writing. I crave it, and when I find it, I treasure it. I surround myself with books full of good writing, and I can’t get through the day without scribbling down a brilliant sentence or delightful word in a thick journal that’s always close at hand.
Also, it’s my business. I’m one of the lucky few who gets paid to indulge his first love.
Where the good writing comes from, though, is irrelevant. All that matters is the writing.
You’re paid to write? I know lots of professional writers who either never learned to write well, or have forgotten. You work for a famous website or newspaper? The big boys don’t have a monopoly on good writing, let alone facts.
Sportswriting, like writing about computing or video games, lends itself especially well to amateur participation because you’ve got, what, tens of millions of people who, even at an early age, are basically experts on football, baseball, basketball, hockey, etc. because they’ve grown up playing, watching, and analyzing those sports. The actual writing bit is harder but the passion is definitely there. (via hello typepad)
Two and a half years ago, Alan Taylor started The Big Picture at the Boston Globe; he basically ran the site in his spare work time as a web developer for the company. Now he’s moving on to The Atlantic, where he will edit a new photo site called In Focus.
I wanted the opportunity to do this — telling news photo stories — as a fulltime job, and the Atlantic has offered that to me, for which I am grateful. I also think the Atlantic is a better overall fit for the type of international, wide-ranging storytelling I’ve practiced over the years. The Globe has been a good home and a great platform for over 425 entries since 2008 and I am truly grateful, but I’ve chosen to move on now, and really hope you’ll come along and see what I’m up to. I feel very fortunate for what I’ve been able to accomplish to date, and for the opportunity given to me now. I really can’t believe this is going to be my fulltime gig!
Smart move by The Atlantic, which is increasingly looking like one of the media properties that may make a smooth-ish transistion from print to online/app media. As for The Globe, well, I don’t think they quite knew what they had there. Eight million page views per month out of nothing with a less-than-maximal effort…that’s the kind of thing you want to encourage if you’re in the media business.
Last week, Bill Simmons accidentally tweeted about a possible trade that would send American footballer Randy Moss from the Patriots to the Vikings and got the entire sports world whipped up into a frenzy. His explanation of what actually happened provides an interesting glimpse into how sports media sausage is made.
The first thing you need to know: I don’t like breaking stories or the pressure that accompanies it. Sweating out those last few minutes before the moment of truth. Hoping you’re right even though you’re thinking, “I know I’m right. I have to be right. This is right. (Pause.) Am I right?” Wondering deep down, “I hope my source isn’t betraying me,” then rehashing every interaction you’ve ever had with that person. My stomach just isn’t built for it. If I had Marc Stein’s job, I’d be chain-smoking Lucky Strikes like Don Draper.
At the same time, I know a few Guys Who Know Things at this point. Whenever I stumble into relevant information — it doesn’t happen that often — my first goal is always to assimilate that material into my column (as long as it’s not time-sensitive). Sometimes I redirect the information to an ESPN colleague. Sometimes I keep it in my back pocket and wait for more details. It’s a delicate balance. I have never totally figured out what to do.
“He’s not, like, a sociopath, but you kind of have to watch what you’re doing around him,” Ricky Van Veen, the C.E.O. of the Web site College Humor, told me.
“The villain public persona is not a hundred-per-cent true,” A. J. Daulerio, the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, Gawker Media’s sports blog, said. “It’s probably eighty-per-cent true.”
“He has fun when people say horrible things about him,” the blog guru Anil Dash said.
“I can’t lie to make him worse than he is, but he’s pretty bad,” Ian Spiegelman, a former Gawker writer, said.
“Other people’s emotions are alien to him,” Choire Sicha, another Gawker alumnus, said.
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.
If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.
And then I’ll make a little joke about one of the study’s possible conclusions. (via someone who actually found the thing and sent it on to this lazy “curator”)
To go along with James Fallows’ 1982 report on personal computing, a 1981 TV report about reading newspapers online.
It takes over two hours to recieve the entire text of the newspaper over the phone and with an hourly use charge of five dollars, the new telepaper won’t be much competition for the 20-cent street edition.
The report was done back in the days when “Owns Home Computer” was a useful differentiating label.
There’s lots of good stuff in this long James Fallows article about Google’s now-intense interest in the health of journalism. In short, Google feels obligated from a business perspective to help serious news organizations put good information online so that people can find it through Google.
There really is no single cause,” I was told by Josh Cohen, a former Web-news manager for Reuters who now directs Google’s dealings with publishers and broadcasters, at his office in New York. “Rather, you could pick any single cause, and that on its own would be enough to explain the problems-except it’s not on its own.” The most obvious cause is that classified advertising, traditionally 30 to 40 percent of a newspaper’s total revenue, is disappearing in a rush to online sites. “There are a lot of people in the business who think that in the not-too-distant future, the classified share of a paper’s revenue will go to zero,” Cohen said. “Stop right there. In any business, if you lose a third of your revenue, you’re going to be in serious trouble.”
Errol Morris recently gave the commencement address at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism; here’s the transcript.
It has become fashionable nowadays to speak of the subjectivity or the relativity of truth. I find such talk ridiculous at best. Let’s go back to Randall Dale Adams. He found himself within days of being executed in “Old Sparky,” the electric chair in Walls Unit, Huntsville Texas.
There is nothing post-modern about the electric chair. It takes a living human being and turns him into a piece of meat. Imagine you — you the young journalists of tomorrow — being strapped into an electric chair for a crime you didn’t commit. Would you take comfort from a witness telling you that it really doesn’t make any difference whether you are guilty or innocent? That there is no truth? “I think you’re guilty; you think you’re innocent. Can’t we work it all out?”
Lorem iPad dolor sit amet, consectetur Apple adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua Shenzhen. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud no multi-tasking ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip iPad ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor iPad in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse CEO Steve Jobs dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Windows 7 ha ha ha. Excepteur sint occaecat battery life non proident, iPad in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Morbi erat justo, magical in semper posuere Jony Ive, molestie eget ipsum. Praesent eget erat no camera. Apple a erat sit amet ante pretium just a big iPod touch bibendum a at magna. Suspendisse Flash, sem sed tempor gravida, dolor mi auctor HTML5, vel feugiat justo metus nec diam. Maecenas quis iPad volutpat augue.
Twilight of the American newspaper tells the story of San Francisco and its newspapers. And in that tale, a glimpse that we might be losing our sense of place along with the newspaper.
We will end up with one and a half cities in America — Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between “conservatives” and “liberals.” We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction” — Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill. — two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.
An article on Aug. 2 about older alumni who have been helped by university career counselors referred imprecisely to comments by a 1990 graduate of Lehigh University who lost his job in February when his company was downsized, and a correction in this space last Sunday misspelled his surname. As the article correctly noted, he is David Monson, not Munson, and he was speaking generally — not about himself — when he said that newly unemployed people sometimes mope around the house in sweatpants.
—
ON 17 July 2008 in our front page article “Ron the Lash” we falsely reported that whilst recovering from an operation to his ankle Cristiano Ronaldo had “gone on a bender” at a Hollywood nightclub where he splashed out pounds 10,000 on champagne and vodka and threw his crutches to the ground and tried to dance on his uninjured foot. We now accept that Cristiano did not “go on a bender”, did not drink any alcohol that evening, did not spend pounds 10,000 on alcohol, nor throw his crutches to the floor or try to dance.
This is the new emerging model — cutting costs, raising prices. It may still fail in the end. But we shouldn’t act as if the online-only crowd has it all figured out. Every month, several million Americans pay to have newspapers and magazines delivered to their homes-a trick most online publications have yet to pull off.
The shrinking circulation while raising prices reminds me of Apple’s strategy in the mobile phone and personal computing space: they have less market share but they make more money on each sale than their competitors by offering a premium product.
Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. Their experience in publishing literary fiction is something of a model.
“People have been saying the short story is dying for a lot longer than they’ve been saying newspapers are dying,” Jordan Bass, managing editor of the quarterly, said in an interview on Tuesday. “But you can still put out a great short-story magazine that people want to grab. The same is true for newspapers.”
In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites.
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.
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