Category: Journalism

I was often struck by the difference between Rumsfeld and Robert McNamara. McNamara said that he never answered the question he was asked but rather the question that he wanted to be asked. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, would never answer the question he was asked or any other question — Ask Rumsfeld a question, and all you get is evasions. But are they just evasions or do they reveal a lack of substance? And McNamara expressed regret

“Go where the readers are” is what publications whistle to themselves as they slink by the graveyard of their inflexible or unlucky brethren. “Go where the readers are” is what they whisper to themselves as they quiver before the mercurial platform gods, waiting to find out if they’ll be cherished or crushed. And it does make a certain amount of sense to go where the readers are, because that’s where all the attention is. But it will cost you.

Every idiot who could blog, and claim to be covering the local zoning commission, could say he was a journalist competing with the local paper. Readers learned not to differentiate and to see a free blog as same thing as the guy writing for the local paper. “And the paper doesn’t think it’s worth any money and is not charging me.” Then, the paper, having trained people to want information for free, diseducated people about the difference between a real reported story and something off the top of the head.

Photojournalist and documentary photographer Marissa Roth has a long photographic legacy of documenting the affects of war. She recently put down her camera to curate an unusual exhibition that shares personal photographs and stories of Vietnam veterans

The pursuit of digital readership broke the New Republic—and an entire industry.

A neutral observer might wonder if Facebook’s attitude to content creators is sustainable. Facebook needs content, obviously, because that’s what the site consists of: content that other people have created. It’s just that it isn’t too keen on anyone apart from Facebook making any money from that content. Over time, that attitude is profoundly destructive to the creative and media industries. Access to an audience – that unprecedented two billion people – is a wonderful thing, but Facebook isn’t in any hurry to help you make money from it. If the content providers all eventually go broke, well, that might not be too much of a problem. There are, for now, lots of willing providers: anyone on Facebook is in a sense working for Facebook, adding value to the company. In 2014, the New York Times did the arithmetic and found that humanity was spending 39,757 collective years on the site, every single day. Jonathan Taplin points out that this is ‘almost fifteen million years of free labour per year’. That was back when it had a mere 1.23 billion users.