Freshmen admitted into the School of Journalism and pre-journalism students are being advised to purchase an iPod Touch or iPhone to aid their studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, the Columbia Missourian reports.
The requirement will not be enforced, however, and there will not be a penalty for students who choose not to buy the items, the associate dean of the school told the reporter.
Newwest.net, an online publication based in the Rockies, reports that its founder, Jonathan Weber, was ordered to stop tweeting from a trial this week.
“Federal Bankruptcy Judge Ralph B. Kirscher shut down the use of Twitter in a Missoula courtroom today during a trial that has pit the members of the ritzy Yellowstone Club against former owner Tim Blixseth and lender Credit Suisse.”
Spotted on a few blogs via Technorati, this clip from Fox News. Here at Breitbart.tv, and the PajamaPundit, for example. See also the Columbia Journalism Review’s round-up, at this link.
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly asks Bernard Goldberg, author of ‘A Slobbering Love Affair’ what he makes of a New York Times’ reporter’s question to Obama at the 100 day press briefing. Goldberg says it is a ‘soft’ question that ‘fits our metrosexual times’. “Today’s men, a lot of men today, even men in powerful positions, especially men in journalism, they’re softer, they’re what a friend of mine calls NPR men,” adds Bernard Goldberg.
The transcript from the O’Reilly Factor:
Bill O’Reilly: “The worst question was one that I cited in my Talking Points memo… Roll tape.”
[shows clip]
Jeff Zeleny, the New York Times: “During these first 100 days what has surprised you most about this office? Enchanted you the most about serving this office; humbled you the most; and troubled you the most?”
Obama: “Now, let me write this down…”
[ends clip]
O’Reilly: “Did he actually say enchanted you the most? Did he actually say that word enchanted?”
Bernard Goldberg: “Yeah, well we’re saying this is the worst question but it’s really a fascinating question. Now let me tell you why. I cannot picture any journalist asking Franklin Roosevelt if he was enchanted. Or Harry Truman. I mean, he had a foul mouth if he was enchanted. Or Dwight Eisenhower. Or even Kennedy or Nixon. Because they were men of a different era, they were men of a John Wayne era. Today’s men, a lot of men today, even men in powerful positions, especially men in journalism, they’re softer – they’re what a friend of mine calls NPR men. They want to know about your feelings. Whether you’re enchanted. If I did a piece about you Bill, for my website or for a magazine, and I said ‘Bill what is it that enchants you?’ You’d punch me in the head.”
O’Reilly: “I don’t know what that means… I know what the enchanted forest is…”
Goldberg: “It’s the kind of question that fits our metrosexual times, if you know what I mean.”
O’Reilly: “I agree, it was a softball question.”
Patricia O’Brien (nee Newton), the first woman reporter in the parliamentary press gallery working for the Press Association, recently passed away. The obituary below is written by her children Francesca and Tom O’Brien.
As children it didn’t seem odd that our mother Pat worked in the House of Commons where the policeman tipped his hat to us as our father (who stayed at home to look after us) drove her in and out.
But for the early sixties our parents were trail blazers and as we grew older our mother’s quiet determination was a source of inspiration and great pride.
Born Patricia Newton in 1924, the daughter of a royal marine bandmaster, Pat left school at 14. Her mother paid for Pat, who was selling chocolate in the Weymouth Pier bandstand, to go to secretarial school.
Pat went from there in 1939 to the Southern Times. It was wartime and there were opportunities for energetic, organised and hard working young women, and at 16 she was a reporter. She had found her metier. At 18 she moved to London to work on South London papers, narrowly escaping being bombed out herself.
In the forties she had the two great breaks of her life. She met our father Joe O’Brien from Cork at a police ball in 1943. He had spotted her walking by as he worked on a building site and had admired from afar. She went on to marry him in 1950 and they remained married for 59 years. A remarkable and devoted couple. He survives her.
Her second break was also another step in the great march of women in the 20th century. In 1946, she became the first woman reporter in the parliamentary press gallery working for the Press Association.
Equality advances come with a price: when she became pregnant with her daughter Francesca in 1956 she was fired on the basis she should be at home looking after her child and husband.
Dame Irene Ward (Conservative) and Barbara Castle (Labour) brought it up in Question Time and the Married Woman’s Association and the NUJ took up her case. Soon Pat had her job back again – only to lose it a second time when she became pregnant with her son Tom born in 1961.
Pat crossed the journalistic Rubicon in 1964. For the next 20 years she worked as a civil service press officer for Arts Ministers and for the Department of Education and Science.
She enjoyed a long retirement battling and baffling officialdom armed with her pre-war typewriter and her mobile phone and devoting herself to her family – particularly her grandchildren Ben and Beth.
(Francesca and Tom O’Brien)
Andrew Nusca shares his thoughts on the new media skills needed by modern day journalists:
“As new media has increased in popularity and usage, this myth has populated of the multi-talented reporter – you know, the one carrying all the gear a few paragraphs back. And while it’s certainly an ideal, it’s not a necessity. In fact, it’s barely a reality.”
He follows this with some very useful advice for journalists entering the profession:
“For most online journalism, all you need to know is how to blog and how to use a CMS, or content management system.”
‘State of Play’ is on the publicity circuit, a film – based on a BBC series – which follows events in a fictional newspaper, the Washington Globe.
“The film’s fictitious Washington Globe, like its real-life counterparts, is struggling for survival, and within its walls are plenty of internal battles. Old-school reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) resents the intrusion of young blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) into his investigation of a murder seemingly connected to a local congressman (Ben Affleck),” reports the Seattle Times.
Ben Affleck has shared his thoughts on the demise of the print industry with a group of journalists.
His lengthy comments can be found at Hitfix and over at Collider.com and About.com.
“”I think this is the last movie that will be set in a newspaper. I don’t know how this movie will be perceived, but I do believe that people will look back and say, ‘Oh yeah, that was the movie that came out right around the time the internet destroyed newspapers’,” Affleck appropriately tells a room of online journalists at the “State of Play” junket. “I don’t think the verdict is in on what that means or what’s going to happen or what the integrity is of one institution versus the other.”
Poynter’s Romenesko has also picked up on his comments about the Boston Globe: “”I was definitely shocked to hear about the Globe,” says Ben Affleck. “I fundamentally misunderstood what was going on. Boston.com has 5.6 million readers a month, and yet this hugely successful newsgathering operation is going out of business.””
PR Sarah Evans, Help A Reporter Out (HARO) founder Peter Shankman and online database software TrackVia are teaming up to create a vast database of ‘meeja’ people on Twitter.
MediaOnTwitter is free to users and can be filtered by beat, location, name or media outlet.
At time of writing 658 folk were included – to add yourself or others use this online form.
Channel 4’s Dispatches will tonight air extracts from a conversation between current London mayor Boris Johnson and Old Etonian friend Darius Guppy from 1990 in which the pair discuss beating up a journalist – then News of the World reporter Stuart Collier.
In an Independent.co.uk interview in January 2007, Johnson said he had offered Guppy his help in finding the journalist because Guppy had told him ‘that some tabloid scuzzbags had reduced his family to tears’.
Listen to excerpts from the conversation at this link.
According to a statement on the Dispatches website, a spokesman for Boris Johnson said: “This was a colourful story from almost two decades ago. It was of little or no consequence back then – and has no relevance whatsoever now.”
The Globe and Mail’s ‘Future of Media: Is democracy written in disappearing ink?’ article has provoked a fair amount of comment (226 beneath the article alone, at the time of writing)
So, this should be fun, a debate on the Globe and Mail’s site, tomorrow:
“…reporter Grant Robertson and deputy editor Sylvia Stead will join us on Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET to debate these topics and take your questions on the future of the newspaper industry.”
“Can journalism truly be saved if newspapers are not? Can citizen journalists in the blogosphere fill the void? What are the social costs of the industry’s decline? How has the Globe and Mail dealt with the fundamental shift in the way people want to consume information?”
That’s 5pm GMT.
Canadian title the Financial Post published an apology on its website yesterday for an unnamed reporter’s conduct on Twitter:
An apologyToday, a Financial Post reporter responded unprofessionally to another Twitter user on his personal Twitter account.
While the remarks were made on the reporter’s personal Twitter account, the conversation first began when the reporter was acting in his capacity as a reporter for the Financial Post.
We hold – and will continue to hold – all our reporters to a higher standard in how they address anyone, in any forum.
We apologize for the reporter’s conduct.
The reporter in question seems to be @sirdavid (David George-Cosh) who engaged in battle with marketing professional @aprildunford – neatly summed up by Ian Capstick on his MediaStyle blog.
Dunford has drawn a line under the Twitter furore in a blog post, which remphasises why social media needs social awareness – basic manners apply here too.
Interesting to note in the Post’s apology the blurring lines between personal and private. We’ve seen guidelines set out before about journalists and professional/public profiles on social networking sites for example, but the debate seems to be moving onto Twitter.
Most journalists (or other professionals for that matter) would see this as obvious – don’t have an outburst like that full stop. But where does the personal become the public? The Post makes the connection because this conversation started on a work issue – but is it always that easy to draw the line?