Posts Tagged ‘journalism’
Judge allows media to live-tweet Sandusky hearing
Senior Judge John Cleland has reversed himself and says he will allow news organizations to report the preliminary hearing for former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky through Twitter, email and text messages.
Pennsylvania law bans “transmission of communications from the courtroom by telephone, radio, television, or advanced communication technology,” but at a hearing Monday requested by news organizations, Cleland appeared to carve out an exception for live electronic text reporting, deciding that the ban applied to “neither ‘tweeting’ or the simultaneous transmission of a reporter’s account or impression of events as they occur in the courtroom.”
The state rule is intended to bar “an audio and/or visual record” of events, Cleland ruled — not the actual reporting of the news.
What do you report, and what don’t you report?
Over at msnbc.com, I’ve written up the gruesome story of a sick person who has coldly and methodically dismembered at least six cats since October and left their remains on a Florida golf course.
The details of the story are horrifying, raising a serious question: How much is enough in a news story?
Here’s what I chose to report:
Development of a news story: Is Obama’s high-speed rail a ‘train to nowhere’?
Over at msnbc.com, I have a piece looking at the status of President Obama’s ambitious project to bring high-speed rail — think Japan’s bullet trains — to most of the country by 2034.
The assignment was to write about the ballooning costs estimates for the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco project, which has been widely covered. So the challenge was to find A) a new angle on a story everyone already knows about and B) a way to make an infrastructure budget story — a known click repellent — interesting.
The first part was relatively easy: Let’s put the California project into a national context and see what, if anything, it says about Obama’s overall plan. The second part was a little harder.
U.S. reconsiders, now says it’s not really OK to lie to journalists
Cross-posted from msnbc.com’s Open Channel investigative blog, where I also hang my hat:
The Justice Department has gotten the message from journalists, interest groups and government watchdogs and has decided to withdraw its proposal to allow federal agencies to lie to people seeking sensitive documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Currently, if a requested document is so sensitive that it would be dangerous to acknowledge its very existence, the government is allowed to tell you that it can neither confirm nor deny whether there is such a document.
Last month, the Justice Department proposed a rule revision that would let government agencies tell requesters there is no such document — even if there is. According to the proposal, which was retrieved by the nonprofit investigative project ProPublica, agencies would be allowed to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”
Why machines won’t replace live editors any time soon
From an article that obviously was run through editing software in a shop that had no one to review the output:
However, if one is wearing a little african american dress, a fun concept is to pair that with any different color of shoe, such as red flats, blue sends, or any other style that fits one’s fancy.
Development of a story idea: Rooting for the home team? There’s a PAC for that
Over at msnbc.com, where I hang my professional hat, I have a piece today examining the intersection of big-time sports and political activism in Washington:
If you’re among the many Americans who believe lobbyists are part of what’s wrong with this country, you should know this: If you’ve ever gone to a football, baseball, basketball or hockey game — or even watched one on TV — you have your own special interest groups pushing your agenda in Washington.
Even Ralph Nader is working for you. …
Leaders of the groups push a number of different agendas — fighting soaring ticket prices, league lockouts and television-rights deals that black out some fans, among others — but they come together on one issue: what they see as the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s exploitation of athletes and fans for profit.
Many believe the answer is to scrap the Bowl Championship Series, which purports to pit the two best college football teams in the country for the national championship, even though its postseason matchups are determined by pollsters and computers, not by on-the-field competition.
DHS says don’t call us. Really.
The Department of Homeland Security has a reputation among journalists and other government officials for being hard to get a straight answer from. For instance, there was its highly publicized refusal, in the face of repeated attempts by reporters and state and local governments, to say one way or the other whether local authorities could opt out of an immigration program called Secure Communities.
Now, Federal Times, a newspaper and website devoted to covering the workings of the federal government, reports that DHS won’t even give it the work phone numbers and email addresses of its public affairs officers — the people it pays to deal with the press and the public.
The reason? In a response to a Freedom of Information request for public numbers and addresses, DHS said revealing the information — which would simply allow citizens and journalists to reach spokesmen for the government at their government offices — would be an invasion of privacy. Federal Times said DHS cited the provision of FOI law that is supposed to protect medical records.
Tales of a DHS FOIA (Federal Times)
U.S. bars the public from seeing its data on doctors
Cross-posted from msnbc.com’s Open Channel investigative blog.
The Obama administration has closed public access to its database of disciplinary action against doctors and other medical professionals, basically because reporters were getting too good at using it.
The Department of Health and Human Services compiles a National Practitioner Data Bank to centralize reports on malpractice cases and licensing board actions against individual doctors and health care companies. The idea is to make it harder for practitioners who’ve been hit with disciplinary actions or malpractice judgments to move to other states and get new licenses.
Four times a year, HHS has published a version of the database to the public. Because the database is supposed to be confidential, it’s scrubbed of names, addresses and other information that patients, lawyers and reporters could use to identify who’s in it. Still, because it provides a wealth of aggregate information, the NPDB quarterly summary has been a regular source of medical stories for a quarter-century. (As recently as June, the database was generating stories like this one, reporting that half of U.S. malpractice payments involve patients seen outside a hospital.)
Or at least it did until this month, when HHS’ Health Resources and Services Administration added this sentence to the databank’s Web page:
The NPDB Public Use Data File is not available until further notice.
Unfortunate Food Headline of the Day
Don’t think too hard about how that might be pronounced.
Net benefit?
“The Web helped make activities fun.”
That’s the caption on a photo topping a New York Times essay, the thesis of which appears to be: Gosh! You can use the Web for more than work!
Here’s a screenshot in case the caption is edited later:
Barefoot Sean Penn looks like he’s having a ball, doesn’t he? Which, according to the Times, would have been impossible before the Web was invented 20 years ago, because activities weren’t fun until then.
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 