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I’m OK without my RSS feeds
A week ago I posted to Twitter that I was officially giving up RSS feeds. I had unofficially given up sometime last week after returning from five days at the beach, mostly without checking in on NewsRack on my iPad, which had become my preferred way of reading them. I used my iMachete to hack […]
A taxonomy of press criticism
The best, and perhaps only, way to maintain a press that is both free of government and corporate control, and yet responsible to the demand that it function to propagate a democratic society and its attendant culture, is to encourage the growth and flourishing of a robust, public, and intellectually probing body of criticism around […]
Leo Rosten: the intellectual’s principal complaints about the media (1960)
In a 1960 article in Daedalus, Leo Rosten spoke up for intellectuals in criticism of the American press. “A great deal of what appears in the mass media is dreadful tripe and treacle,” he wrote, “inane in content, banal in style, muddy in reasoning, mawkish in sentiment, vulgar, naive, and offensive to men of learning […]
Opponents of Anti-Intellectualism in the American Press: Lincoln Steffens to Jon Stewart
On Saturday, March 13, I presented an abstract toward my dissertation at my favorite conference, the joint meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association and the history division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (a conference that I helped to organize, and will be working with Lisa Burns of Quinnipiac University […]
The New York Times metered pay wall is an NPR pledge drive with a bouncer
The New York Times officially announced today that it will begin charging for some of its content beginning in 2011. The Times decided to go with a “metered” system: a certain number of articles will be free to casual browsers, but to go beyond that limited number of monthly articles, readers will pay a flat […]
Exploiting Google Wave: Can the process of journalism be a news organization’s product?
My first teaching job was at a community college in the City University of New York system. I taught in the English department, which mean that in addition to my journalism courses, I would fill out my schedule with composition classes. The college had (and still has) some first-rate composition experts, and one of their […]
In praise of the “gabfest”
It’s Tuesday afternoon as I post this, which means that sometime tonight or tomorrow, my iTunes will reach out to some server somewhere and download the Slate Culture Gabfest. It’ll be three people—Slate editors and critics—talking about stuff. There will be a loose structure of some sort: usually three topics, loosely moderated by Stephen Metcalf; […]
Ted Kennedy, Chappaquiddick, and taste in obituaries
Ted Kennedy died, which isn’t news anymore, but in the New York Times obituary for him, there is one choice of verb that seems to be either a bad and tasteless joke or at the very least an editing oversight: One paragraph well into the piece describes Kennedy winning the post as the majority whip […]
Parenchyma: How do you teach “content”?
I’ve kept this article by Mark Briggs up in Safari for the last week or so, mostly because I’m not sure what to make of it, but also because I care quite a bit about the future of journalism education. In it, Briggs argues that it might be time to relegate journalism education to being […]
What’s an article about newspapers dying without anything new to say?
I finally read Michael Sokolove’s Times Magazine article about the impending death of the Inky and the Daily News in Philadelphia. And it made me wonder: if I feel like I’ve read everything in this article at least a dozen times before, does it mean: I’ve become an expert in the dying media, or… This […]
Press Criticism 