An assortment of recent (and some not-so-recent) stories, comments and observations that have crossed the Pressroom Buzz desk in recent weeks.
The Dark Side of Apple: The maxim is to never speak ill of the dead, but that doesn’t stop most journalists. The departed Steve Jobs was indeed a genius of technology, business and marketing, whose iPad has helped give the newspaper industry a shot at survival. But when it comes to dealings with the press – and when it comes to free expression generally – he left something to be desired, as James Rainey at the LA Times pointed out this past weekend.
Then there’s Apple’s famous tight control on content that could be uploaded to the iPad (or iPhones). This was a double-edged sword. Many progressives cheered when Apple removed an anti-gay-marriage group’s app. Yet the company also blocked Lady Gaga’s tweets protesting California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage.
Speaking of Steve Jobs: New Yorker covers really are like no other magazine’s. This week’s is perfect – and amazingly timely, leading me to wonder whether it had been commissioned in advance, the way famous people’s obituaries are.
Swiming in the stream: From the Poynter Institute, a fascinating essay on what may be the most fundamental change in the media, the one to which all the other changes – the Internet, social networking, tablets, mobile telephony and more – ultimately point: The news is no longer something we consume in discrete chunks of time set aside, but rather something we inhabit, a seamless part of the environment in which we are immersed.
Yet are we all plugged in? To the extent that this brave new world of information relies even more on technology, does the whole issue of information-have-nots become even more critical?
Also from Poynter, Rick Edmonds sums up the uncertainty swirling around Gannett (which owns 10 dailies in Wisconsin) as CEO Craig Dubow steps down because of ill health. Edmonds also directs us to the account of Gannett Blog proprietor Jim Hopkins. Along the way, Edmonds and Hopkins analyze the sudden shuttering of Gannett’s parenting news/commentary/social network site, MomLikeMe.
Meanwhile, at the Gannett paper in Indianapolis, contract talks are about to begin with the newsroom union, and it’s not pretty in the early goings, reports Jim Romenesko.
It still takes a human: And back to that ever-present stream of content, at Sparksheet, Karyn Campbell argues that computerized aggregation will never replace the living, breathing, warm-blooded editor when it comes to fishing from that stream what really matters.
And these somewhat older items, still worth a look…
Internet dialogue — not always an oxymoron: Usually online debates seem to be just cage matches between rigid partisans who talk past each other and never persuade each other. Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker recently offered his own exchange with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat as a contrary example: “Unlike in so many debates on the Web, the gap between Ross Douthat and me has narrowed considerably in the course of our back-and-forth.”
Do Facts Matter? Rural Edition: Via The Rural Blog, from the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community issues, we learned of a recurrent rumor that the Obama administration plans to regulate “farm dust” and several other agricultural phenomena. Not so, report two ag policy analysts at the University of Tennessee, who note that the phony farm dust claim was given credence recently by a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Which leads us to ask: Don’t the folks who edit op-ed columns have a right and responsibility to edit those submissions – not for opinion, but for facts?
And finally, this item from ProPublica in August deserves wider attention. It’s a point-by-point factual account that explains what really did and did not happen as a result of the 2009 stimulus package early in the Obama administration. As Al Cross said in linking to it, it models exactly what the press must do more of in these troubled and polarized times:
get past the partisan and ideological arguments and offer a reliable set of facts (or at least the consensus of expert opinions) for readers, listeners and viewers.
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