Category Archives: Journalism

Are journalists corporate spies?

Published: April 21, 2010
A thought experiment: When journalists investigate private businesses for wrongdoing, or upcoming products, or rumors, etc., do they commit corporate espionage? By “corporate espionage” (or “industrial espionage”), I mean simply when one business attempts to obtain information about another business for competitive gain. Journalists usually work for privately-held media. Learning about other companies helps journalists [...]
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From SPJ’s unimaginative department

Published: March 22, 2010
In researching state shield laws recently I found that past presidents of the Society of Professional Journalists had written editorials about them. I couldn’t resist the irony of journalists recycling old editorials into new ones. This is the stuff of bad PR reps, or at least so we were taught. Here are the opening sentences [...]
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Future of context: Same as the past?

Published: March 18, 2010
I generally agree with the goals of Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, and Tristan Harris’s Future of Context project. But at the same time, I don’t quite get it. Concern for context in journalism has been around since before the Hutchins Commission, which in 1947 wrote: “The media should provide a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account [...]
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Robert McChesney on press subsidies

Published: March 16, 2010
I have lots of respect for Robert McChesney (see his “Labor and the Marketplace of Ideas: WCFL and the Battle for Labor Radio Broadcasting, 1927-1934”) but his recent interview on PBS’s NOW is almost embarrassing. He’s on the show to argue in support of increased subsidies for the press — which isn’t a terrible argument [...]
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Washington Post: Speak only when spoken to

Published: January 28, 2010
We discussed some institutional legacies of journalism in one of my classes today, such as the idea that the newspaper or the broadcast anchor holds authority over what’s important in the world; the idea, as Walter Cronkite might have put it, that mainstream media control “the way it is.” Wouldn’t you know it? That view [...]
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