Tag Archives: new york times

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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Randomized home page: One solution to filter failure

Published: March 9, 2010
I use mostly RSS for online updates — except for day-to-day, “what’s happening worldwide” hard news. For my RSS reader to present me with 100+ unread stories from the BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters, and The New York Times, two or three times a day, simply overwhelms. I tried, unsuccessfully, to adopt Dave Winer’s river of [...]
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On argumentation in reporting

Published: January 15, 2010
Perhaps I’m being unfair to journalists, or to writers in general, but I can’t understand how an article like “Labor Campaigns Against Tax on Health Plans,” in The New York Times, could make sense as a piece of writing trying to inform me of something. Consider (what I think is) the article’s conclusion: Having failed [...]
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Media partisanship?

Published: November 2, 2009
Just what is John Harwood of The New York Times trying to say in his recent piece on partisanship in cable news? I can’t figure it out. The opening lines seem to me riddled with ambiguity and offer no clear conclusion to the article. Why bother? • Is this the conclusion? “The Obama White House’s [...]
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