1. Find a niche - that's the only way I was able to be considered an "expert" here (though this still makes me laugh, no one can be an expert at 24...but oh well).2. Know your audience - I had to think about how I'd explain this to my grandma or someone who knows nothing about food policy (not my usual audience) - and I got stopped mid-sentence when referring to the "Lakers." The producer insisted I say "Lakers basketball team" instead so that viewers in, say, Iraq would understand the reference.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Class Alum on the BBC
BBC television recently interviewed Helena Bottemiller. She offers some journalism takeaways from the experience:
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Harry Shearer on Journalism in the US
Harry Shearer, actor and radio show host, talks about the state of journalism in the US. He spends a long time discussing the news coverage of Katrina, which is of special interest to him because he is from New Orleans. He also jokes about the NPR video sting which caused Vivian Schiller to resign.
The video can be found on C-Span at this website:
He doesn't start talking until about six minutes into the video - I recommend skipping the introductions.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
The Media and the Disaster in Japan
Scott Gold and Hector Becerra write at The Los Angeles Times:
After the quake, it took 45 minutes for the tsunami to reach the coast of Japan — 45 minutes of knowing, of waiting, of bracing.
When it came, they were all glued to their televisions — a Jesuit priest in New York, an engineering professor in rural Oregon, a geophysicist in San Diego. What unfolded had never been broadcast live before: a 13-foot wall of mud that belittled human achievement, folding houses inside out, propelling yachts across miles of rice fields, rupturing oil refineries, sweeping trains from their tracks and killing hundreds.
By now, we're versed in bearing witness to the aftermath of disaster: limbs jutting out from collapsed buildings in Haiti, survivors using laundry to spell out "HELP US" on their rooftops after Hurricane Katrina. This was different — a disaster unfolding in visceral, wrenching real time, for viewers who were alternately spellbound and tortured by their inability to do anything about it.
Japan's plight came on a sunny Friday afternoon; the magnitude 8.9 earthquake, the largest to strike the area in more than a millennium, hit at 2:46 p.m. local time. Japan is not only an advanced economy but one of the most wired nations on earth; at one point Friday, there were 20 tweets a second coming out of Tokyo.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Bell
Dan Wood writes at The Christian Science Monitor:
It started as a local story about small-city graft but quickly grew to become a national symbol of greed and failed government.
Nine months ago, the 40,000 residents of the city of Bell, Calif., – where 1 in 6 lives below the poverty line – became incensed with the discovery that several city officials were making six- and seven-figure salaries after creating secret boards and giving themselves outrageous raises.
Now, the light shined on the city of Bell by journalists, public officials, and the courts will reap large lessons from coast to coast, several political analysts say. As eight current and former officials await trial for fraud, Bell voters – one-fourth of the city’s population – will select five new city council members Tuesday from among 17 candidates in a recall election.
...
"The city of Bell is typical in that voters don’t pay much attention to their state and local legislative bodies, and the media are too stretched to look at each of the governmental jurisdictions within their territories,” says Robert Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies. “Governmental officials in the smaller jurisdictions rely on this lack of attentiveness and interest. There are a lot of Bells throughout the county; we just don’t know about them.”
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