Recently added articles from Nieman Reports:
Change is in the air at Lippmann house: applications for fellowships are on the rise, as a multimedia curriculum is readied for the new fellows who will engage in the industry's digital transformation.(Curator's Corner)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Attached to the personal statement in the file of a Nieman Fellowship applicant for the class of 2010 is this note of explanation concerning his evolving situation." He had been offered a buyout from his company, he said, and had decided to accept it. He and his family would be moving back ...
Voyages of discovery into new media.
Mar 22, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Crisis has its way of focusing the mind. And so it has--many minds. In February, one metro newspaper ended its 150-year publishing history, while others are so financially strapped as to be teetering on the cliff's edge; the fate of still others resides in ...
The new front page: the digital revolution: a former newspaper editor figures out how to fund serious digital journalism with an annual budget less than what newsrooms sometimes spent on one investigative project.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A lot of pixels are being spilled these days reflecting on the future of newspapers, news, journalists and journalism. I spent my career in newspapers, first as a journalist and later as a publisher, and ! left when the business was financially near its ...
Watchdog analysis: offering context and perspective online: at the Beacon in St. Louis, reporters attempt to 'provide context to illuminate why something is happening, explain what's at stake, and assess what might--or what should--happen next.'.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... The spotlight often focuses, justifiably, on the threats that downsized newsrooms pose to investigative reporting--the kind of muckraking that should (but didn't) spot a governor dickering over the value of a U.S. Senate seat. But investigative reporting has a less celebrated cousin in the ...
Defining an online mission: local investigative reporting: at the nonprofit voiceofsandiego.org, 'from our first day our job has been to fill the gaps between what people want from their local media and what they have.' (New Media).
Mar 22, 2009; ... There's a common refrain that comes with many commentaries lamenting the decline of newspapers these days: Investigative reporting is an expensive endeavor. Our experience proves that bit of conventional wisdom dead wrong. For the past four years, we've been running ...
Crowdfunded reporting: readers pay for stories to be told: 'reporting for Spot.Us, where money directly changes hands, is the same as reporting any story for Wired.com. For Spot.Us, the ethical promise inheres in the transparency of the funding.'.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... It seems to be a time-honored journalistic tradition to launch partnerships over beer. So whatever else David Cohn and I might have gone on to do differently, know that some things are still sacred among reporters. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] That night, as I heard his ...
A digital vision of where journalism and government will intersect: '... the journalistic process of assembling information and connecting the dots to inform tough questions will be easier.'.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Soon after I came to work for the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that uses the power of the Internet to bring greater transparency to government, I started to investigate the connection between a multimillion dollar Illinois highway project and some land owned by ...
Tracking toxics when the data are polluted: how computational journalism can uncover what polluters would prefer to hide.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... Each year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program releases information from more than 20,000 plants on their self-reported emission and transfer of nearly 650 chemicals. In the early years of the program, the failure of a plant to file a ...
An investigative reporting partnership: a serendipitous collaboration: 'at Northeastern University in Boston, where I joined the faculty in 2007, students in my investigative reporting seminars have produced 11 Page One stories for The Boston Globe in just 20 months.'.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... It is a journalistic paradox. Newspapers and other media are shedding reporters and editors by the thousands, with worrisome ramifications: The press watchdog, so essential to a functioning democracy, doesn't bark as much or as often. Yet despite the newsroom carnage, journalism schools ...
Long-form multimedia journalism: quality is the key ingredient: as a producer of social documentary projects--viewed on digital platforms--Brian Storm talks about the excitement of doing journalism in this way, at this time.(New Media)(Interview)
Mar 22, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Brian Storm is the president of MediaStorm, a production studio located in Brooklyn, New York, which publishes multimedia social documentary projects" at www.mediastorm.org and produces them for other news organizations. In an interview I did with Brian on ...
Video news reporting: new lessons in new media: 'what would it take to create good video journalism for online audiences, inexpensively and in an idiom that looked neither too homemade nor too much like TV?'.(New Media)(American News Project)
Mar 22, 2009; ... In the fall of 2007, I spent a week doing what I would recommend to none of my friends: ceaselessly surfing YouTube. My goal was to find good, original video reporting. Not repurposed content from the news networks or indie channels, but pieces that had been produced for the Web. ...
Using social media to reach young readers: in reporting on a case of a police informant who'd been murdered, the Tallahassee Democrat relied on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and text messages to get its reporting to young readers.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... When 23-year-old Rachel Hoffman, a recent college graduate, agreed to become a confidential informant, she could not have known she would soon become a household name in Tallahassee--and on the Web. On the night when she went to buy Ecstasy, cocaine and a gun from two men, her wire failed, ...
The Web: fertile ground for investigative projects: 'digital journalism could not be the sole domain of breaking news and blogging, and it had to be more than the repository of electronic reprints.'.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... What would a big newspaper investigation look like if conceived primarily for the Web? What would we do differently? Would the medium affect our reporting? And could we do an equally good job in both digital and print with the resources we had? These questions were on our mind ...
Using multimedia to tell an investigative story about innocence: 'two departments within our newspaper--editorial and new media--had to work closely together to construct the project.'.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... I first heard about the murder of Blue Eyes from Major Betty Baker, a feisty, God-fearing Salvation Army officer with a gravelly voice and a thick Scottish brogue. Every weeknight at about 10 o'clock, Baker and a driver would traverse the city in a converted ice-cream truck, passing out ...
Reliable news: errors aren't part of the equation: in the transition to digital journalism, accuracy--as an indicator of quality--must maintain its place at the top of the list of essential ingredients.(New Media)
Mar 22, 2009; ... For more than 100 years, one of the most recognizable slogans in journalism has been All the News That's Fit to Print." Lately, The New York Times motto is being challenged by the familiar phrase, "do more with less." This new saying was, in fact, the theme of the World Editors Forum ...
21st century muckrakers: investigating medical and health issues.
Mar 22, 2009; ... If data talked, oh, the stories they could tell. Today, enterprising reporters are "listening" to what data can tell them. By harnessing technology's tools, they dig with increasing speed and thoroughness through stacks of numbers and reams of documents, and what they find forms the ...
Diving into data to tell untold medical stories: 'the U.S. press seemed to accept as established truth that cholesterol lowering is vital and that statins are the closest thing to wonder drugs. I'm not any smarter than my colleagues, I worried. Maybe I'm just wrong.'.(21st Century Muckrakers: Medical and Health Reporting)
Mar 22, 2009; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I didn't set out to question the importance of lowering cholesterol, the subject of my BusinessWeek cover story "Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good?" (January 28, 2008). Like most reporters, I had assumed that keeping "bad" (LDL) cholesterol in check is one ...
Investigative reporting on medical science: what does it take to break through the commercial spin? '... it is almost impossible to get the story right when the fundamentally commercial goals for which the study has been done are covered up with so much industry-sponsored expertise.'.(21st Century Muckrakers: Medical and Health Reporting)
Mar 22, 2009; ... When it comes to real-time reporting on medical science, journalists (as well as many experts and even medical journals) have been largely relegated to the role of cheerleading for the industry, unable to fulfill their rightful role as critical investigators providing a balanced view. The ...
Changing the drumbeat of typical health reporting at HealthNewsReview.org '...we are on the lookout for those stories that include unsubstantiated claims made in the course of reporting about health.'.(21st Century Muckrakers: Medical and Health Reporting)
Mar 22, 2009; ... "The level of health care investigative reporting has never been better in this country even in small- and medium-sized newspapers. But the once- or twice- or three-times-a-year stories don't make up for the daily drumbeat of stories. Health care reporting in this country is a disgrace day ...
Examining water supplies in search of pharmaceutical drugs: 'secrecy, it turned out, was our biggest enemy, but not for the reasons investigative reporters typically encounter....'.(21st Century Muckrakers: Medical and Health Reporting)
Mar 22, 2009; ... An investigative reporting project sometimes begins with a whispered tip from an informed insider or a stack of leaked documents from someone with an ax to grind. Frequent topics include corruption, faulty regulations, laws that aren't enforced properly, or the failure to protect the ...