Friday, May 04, 2018

What journalism is all about ... why ethics and empathy matters

After reading every available opinion, I’ve come to a rather banal but beautiful conclusion: Jane Austen is cited as an authority on the complexity of life, particularly with regard to the intricacies of relationships.


“(Like) Mr Hazzard, (Mr Trump,) is living with his own moral choice”  via Nom



A magician broke the ice during last week’s historic Korean summit. One of his tricks was called the “Trump card.”
↩︎ Genii OnlineThe Justice Dept. is revising its guidelines. Recently deleted: a "Need for Free Press and Public Trial" section.


Mossack said the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was “a baby” compared with Quintero and was worried he might come knocking (you can read the email yourself!) Now, the FBI has posted a $20 million reward for information on Quintero and added him to their top-10 most wanted list. The notorious drug lord is wanted in relation to a kidnapping and murder from 1985. Maybe Mossack’s fear was warranted...

Why Do So Many Judges Cite Jane Austen in Legal Decision

though others may feel put upun: If You Think You Hate Puns, You're Wrong - In Defense of Puns



ATTENTION SPANS: Normally we extol short, clear writing. But brevity, Roy Peter Clark says, rarely can take us on a journey, or unroll a carefully nuanced argument. Clark praises the joys of a story that can accept complexity and abounds in important ideas and language. "The deepest power of story is felt only by spending time,” Clark writes for Poynter. “Have we abandoned the long story — to our peril?”




Vic judge blasts ATO over victims' debt











How AI Might Make The Vatican’s Amazing Archives Accessible



The Vatican Secret Archive isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand. But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time.

A historian of prisons says "daily degradations" wore down South Carolina inmates' before deadly riots. ↩︎ The New York Times

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian reveals her Syria connection
  1. The NSW Premier will tonight tell the Sydney Institute how her family's experience shaped her as a person, as colleagues encourage her to open up to the public ahead of next year's election







How AI Might Make The Vatican’s Amazing Archives Accessible



The Vatican Secret Archive isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand. But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time.






How AI Might Make The Vatican’s Amazing Archives Accessible



The Vatican Secret Archive isn’t much use to modern scholars, because it’s so inaccessible. Of those 53 miles, just a few millimeters’ worth of pages have been scanned and made available online. Even fewer pages have been transcribed into computer text and made searchable. If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand. But a new project could change all that. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time.

An awards night where the world dominated

Four-time Pulitzer-winning photographer Carol Guzy stood before the Overseas Press Club in New York on Thursday night, having just accepted this year’s Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for photojournalism. Then she mused about one of that famous Spanish civil war photographer’s most famous guidelines: improve the work by showing the courage to push closer.
GuzyGuzy, already known for her unflinching gaze in places such as Haiti, got closer in documenting the scars that war left on the children of Mosul, Iraq.
Incredibly close.
But that wasn’t her point Thursday night.
Courage, Guzy said, was not about getting there; it’s about staying there, even when that story is shredding your heart. She dedicated the award last night to the bruised, scarred children left behind in Mosul. They are showing true courage, Guzy said, with their resilience and grace.

Her view of courage and humility was echoed by the feature photography winner, Getty Images’ Kevin Frayer. He covered Myanmar’s pogrom of its Rohingya minority, driving nearly a million people from their homes. There were times when, Frayer said in a message, "surrounded in sadness, I could find beauty in nothing."

Frayer shotDetail: A Kevin Frayer photograph of a fleeing Rohingya family (Screenshot)
He urged the crowd to support the release of the two Reuters reporters in Myanmar who have been imprisoned for months for doing their jobs. Other winners included the AP for the big award, the Hal Boyle award, on the Rohingya flight, and to the AP’s Maggie Michael, who found secret Saudi-led camps where Yemeni prisoners were being tortured. Other awardees showed the economic destruction of Venezuela and rampant corruption in Mexico, important stories often lost in awards season and the day-to-day coverage of America's mercurial leader.  
Judges awarded the magazine award to Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal of the New York Times Magazine for their nearly two-year effort, "visiting about 150 bomb sites in northern Iraq, often at great personal risk," to show that  civilian casualties caused by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes were considerably higher than previously reported.
A Reuters team, as with the Pulitzers, won for its coverage of the Philippines under vigilante president Rodrigo Duterte. Judges said "their exhaustive, meticulous reporting exposes the scope of the state’s role in the slaughter of its own citizens." NBC Left Field, the network’s digital news video unit, took an award for “The Kill List,” a documentary on Duterte. Here are all the winners.

Trump's 'Friends' cut him off

President Donald Trump’s phone-in to his security blanket, “Fox and Friends,” Thursday morning generated exponential amounts of coverage, not just for the newsy nuggets coming out of it (courtesy of Trump), but because it was a chance to see the president in full defensive mode on live TV — something that heretofore had only been described in news stories by “sources close to the president.”

Fox
And what a display it was. He went on for close to 30 minutes, many times with his voice getting louder and louder, before show co-host Brian Kilmeade — sounding like a harried mom having to deal with a gossipy neighbor — told him, ““We could talk to you all day, but it looks like you have a million things to do.” (Translation: This is getting old, dude, let me help you out ...)
Here are some of the stories we liked that captured this unprecedented venting:
·        The case for “Fox and Friends." Erik Wemple of the Washington Post says it’s good to at last see a tirade like this in person instead of getting it second-hand.
·        The entire transcript, annotated, by the Washington Post.
·        Along the same lines, HuffPost offers up “A Guide To Unscrambling Trump’s Bonkers ‘Fox & Friends’ Interview.”
·        And this, for the headline alone: “Old man yells at country,” via Slate.

Quick hits

NO MORE KNOW-IT-ALL: In a major report for the American Press Institute, P. Kim Bui casts a broad net in seeking how to build trust in reporting and in a newsroom. Empathy, humility and transparency go a long way. In reporting, do your homework, but don’t act the expert, she writes. In a newsroom, you can go a long way in training, starting with admitting mistakes, but not everyone will be able to do it all, NPR’s Keith Woods tells Bui. “That’s all empathy is at the end of the day, is standing in someone else’s shoes,” Woods says. “You don’t have to wear them. You don’t have to like them.” The report is engaging, but if you’re time-pressed, here are 9 steps for storymakers and 10 steps for the story editors and supervisors.
BROKAW ALLEGATIONS: Variety and the Washington Post cite a former employee as saying that former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw groped her in a meeting in the 1990s. Brokaw acknowledged meeting her but denied the allegations. We'll be going through the stories, of which the Brokaw incident is just a part, throughout the day.
HE STARTED THE WAR: Back in 1986, “Gallup was finding that 65 percent of Americans still felt a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the press.” The following year, Brent Bozell started his advocacy group, the Media Research Center, in order to root out and expose liberal bias in the media. And thus the war on the press began, writes Tim Alberta for Politico Magazine. Flash forward 30 years, and the Gallup numbers show confidence in the press is at an all-time low of 32 percent, and at just 14 percent for Republicans. Mission accomplished?
SPEED BRIEFING: For longtime New York Times photographer Sara Krulwich, there's something new at this year's Tonys: Her very own award, writes Michael Paulson. … Two Southern California public television stations, KCET and KOCE, are merging, says Meg James. ... the president of the group that runs The New Orleans Times-Picayune is stepping down and will not be replaced, the Advocate’s Richard Thompson reports.
TURKEY CRACKS DOWN: A Turkish court has sentenced 14 journalists and newspaper employees working for a Turkish opposition newspaper to prison sentences up to 7 ½ years. The charges were terrorism-related and came after a failed coup attempt. The move is raising alarm bells over press freedoms under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
‘WE WERE WRONG:’ On the same day that a new memorial opened in town that honored victims of lynchings, the Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser published an editorial owning up to its own role in perpetuating violence against African-Americans. “The Advertiser was careless in how it covered mob violence and the terror foisted upon African-Americans from Reconstruction through the 1950s. We dehumanized human beings.” One of the headlines the paper published: Dead! Riley Webb hanged in Selma by orderly mob. (Emphasis ours.)
A VAMPIRE SQUID: That’s how a British lawmaker described Facebook on Thursday. So, yes there is such a thing, but the foot-long cephalopod isn’t too scary, despite its fearsome name. It hangs in the low-oxygen, low-predator ocean deep — and doesn’t eat much.
Pie chartAnnFriedman.com
THE VAMPIRE GRAPHIC: Quartz’s Dan Kopf on why you should never use a pie chart — and why, no matter how hard you try, you can’t kill data visualization’s Walking Dead. Nor should there be a silver bullet (or a cross or garlic or whatever), argue fans of idiosyncratic and brilliant pie-charter Ann Friedman. They are right.  (Hat tip: Mel Grau)
A SHARING PROBLEM?: The Newseum has created a poster for educators, libraries and others (editors?) to help Americans get wiser about what stories online they would share. It’s part of a media literacy effort at the Washington museum, says Anna Kassinger, director of curriculum for the Newseum’s educational wing. You can check out the poster and/or download it from here.

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What we’re reading

DO YOU BELIEVE?: A Pew poll shows most Americans believe in God or a higher being. It’s just not always the God in the Bible. Get this: About the same percentage of nonwhite Democrats and Republicans in general agreed on the God in the Bible. Three other takeaways, although 1 and 2 may seem contradictory: 1) Belief in the God of the Bible declines with age. 2) Those under age 50 viewed God as less powerful and less involved in earthly affairs than do older Americans. 3) Among college graduates, only 45 percent believe in the God of the Bible. (Hat tip: David Dockterman)
FAREWELL, FREE JOURNALISM: Post Opinions commentator Megan McArdle on the reported move of her former employer, Bloomberg News, behind a paywall: “The old open Internet was a marvelous gift to readers, a vast cornucopia of great writing upon which we’ve been gorging for the past two decades. But there’s a limit to how long one can keep handing out gifts without some reciprocity. At the end of the day, however much information wants to be free, writers still want to get paid.”
THE REST OF THE STORY: “I hope you’ve monetized this,” Donald Trump said to the two North Carolina sisters known as Diamond & Silk before sending them out to do their routine to a campaign audience. Oh, they have, Donald. They have. Here’s everything you need to know, by the Washington Post’s Monica Hesse and Dan Zak.

soldier

OVERLOOKED NO MORE: Maria Bochkareva jammed three lifetimes into her 30 years. Married at 15 and split up not much later, the semiliterate peasant petitioned Russia’s czar to enter the military during World War I. She loved it, wrote the NYT’s Elisabeth Goodridge in the latest of the paper’s obituaries of “overlooked” women of note. By 1917, Bochkareva was commanding an all-women’s “strike force” that was on the wrong side of the Russian Revolution. Touring the West, she raised money from Theodore Roosevelt and “wrote” an autobiography. Returning home, she was imprisoned by the victorious Bolsheviks — and executed.  


What you need to know about your student debt before heading ...

 

Michelle Wolf: 'I wouldn't change a single word'

Abandoned by her sponsor, comedian Michelle Wolf withstood a barrage of conservative criticism for her White House Correspondent Dinner speech, and her supporters urged America to hold its president to the same standards it holds a comedian.
Wolf“I think having the ability to laugh at yourself is important,” says Wolf, who added in an NPR Fresh Air interview Monday that she hadn’t expected the degree of criticism.
But, she told radio host Terry Gross, she wouldn’t “change a single word,” either. (The episode airs Tuesday).
Comedians such as Adam Conover rushed to defend Wolf, saying she was just doing her job, which was to:
“1. Be funny.
“2. Tell the truth.
“3. Make people in power uncomfortable.”
"In other words," wrote Conover in the NYT, “she killed.” 
Brendan Loper got at criticism of Wolf in his cartoon for the New Yorker on Monday, reprinted here by permission. The caption reads: “All hail the king, emperor of the earth, ruler of the air and seas, arbiter of what is funny.”

(Illustration: Brendan Loper/The New Yorker)
If a comedian offends our president, Jimmy Kimmel suggested sarcastically, how about a juggler? As Erik Wemple put it: “The president of the United States is committed to undoing journalism, and the country’s top journalists are debating a dinner format.” 
Philadelphia columnist Will Bunch went further, saying “this republic won’t survive unless people start getting as uncivil as hell. Just like Michelle Wolf did.” He then echoed the last line of Wolf’s monologue: “Because Flint still doesn’t have clean water.”

Quick hits

QUESTIONS FOR TRUMP: Robert Mueller's office shared with Trump's legal team at least four dozen questions for the president about the Russian investigation. The questions, obtained by the New York Times, provide a look into the special prosecutor's examination of possible obstruction of justice in Trump's knowledge of Russian connections and firing of FBI Director James Comey. Among the questions for Trump: "What did you mean when you told Russian diplomats on May 10, 2017, that firing Mr. Comey had taken the pressure off?" Mueller also wants to know about Trump's conversations with his fixer, Michael Cohen, possibly as many as three of them, about the status of a proposed Trump multimillion-dollar real estate deal with Russia that was being negotiated while Trump was running for president.
THIS JUST IN: President Trump has made 3,001 documented false or misleading claims since he has been in office — and he's making them more frequently in recent months, according to an updated count by Washington Post fact-checkers. "Seventy-two times, the president has falsely claimed he passed the biggest tax cut in history — when in fact it ranks in eighth place," the fact-checkers write. "Fifty-three times, the president has made some variation of the claim that the Russia probe is a made-up controversy."
RESIGNED: New York Times metro editor Wendell Jamieson, immediately, for unspecified reasons after an unspecified investigation, according to a staff email. Susan Chira will be taking over temporarily, HuffPost reported, citing the NYT email. 
HIRED: Lisa Schwartz, a member of two teams that won Pulitzers for National Reporting, joins The Daily Beast as its new head of research, editor Noah Shachtman announced. Schwartz had been a research editor at the Wall Street Journal since 2014 and previously had been an Investigative Researcher for the New York Times and Director of Research at ProPublica. Meantime, Slate is looking for a director of research and the NYT is seeking a social media strategy editor. More jobs.
FREE: Matthew Keys, a journalist who was convicted in 2016 on three counts of conspiracy and criminal hacking, finished the last of his sentence on Monday and is returning to Sacramento, he said. He had been released to a halfway house in Fresno two months ago, where he worked for a food pantry. "I hope that I’m privileged enough to find work in journalism," Keys told Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica last month. "I work hard, and I’m smart, but I do have an uphill battle going forward."
CONVICTED: In its first use of a new “fake news” law, Malaysia sentenced a Danish citizen to a week in jail after he criticized as slow the EMS response after a Palestinian Hamas member was assassinated in Kuala Lumpur, the capital. AFP reported that the plaintiff said he made a mistake by posting the YouTube video criticizing the response time, which officials have disputed. Israel has denied the killing. The new law, criticized by human rights groups as an attempt to muzzle dissent, can carry a sentence of up to six years in prison.
DEPARTING: WhatsApp founder Jan Koum from Facebook, after battling the parent company over attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, the Washington Post reports. Koum, who sold his company to Facebook in 2014 for more than $19 billion, is also leaving Facebook’s board of directors, the Post reports. Recode adds that co-founder Brian Acton left Facebook in September — and last month urged everyone to #DeleteFacebook.
ARC GAINS: The Washington Post’s Arc Publishing signed up Advance Local for its publishing system. Advance includes NJ.com, NOLA.com, AL.com and Cleveland.com,
LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION: Where a news outlet has its office is still important, writes Nikki Usher for Poynter. “Geography and place still matter,” she writes, “even in an age of virtual communication with Slack, Blue Jean and multimedia mobile journalists. How journalists do their work is affected by where they are, from the news decisions they make to the perceived audience.”
QUESTIONS: Supporters praise Joy Reid’s apology for anti-LBGTQ posts in the past, but haven’t addressed her apparent coverup, says HuffPost’s Hayley Miller.
TOO MANY MALE SOURCES?: “More often than not, women are conspicuously absent from media coverage on Iran, North Korea, bilateral and multilateral arms control, civil nuclear cooperation, nuclear terrorism, and more,” write two arms experts, Alexandra Bell and Kelsey Davenport, for Poynter. They call this kind of coverage marticles, where only men are quoted. Plus, manels — all-male panels at conferences. There’s a solution for the most clueless of journalists or conference programmers: Check out WomenAlsoKnowStuff, which groups experts by topic.
AGAINST METRICS: How measuring performance by numbers backfires. By Jerry Z. Mueller. (Hat-tip: Raju Narisetti)
 

HE DID THE BUNNY: Hugh Hefner turned to his first employee and asked him for something that would symbolize “stag party.” Designer Art Paul thought about something that could be used to punctuate the end of a story or be a cover. Paul didn’t know his half-hour’s work would end up adorning clubs, phone cases, bedsheets, condoms and pajamas — or inspire the name of a newly discovered species of rabbit. “If I had known how famous that trademark was to become,’’ he said in 1994, “I would have taken more time with it — and it probably wouldn’t have turned out as well as it did.” Paul died on Saturday in Chicago. He was 93.

The politics behind the competitive neutrality inquiry into ABC and SBS