Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
W ithin the first few weeks of his participation this fall in the Philadelphia Social Innovations Lab — a semester-long program run by two University of Pennsylvania professors that helps social entrepreneurs incubate ideas to improve the city — Jim MacMillan had a sense of where he could have improved the Gun Crisis Reporting Project….
What’s in your news diet? Sure, we can name the sites, papers, and stations that pepper us with news through the day and week. But we can’t easily sum up what we’ve read and how much of it, or really get an accurate sense of the balance between serious Times or Guardian fare versus the…
A tribute at the Place de la Republique, in Paris, to victims killed during the attack at Charlie Hebdo. Credit Photograph by Aurelien Meunier/Getty The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action against the…
Hitler’s Cartoon Problem and the Art of Controversy Low’s strategy of making Hitler silly rather than scary pinched a touchy nerve. When the English government was pursuing the policy of appeasement before the Second World War, they found that one of Germany’s demands was that Low stop making fun of Hitler. As Lord Halifax, a…
In an attempt to be far out in front of the Charlie Hebdo terror attack manhunt story Wednesday night, NBC News ended up walking back what the network claimed was false information from U.S. counterterrorism officials. And in a series of appearances on MSNBC, justice correspondent Pete Williams had to radically change the story he…
Frederick County council member Kirby Delauter, who threatened to sue the Frederick News-Post if it published his name without permission, now acknowledges that he was wrong. He says in a statement: Over my career I have fired off my fair share of angry e-mails, which in hindsight I wish I hadn’t. I can’t think of…
PARIS—Following the fatal terrorist attack Wednesday at the offices of French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, sources confirmed this afternoon that it is sadly not yet clear whether this very article will ultimately put human lives at risk. According to totally and utterly depressing early reports, given the tragic deaths of 12 people, it is impossible to…
Building a journalism organization that exists mostly (or only) on social media and other platforms makes a kind of weird sense. After all, where would Twitter or Facebook be without the commercial driving power of media organizations using and advertising on them? After all those years of our words helping them make money, shouldn’t they…
Updated with more comment from an AP spokesperson WASHINGTON — News organizations around the world are facing a dilemma about how to portray cartoons of Muhammad by the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo after a deadly attack on its offices Wednesday — and some are choosing to respond by censoring or cropping out photos of…
Hours after 12 editors and cartoonists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were executed by Islamic extremists, the Financial Times‘s editorial board published a strongly-worded editorial criticizing the magazine for their “editorial foolishness.” “If the magazine stops just short of outright insults, it is nevertheless not the most convincing champion of the principle of…