From 1920 to 1924, Ernest Hemingway worked as a newspaper columnist for the Toronto Star; he wrote 191 articles for them of which 70 are now available online for free. (More are promised.) The Hemingway Papers are divided into several categories such as “vice.” “war,” and ‘sports.” There are also articles describing his work at the newspaper. Of particular local note is the article on the world heavyweight boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier that took place at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in Jersey City on July 2, 1921. It was the first fight that generated a million dollars in revenue.
Archive for journalism
News Corporation and Phone Hacking – Final Report
This document from the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee provides evidence of the extent of phone tapping by the News Corporation and how the higher-ups in the company knew about it, contrary to their protestations. One of the Committee’s conclusions reads thusly: “Corporately, the News of the World and News International misled the Committee about the true nature and extent of the internal investigations they professed to have carried out in relation to phone hacking …. Their instinct throughout, until it was too late, was to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators, as they also professed they would do after the criminal convictions. In failing to investigate properly, and by ignoring evidence of widespread wrongdoing, News International and its parent News Corporation exhibited wilful blindness, for which the companies’ directors—including Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch—should ultimately be prepared to take responsibility.”(84) Because of the compexity of these hearings, a who’s who of the participants begins on page 86; this is in turn followed by a lengthy timeline dating back to 2000 starting on page 90. A review of these hearings and their outcome can be read at The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter Institute, Press Gazette, BBC (with a very informative Q&A section), and The Guardian.
Arguments Before the Supreme Court on Health Care Reform
While we have no objection to the frenzy surrounding Tim Tebow’s introduction to the New York media today, we would like to point to a more momentous occurrence in Washington, D.C. – the three days’ of oral arguments over health care reform before the Supreme Court. Being as there will be NO electronic recording devices in the Court, information will be handed out in dribs and drabs as reporters exit the hearings, file their observations, and go back into the hearings. Audio recordings and unofficial transcripts will be generated as quickly as possible by the Court. Here are several excellent sources of information, presented in accessible language without the legal obfuscation that clouds minds: Health Care Reform and the Supreme Court (Times Topics, with guide, background materials, and additional links); The Court and Health Care Reform (Oyez Today, contains briefs, filings, arguments of the original cases that have wound their way up the judicial ladder); Health Care Resource Page (SCOTUSblog, includes in-depth reviews of the individual cases along with numerous links, one the best ways of keeping up with what is happening anytime at the Court); Supreme Court Oral Arguments on Health Care (C-SPAN, video resources of the various court cases that have preceded today’s oral arguments as well as providing same-day audio recordings of said arguments); and these CRS reports -Health-Related Revenue Provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (April 2010), Health Care: Constitutional Rights and Legislative Powers (April 2010), and Grandfathered Health Plans Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA (January 2011).
2011 Pulitzer Prizes Announced
The awards for journalism, letters, drama, and music have been announced. For the first category – journalism – links are provided to the winning stories. Amy Ellis Nutt of The Star-Ledger won for feature writing; her series starts here. For every winner, there is a biography, the citation, and the jury involved in each section.
The New York Times Introduces a Paywall
Starting March 28, full access to The New York Times will be through a digital subscription service; those who receive home delivery of the paper will have free access. As online versions of newspapers are not attracting the advertising support that had been predicted, papers of all sizes have instituted paywalls. The Times is the largest paper to do so. A Brief History of Paywalls, Play Paywall! (Nieman Journalism Lab), a comparison of newspaper paywalls, and paywall articles from the Columbia Journalism Review should be reviewed.
The Decline of Newspapers
The list of newspapers that has gone under or have morphed into an Internet version is seemingly endless: Rocky Mountain News, Cincinnati Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Detroit Free Press, and The Christian Science Monitor, to name a few. This was adumbrated by a Pew report issued a few months ago -Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Outlet. So dire has the sitution become that Maryland Senator Benjamin Carbin is sponsoring the Newspaper Revitalization Act, allowing newspapers to act as non-profit entities. The fact that the respected International Herald Tribune has just been subsumed under the New York Times and been sub-titled “The Global Edition of the New York Times” only adds an urgency to this situation. Read this informative Reuters entry on the takeover. Also, other articles worth looking at are : “The Death and Life of America’s Great Newspapers” from The Nation, “Stop the Presses” from cbsnews.com, and “The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America” from Time.
State of the News Media 2009
This annual report from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism examines the major sectors in journalism (newspapers, online, network TV, cale TV, local TV, magazines, audio, and ethics news outlets) using the following tools: analysis, audience demographics, economics, news investment, and ownership. Special reports are also included along with an extensive bibliography which has hyperlinks in many cases.
