The Guardian newspaper in Britain has decided to turn off comments on the Woolwich attack, on the grounds that they could prejudice a fair trial: There is a risk of contempt of court if users post prejudicial remarks about the case. It used to be that the Letters page of a newspaper had an editor [...]

It costs about $84,000 to attend the prestigious Columbia Journalism School MS program. There are businesses you could buy for less. So even if your blood is printer’s ink, if you need to make a living, we need to look at the situation calmly and clearly. The Economist provides some sobering recent statistics about your [...]

The free fall to fishwrap  is certainly a historic story though we must stand back a bit, to see why. I used to live in a city (Toronto, Canada) where real estate prices went up and down, the latter event made to sound like a street-level apocalypse. But when I mentioned the doomsaying to an [...]

Probably not, and here is why: The move to institute new paywalls (where you have to pay to read the article/see the TV show) is usually a frantic effort to stem the rising tide of red ink. Generally, readers have never covered anything like the costs of traditional print media. In the movies, the newsboy [...]

Recently, some friends were discussing the falling reader and viewer stats of traditional mainstream media. I commented that a sign of their growing weakness is the increasing number of simple, disastrous errors in reporting. A friend offered, “They can’t really help it though; they have to compete with Facebook and Twitter.” I retorted, “If that [...]

Don’t pretend it’s mainstream journalism. Mainstream journalists are increasingly believers in increased power for government to force attitudes, values, beliefs, and lifestyles on citizens, and are often apparently willing to help. That may include suppressing or manipulating news if necessary. This sort of thing didn’t used to be so big a problem because, when the [...]

Philosopher-photographer Laszlo Bencze commented recently on the film The History of the World in Two Hours: He writes, ==================================================== In terms of computer graphics, it was quite impressive. In terms of explanations of life, it was the usual: The great myth of our times presented uncritically in the vaguest of terms: Chemicals form on the [...]

Recently, I noted Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians by Paul Marshall, Lela Gibert, and Nina Shea (here and here). Their Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute has launched a Web site, offering up-to-date reports on religious persecution of Christians. The world-wide picture is sobering. Pew Research Center, Newsweek, and The Economist all agree [...]

The media giants are no longer gatekeepers. It is a logical result of the Internet. Yes, you can have a career in media, but you must build it yourself. Don’t depend on legacy media = the stuff your granny reads. You can believe big media are gatekeepers, if you wish, but it simply isn’t true [...]

Of 100 listed papers’ Web rankings, the Onion, a satire on the stale tropes of dying mainstream media, is actually #11 in North America. That should tell us something about how seriously people take newspapers these days. However, in my view, not everyone gets it right about why this is happening. In the wake of [...]