The video went viral, of course. Reporter Abbey Niezgoda of WLNE in Providence, R.I., was reporting reaction to a shooting when she was attacked by the victim’s mother. The video shows the woman throwing a rock at the TV crew, threatening them with a baseball bat, and finally sending her two pit bulls after the [...]
Picture this. You’re on day two of a TV news shoot out-of-town, working with a freelance crew. Location: a high school auditorium. Day one was a morning session and the house lights were on. The photographer got plenty of shots of the action on stage and the audience reaction. Now it’s the evening of day [...]
Local television news can be so easy to mock. Happy-talk anchors, meaningless live shots and enough on-screen grammar goofs to send an English teacher into orbit. The good news is that it’s not all terrible. But a lot of it is and, sadly, there’s not much hope for improvement. Take the fact that so many [...]
We’re starting the New Year here at NewsLab by looking back at the year before–just as we did at this time a year ago. In 2012, our readers not only wanted practical tips, they also gravitated toward posts about the state of the news business. Here are our top ten most viewed posts, in case [...]
Here we go again. Two more journalists have learned lessons the hard way. If they thought their personal lives were somehow separate from their professional lives, they’ve had to think again. And while the two cases were vastly different, the outcome was the same. Both journalists lost their jobs. Lesson 1: What you post on [...]
I know this is a touchy subject. Maybe I’d be smarter to leave it alone. But a piece in the new issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism and a recent exchange I had with a freelance photojournalist have me thinking again about this apparently age-old question: is staging ever acceptable in TV news? First, [...]
Quick: What do Wynton Marsalis, Elizabeth Smart and Chelsea Clinton have in common? They have well-known names, certainly, but that’s not all they share. All three are now employed by network news divisions, which speaks volumes about both the power of celebrity and the current state of television journalism. CBS News recently gave Marsalis the [...]
More than 30 journalists in Wisconsin were discovered this week to have signed petitions for the recall of the state’s controversial Republican governor, Scott Walker. The first news organization to publicly disclose its employees’ involvement was Gannett, whose newspapers published a letter to readers noting this “breach of Gannett’s principles of ethical conduct” and promising disciplinary action. [...]
You might think that this is yet another rant on how technology is putting pressure on journalists to publish more quickly and pushing what’s published out to more people, more easily than ever before. But two things happened this week that made me think that we can’t do enough to remind journalists that accuracy has [...]
After more than a year of work, NPR has issued a revised ethics handbook to provide guidance in sticky situations. NPR has weathered quite a few of those recently, from the firing of commentator Juan Williams to the decision to stop distributing an opera program because of the host’s political involvement. Ironically, the guidelines came out [...]
Who’s counting? Everybody, it seems, at this time of year. Everywhere you look, there’s a top 10 list for the year’s best and worst, so why should journalism be different? And why reinvent the wheel? Instead of creating our own 2011 rundown, we’ve put together a meta-list with a few additions and comments. This was [...]
How far will you go to protect the identity of sources who give you information on the condition that you not reveal their names? If you haven’t thought about it, you should. Every reporter eventually runs into a story so important that it’s worth getting the information on a confidential basis. But you’d better understand [...]
I love reading what other journalists have to say about their work and sharing their insights here, but sometimes I find myself in a bit of a quandary. What to make of this comment? “You’re in the wrong job if you think that political journalists can or should be entirely up-front and open in their [...]
Whoever said news about important subjects doesn’t sell? CBS News chairman Jeff Fager is happy to contradict them. The ratings for 60 Minutes, he says, make it clear that Americans are hungry for that kind of reporting. His goal now is to make the rest of CBS News more like the Sunday evening program, with [...]
How’s this for a new way to train journalists? An Australian company is working on a new first-person video game that puts players in a war zone armed only with a camera. In Warco (short for “war correspondent”), players document a conflict that echoes recent events in the Middle East. Each scenario has different story [...]
Do independent hyperlocal news sites face different ethical challenges than bigger news organizations? Yes, according to a new report, Rules of the Road, from American University’s J-Lab. Author Scott Rosenberg says hyperlocal sites have “fewer traditions and rules and more confusingly blurred boundaries.” So how are they handling these challenges? Like small newspapers–and, I would [...]
Twitter got a ton of free publicity this week by releasing #TfN, a newsroom guide for Twitter. “We want to make our tools easier to use so you can focus on your job,” the guide says, “finding sources, verifying facts, publishing stories, promoting your work and yourself—and doing all of it faster and faster all [...]
The mayor of Seattle is telling local TV stations to back off. In Georgia, the governor’s office went so far as to ban an Atlanta station from a public event. What’s going on here? Elected officials often don’t like the way they’re covered but they usually put up with it. After all, they’re on the [...]
Wearing dark sunglasses and a baseball cap, Bubba the Love Sponge brings it on. “Oil prices are a scam,” he roars. “A select few people are getting ultra-rich on the backs of the American family!” It’s classic Bubba, the same shock jock shtick he’s been doing for years on the radio. What’s different now is [...]
Should online video follow the same conventions as TV news? Adam Westbrook thinks not. In a provocative essay, he argues that several TV news conventions were developed to help journalists work faster and tell stories in less time–constraints that he believes do not apply to online video. That’s debatable, of course. I’m not sure most [...]