Journalists reacted to the bombings at the Boston Marathon and the aftermath the way they always do: they ran toward danger. In a crisis, whether it’s terrorism or a manhunt in Boston or a fertilizer plant explosion in Texas, the news media are first responders. In order to do their job well, however, journalists must [...]
You’re working on an exclusive story for tonight and the Web and social media team wants a piece of it, hours before air. Should you share? If you thought that question had been laid to rest years ago, think again. In some newsrooms, the answer still is, “It depends.” Brandon Mercer, news director at KTXL [...]
by Steve Safran I want to tell you a little bit about working in local news. It’s messy and complicated. It’s filled with drudgery. It’s overnights for years without recognition. It’s reporters who start in small markets with pay so low they take a second job, usually as a waiter or waitress. Pilots describe their [...]
Consumer reporter Jackie Callaway of WFTS in Tampa calls her beat a beast. She’s expected to produce two or three quick turns a week and a “deeper dive” every other week, while working long-term on investigative stories. But after heading the station’s “Taking Action” franchise for a decade, Callaway says she’s learned how to tame [...]
Do you write more than you read? One way to become a better writer is to read more. Here’s how the Portuguese author Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, once described his writing routine: “I write two pages. And then I read and read and read.” Writers read to see how others do [...]
Organized chaos. That’s how Lee Zurik of WVUE in New Orleans describes his work days. And no wonder. He anchors two prime time newscasts every night and also serves as the station’s chief investigative reporter. How does he manage to keep producing award-winning work? We asked Zurik to share his strategies for finding and keeping [...]
Darren Durlach left television almost two years ago to try something new. He’d won two consecutive NPPA TV Photographer of the Year awards and, unbeknownst to him, was on the verge of winning a third. He’s now senior multimedia producer at the Boston Globe, where he shoots and edits stories both alone and in collaboration [...]
It’s a long way from the “Boys on the Bus.” Political reporters today have more information at their fingertips than a whole newsroom could provide not that long ago. Here are a few you might want to download, if you haven’t already. Ad Hawk, free from the Sunlight Foundation, uses sound recognition technology to quickly [...]
It’s an age-old question. How can you be sure the information you’re getting is accurate? That basic task of every journalist has become more difficult in today’s digital world, when data can be so easily manipulated. But as we’ve noted here before, technology also makes it easier to detect manipulation. And one very useful piece [...]
Ask an entire generation of journalists what inspired them to go into or stay in the news business and the answer often comes down to one word: Watergate. Forty years ago this month, two young reporters at the Washington Post filed their first stories about what a White House spokesman described as ”a third rate burglary.” [...]
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 [...]
He was a ground breaker who became a CBS News icon; a game show host and pitchman who became such a hard-nosed journalist that his name made up half of “the four most dreaded words in the English language: ‘Mike Wallace is here.’” His death at 93 after a long illness occasioned a flood of [...]
It’s not a first, but it’s exceedingly rare. This year’s IRE Medal, the highest award for investigative reporting by Investigative Reporters and Editors, went to two broadcast outlets: KRTK and KQED. Only once before in the 18-year history of the medals has broadcast recorded a sweep, when Lee Zurik of WWL was the only winner [...]
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 [...]
by John Larson, correspondent, PBS Note taking for me has always been defined by deadline — the tighter it is, the more my notes tend to reflect immediate needs: the in/out cues of the best potential quotes, the most important facts/statistics that I’ll need RIGHT NOW. I needed to make sure I’d have the quotes [...]
“Leave the notebook at home.” That’s what one journalism site recommended when reviewing Evernote, a digital service that stores notes, pictures and Web clips online so users can access them anywhere from any device. It’s a cool tool but it hasn’t replaced my reporter’s notebook and I don’t think it ever will. A pad and pen [...]
Television’s need for pictures can be a two-edged sword. Great pictures can make a story memorable, because viewers remember what they see longer than what they hear. But a lack of pictures can turn an important story into a throw-away anchor reader, giving it less time on air and leaving little impact. So TV’s bias [...]
Beginning a new year by looking backward is a time-honored tradition among procrastinators and (true confession here) I can procrastinate with the best of them when I’m not on deadline. So herewith, a look back at the posts that got the most traffic at NewsLab in 2011, in case you missed any or would like [...]
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 [...]