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Posts Tagged: journalism

Weekend Rumpus Roundup

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Check out these tasty Rumpus morsels, posted over the weekend!

Wendy Ortiz interviews poet Louise Mathias about beauty, ecstasy, and eroticism…and “snakes and horses and sky and birds and hallucinogenic flowers, and stars, and the smell of creosote after rain, and…”

When journalist Maggie Downs lost a friend in a skydiving accident, many of her writer acquaintances filled her “voicemail…with interview requests instead of well wishes.” In her Sunday Rumpus essay “Spill,” Downs tries to figure out what role journalism has in times of tragedy:

Are these articles designed to tell us that humans suffer?

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The Dish Ran Away With the Andrew Sullivan Readers

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Andrew Sullivan is lighting out on his own, hoping his blog The Dish will make enough money to stay afloat without the assistance of the Daily Beast or any other publication.

His plan has a number of details that set it apart from other attempts to monetize online media: no ads (for now), no paywall (sort of), and an option for dedicated fans to pay over and above the annual subscription price, to name a few.

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The Big Idea #2: Andrew Solomon

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Writer and journalist Andrew Solomon talks about parent-child differences, and the eleven-year process of writing his latest book, which profiles families of deaf, dwarf, autistic, severely disabled, transgendered, schizophrenic, and other marginalized children.

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The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert

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This is how I think of it: there’s a contract between you and the mystery. And the mystery is the thing that brings life to the work. But your part of the contract is that you have to be the plow mule, or the mystery won’t show up. It might not even show up if you do your work. There’s no guarantee.

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Whose Opinion Is Missing?

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Talking Points Media reports on the deficit of female op-ed writers, citing an assessment conducted by The OpEd Project.

The article quotes Katherine Lanpher, a member of the organization, who tells the website: “We are seeing that women aren’t narrating the world, even though they’re half of the world.” TPM cites the Byline Survey, writing “women authored thirty-three percent of op-eds in new media publications and twenty percent of the op-eds in traditional media during a twelve-week period last year.” Op-eds are stratified by content too – only eleven percent of the opinions written on the economy during this time were produced by women.

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Young Journalists in a Cut-Throat World

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There’s yet another example of underpaid and undervalued journalists, this time from the campaign bus.

Budget cutbacks have filled these buses with fledging reporters, in contrast to the seasoned political journalists that once occupied those very seats. Mid twenty years old are jumping from their student newspapers to National Journals, hearing the cautionary tales of the cut-throat world of campaign reportage (stuff like: “Everything can and will be used against you”).

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Questioning Truth in Photos

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Errol Morris, the truth-seeker/director of the documentary The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War is once again having us question the facts. His collection of essays, Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) considers our undiscerning trust in photos, though their reliability is as questionable as any story-telling medium.

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British Hacking Scandal Roundup

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Perhaps the most surprising thing about the British phone hacking scandal is the lack of coverage in the US press.

Among the US newspapers, the NY Times is the only one I can find which has done significant reporting on the story, though the best work on the story comes from (no surprise) the Guardian.

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Phone-Hacking Scandal’s Latest

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With more unraveling of the Murdoch/phone-hacking scandal, the consequences and reverberations of the case have grown extensive and increasingly grave.

The latest development came to light this morning when Sean Hoare, a former employee of the News of the World, who initially outed Andy Coulson for his involvement and awareness of the phone-hacking activity at the newspaper, was found dead in his home in Watford.

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Sorkin and Carr Discuss the News

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Director Aaron Sorkin’s conversation with NY Times columnist (and intrepid memoirist) David Carr for Interview Magazine delves into the territory of addiction, journalistic journeys and the state of news media. He uncovers much about the state of journalism in these aggregation-based and blog-heavy times, and sheds light on his own unconventional path to the NY Times.

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Publicists vs. Reporters

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“The dangers are clear. As PR becomes ascendant, private and government interests become more able to generate, filter, distort, and dominate the public debate, and to do so without the public knowing it.”

Newsrooms are experiencing a PR takeover—as the numbers of journalists further descend, publicists are picking up the slack and filling in the empty spaces that reporters once occupied.

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Bowden On Juárez

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“The way I was trained, reporters went toward the story, just as firemen rush toward the fire. It is a duty. As it happens, I am a coward and would rather write about a bird or a tree. But, I don’t know how to be aware of such a slaughter and not report it.”

Charles Bowden is back with another book about the contradictions and struggles of the U.S.-Mexico Border, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields and he talks to The Book Bench about it.

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Ceasefire Liberia And The Promise of the Internet

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Going through the book blogs every week, I read a lot  about how the Internet is ruining everything — from publishing to our attention spans to investigative journalism to our social lives. But every once in a while, I hear about an online project that’s so necessary and does so much good that I flash back to what it was like when all this technology was brand new and we thought it would turn the world into some sort of tech-happy utopia.

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