BEING TRANSPARENT

Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN journalist, reads Kevin Sites' remarkable post on what happened in Fallujah and sees it as a great example of why media should allow journalists to blog.

Sites' blog post reveals what any professional reporter who has worked in difficult situations knows to be true: journalists are constantly making extremely subjective - and often angst-ridden - decisions about right and wrong when they cover controversial stories. By veiling this backstory from public knowledge we are depriving our readers and viewers of an important contextual framework through which to judge the information we're giving them. The best way to restore the public's faith in our work is to be more honest and transparent about why and how we report what we do... and even more importantly, how we're not always sure if we're doing the right thing in the heat of the moment.

I agree that on big issues, and important stories, it's important that big media tell us what they are doing and why they are doing it. I'm not sure how much appetite the public has for journalistic navel-gazing on the day-in and day-out job of covering individual stories or beats but I'd love to see journalists blogging about the discussions and directives that determine what gets covered and what doesn't. I'm not sure many big media outlets are willing to give us that much transparency.
10:21:09 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

NAMING THE NEW POWER

Mark Tapscott has picked up on idea of bloggers using the power of their readers to help chase down the news and suggests distributed reporting may be on the ways that mainstream media can be salvaged.

Tapscott, who describes himself as "an aging ink-stained wretch," picks up on Jeff Jarvis's post and writes:

Think of it this way - who is more likely to nail a complicated story, one intrepid MSM [mainstream media] reporter backed up by a small staff of fact-checkers and a bevy of over-worked, underpaid, griping desk editors, or a network of thousands of individuals with varying levels of knowledge, experience and contacts and the ability to bring those assets to bear in cybertime?

(I first wrote about this over the weekend. See the post When blogs beat media below.)

SOURCE: J.D. LASICA AT NEW MEDIA MUSINGS
10:10:47 PM  LINK TO THIS POST  

TRUTH AND IMAGE

Filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War), takes a look at photos and videos from Iraq and writes an op-ed piece for the New York Times on the power of images:

Pictures force us to collect our thoughts. They make us think about motivation, intent - they make us think about how we interpret our experiences, how we think about the world, how we try to understand the motives of others. (Maybe it's in our DNA. We look at pictures of other people and we want to know: what were they thinking?) And when it's a photograph of a crime or of violence, we think even harder. Such images make us care because they make us part of the mystery of what happened. We are not merely spectators; we are investigators. We are involved. What do the images mean? What do they show? What led up to these events? Are there mitigating circumstances? Is it as bad as it looks?

SOURCE: THE DIGITAL VIDEO NETWORK BLOG
9:26:57 PM  LINK TO THIS POST