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All modern presidents have done the same thing. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=75&aid=96665

Which makes it right in which way?

The citation implies that it all started with Truman and, I assume, the "threat of Communism" which, in retrospect, was mostly a boogeyman. Are you arguing that fear alone is a valid basis for surrendering any freedom?

All modern presidents have done the same thing. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=75&aid=96665

BTW to answer my own rhetoric.... the numbers:
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=61001

The link quotes another article:

In its front-page coverage of the Carlie Brucia murder, the St. Petersburg Times included this sidebar inside the paper, under the headline "A rare crime":

        According to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 58,200 children in the United States were abducted by nonrelatives in 1999, the most recent data available. In the vast majority of cases, the children were released unharmed. Only 115 abductions were classified as the most dangerous kind, where the child was kept overnight, held for ransom, or killed. In those instances, 69 children were returned safely, and 46 were killed.

All this in a country of 300 million people.

Absolutely horrible, despicable crimes. The people who commit them deserve harsh punishment. However, with those numbers, compared to the population. Do these extremely rare crimes really warrent the media attention, and legal attention? Does it warrent a system like "amber alerts"?

Frankly, with those numbers, the idea of kidnapping and raping childen should be one of those things that you bring up and people say things like "Yah, I heard about that happening once". Instead, its something everybody knows about and thinks about.

THAT is the skewed perception that I am talking about.

-Steve

I don't think he's joking.

There are some beautiful typefaces out there, and Microsoft has more or less veritably shat upon the world of typography by imposing Arial and Times New Roman on the world for over a decade.

As a concession, some of the new office 2007 fonts are quite nice, and Consolas is probably one of the best fixed-width fonts out there.

Apple's built-in font collection is quite a bit better, and their font-rendering system is vastly superior to just about anything else out there.

You think journalists make the big bucks, do you?

At least the researchers got a correction from Reuters. Wikipedia never got one of these things.

A few months ago there was an article at Poynter.org, about how journalists hate getting assignments for these seasonal safety articles even more than people hate reading them. Christmas, New Years, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, all annual observances that "we all experience together," strike fear and loathing into journalists, who cower under their desks when the editor approaches.

It is true that editorial commentary (opinion work) is held to a different standard than traditional journalism. For one, commentary is expressly allowed to advocate for a particular position, rather than attempting to fairly and objectively present all sides of an issue. However, there are still standards for fair rhetoric which this article blatantly ignores. I offer this Poynter editorial about a current Wall Street Journal article that included a bit too much opinion commentary that turned into a scandal. And here is a Christian Science Monitor article about general journalistic ethics which may be of interest. --M

Journalists are not supposed to advocate for either the ruling or the opposition party. That's a fundamental rule of journalistic ethics.

The main effect of this will be that we see even more blogs that use Comic Sans. Oh boy, I can hardly wait!

Let's hope the fonts included in vista catch on - they're actually quite fetching, and designed by some of the greats of contemporary typography. (Props to Lucas de Groot!) Georgia is gorgeous too, and included with the current generation of windows.. Microsoft actually can do some stuff right; they're paying penance for comic sans..

Maybe if Israel didn't build a giant apartheid wall deep into Palestinian territory in flagrant violation of international law, didn't have the IDF shoot
Palestinian children with snipers as is documented in Pulitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges excellent book, "War is Force that Gives Us Meaning."

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id =25166

Didn't kill Palestinian civilians at 4:1 ratio to Israelis deaths as I documented before. And further didn't have Jewish only roads in the Palestinian territories, THEN maybe Arabs wouldn't be so mad at them. Would we accept whites only roads in the U.S.? I don't think so.

"But many of the checkpoints, fences, military patrols, Jewish-only roads and land expropriations that infuriate and disrupt the lives of ordinary Palestinians are not aimed only at stopping terrorists. Rather, they are part of the presence Israel maintains in the West Bank to sustain the settlements there."

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=1 0922

The Israelis have only created their own very serious problem by killing thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians and occupying Palestinian territory in flagrant violation of international law. Arabs are right to be outraged over this just as they outraged over the U.S.'s brutal occupation of Iraq. And no Israel won't get nuked as Israel is the terror state which currently has nuclear weapons, that should be an effective deterrent from Iran's HYPOTHETICAL nuclear weapons.

I will say one good thing about Israel at least they had some sense and elected the moderate Kadima party into power and not the Zionist nut case Likud party that got it's ass kicked, ha.

Photographers get fired and blacklisted for manipulating their pictures. Have a look here for an example.

As for focussing on both a poster and a person walking past it, you measure the distance from you to the poster. Then you measure the distance between you and where the nearest person you want to focus on will be. You focus between them and use the hyperfocal marks on the lens to choose the aperture you need to use. Then you meter to find the shutter speed you need. If it's too slow, then you have to focus on someone closer to the poster, or use a faster film. Then you stand and wait for someone to get in the right place. It's a trivial process.

How exactly will this system help? By providing technology that few understand, people will be tempted to lean on it and begin to ignore their instincts. If a seldom-seen uncle appears out of the blue to pick up a child a few hours early, even if they pass the scanner, it would still warrant a call to the parents — just to check. The temptation of an administrator would be to think, "well, if they passed the scanner, they must be okay," so I'd think it might not be all that useful. After all, a policy change and an ID check at entry doors would do the same thing without so high a cost.

Second, and no less important: how reliable is the system? Can it false-positive? Can I hack in to add an malicious record? Umm ... yeah ... can I see the source code just to make sure it's secure?

Having announced that a new font is classed as one of Microsofts "top five priorities", how does this make you feel?

Funny you should say that, because some newspapers are telling their reporters NOT to use Wikipedia.
http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=10748

General item on journalists and Wikipedia: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=62126

Funny you should say that, because some newspapers are telling their reporters NOT to use Wikipedia.
http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=10748

General item on journalists and Wikipedia: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=62126

For those who don't keep up to date with Windows Vista's and Office 12's new general purpose fonts to succeed Trebuchet, Verdana, etc, here's what he's talking about:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=78683

More characters and better previews here, but in Flash:

http://www.poynterextra.org/msfonts/

Personally, I agree that these fonts look good and professional (I like Consolas too as the new monospace font, it always annoyed me that Courier / Courier New had tons of "serifs" or whatever you'd call all those pointy things). Microsoft does some things pretty good -- web fonts, like Verdana and these new ones, and computer mice are two. :-)

Chris Graythen wrote the caption for his photo of two hurricane survivors with bread and soda. "I believed in my opinion, that they did simply find them, and not 'looted' them in the definition of the word," he writes. "The people were swimming in chest deep water, and there were other people in the water, both white and black. I looked for the best picture. there were a million items floating in the water - we were right near a grocery store that had 5+ feet of water in it. it had no doors. the water was moving, and the stuff was floating away. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow.

It's only news because it was a bunch of journalists who saw it, and so, a few of them who had nothing interesting, but had a deadline for an article, decided to write an article which should have been called 'the stupid thing that happened to me that no one else cares about'. (actually -- Romensko might care, as he posts news about journalists, but he doesn't post stuff over the weekend typically)

In other news, someone clicked 'approve article' when they should've hit 'reject'.

The 6 new longhorn fonts are very readable, and a quick google can get you the ttfs to install in XP.

the primary reason being a multi-pronged, multi-year (or perhaps multi-decade) strategy of initiating difficult changes in the mideast would not have flown as a justification. Sure, there would have been those that understood it, but for better or worse, that would not have worked as a justification for the action.

It seems clear this is nothing more than a manifestation of Strauss' concept of "noble lies".

I think one reason it wouldn't have flown because it was a bad idea, and most experts knew it.

Regardless, there you have the problem with noble lies: we didn't have a real debate.

Who knows, maybe there was a "right way" to invade Iraq; multilateral, sophisticated, well-planned, executed by people promoted for talent instead of loyalty. That right way had no chance of happening under Bush.

Bush's problem is that he is after the oil. And when I say that, I mean that his bigger picture isn't big enough. He is a silverware thief and a second-rate fascist, not a nation builder, and he runs his war like one.

In reality, the weapons were properly either hidden well enough long ago, and indeed, many or nearly all likely do not even remain in Iraq.

You phrase it well. They thought they would at least find something they could use. Truthfully even if they found some Sarin or Anthrax it doesn't change that others next door are known to be working on nukes.

Let alone that we have now demonstrated to the 3rd world that a plausible purpose of U.N. disarmament regimes is to pacify a nation before a U.S. invasion.

Let alone that the U.N. itself, an essential instrument not only for peace and WMD disarmament, but as a sophisticated tool for U.S. hegemony, has been irretrievably weakend by our actions.

Incidentally, I actually disagree that America wouldn't have bought a more bold-faced justification for the war. I think that more of the truth would have worked. We'll never know, of course. Just an idle speculation, but take it for what you will.

This is patently incorrect. On what basis do you make this claim?

Let's start by agreeing to disagree. Neither of us are in the intelligence business (or would admit to it if we were), so we are only swordfighting with table knives.

That said, even Wall Street Journal reporters are waxing apocalyptic at this point. The reports from the ground are quite frightening, especially when you consider certain details.

I am willing to be persuaded, in no small part because I want to be persuaded, that I am wrong.

I am unimpressed by ceremonies. I always said they would have great ones. Sovereignty, elections, constitutions... Occupation is all about ceremony. It's all meaningless if the end result is a backlash and a possible Iranian takeover (in fact if not in name), when we are finally beaten away.

Who has good news that is not also drinking the kool aid? The casualty graphs don't show a trend...

This is one of my favorite arguments, because it presumes that someone expected Islamic radicalism to simply be quashed quickly and easily by entering a single, somewhat secular nation-state.

Actually, nobody expected it, and not even Bush's people claimed anything that outrageous (though they came close).

I don't see how what we've done for the anti-western arab movement in Iraq is in any way a short-term problem. Casualties never come back to life. Casual humiliation from frontier-mentality security actions has been the first impression of the west for an enormous number of Iraqis. People will now be saying the words "Abu Ghraib" with respect to us instead of Saddam for a generation.

I think you've traded a major strategic gain to Muslim Fascism today in exchange for an extremely dubious chance of fostering western-friendly oil policies and political moderation in Iraq in the future.

Say we were able to build a democracy in Iraq tomorr

Amnesty International calls the Shah's secret police the Worst in the World.

Think about that for a minute. The Worst in the World.

And you call him a kindergartner.

A kindergartner? A kindergartner who liked removing teeth with pliers, I guess.

Unfortunately, your grasp of history is as loose as your grasp of current events, and the war is not going as well as you would like to believe. The insurgents include many Iraqis, for a variety of reasons, so your reference to what "The Iraqis" want isn't necessarily meaningful. If you're pointing out that bad actors like Iranian intelligence have a bit of a home-court advantage there too, you're not exactly helping yourself.

(That's a private account by a Wall Street Journal reporter, by the way. For those not current with U.S. media, the W.S.J is ostensibly right-wing, and pro-war.)

"Heart pacemakers extend the lives of countless patients but can be surprisingly hazardous to others after death," says Christopher Gale, a research fellow at The General Infirmary at Leeds in England. The implants, which are typically hidden under layers of tissue, contain combustible chemicals that can suddenly explode if a body is cremated, injuring unsuspecting workers. Gale surveyed 241 British crematoriums; more than half reported pacemaker explosions, including blasts powerful enough to blow off oven doors and cause hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of damage. For safety's sake, Gale suggests that crematoriums should install metal detectors.

http://www.poynter.org/dg.lts/id.2/aid.8039/column .htm

Justin.

I'm not sure where I could find a history but that's a pretty good list.

This article from March, 2001 on the history of paid online newspaper content mentions only the San Jose Mercury News and Slate as charging a fee. I would have expected them to point to a failed effort of a major paper if one had existed.

Similarly, this article on paid online subscriptions from Nov., 2002 only mention the SJMN as having charged.

This story on the L.A. Times' plans for online subscriptions only mentions it ever charged for online content through Prodigy, which pre-dated the Web.

not sure what you mean by "company information"...

From the WSJ site: "Get stock quotes, charts, news, detailed financials and more for 8,500 publicly traded U.S. corporations and international companies listed as American depositary receipts. Plus, find quotes, news and overview information on nearly 20,000 companies that trade on non-U.S. markets." Users can generate graphs of the stats over time periods of their choosing.

The articles you mentioned are relative safe journalism.

Safe or risky wasn't the issue you raised. The question was whether the Times had "anything all that important to say". The Pulitzers clearly show it does.

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe I didn't think it was worth it to spend $50K each on a half dozen law suits? I could, but why?"

Charlie,

Why defend your work? Because as a journalist, that is you and your publisher's responsibility. What you just said is not a defense, it's an admission of bad journalistic ethics in your intent. When making an accusation of serious wrongdoing in print, you have a responsibility to readers and the accused to list specific instances and cite documentation and sources. That's journalism. If you to claim the article is editorial then your factual responsibility is limited, but the article should not stray into specific accusations and instead should consider a hypothetical problem you believe may be real. To state wrongdoing in fact, while obliquely implying who is the accused without any supporting evidence, is much worse than simply getting your facts wrong. Being wrong simply requires a retraction. But your statement suggests intent on your part to print unsubstantiated accusations against a specific entity, while at the same time only implying who that may be in order to limit your liability. Your accusations can even be correct in fact, but without substantiation are still inappropriate in print. Again, I point you and other readers to the Poynter School of Journalism's page on Journalistic Ethics for further details.

Nothing personal here, Charlie. I don't mean to insult you, but someone should call that article what it is. And more importantly, what it is not. Best of luck to you Charlie, I wish you well. --M

I think he was pretty clear about calling it a rant.

I'm getting too many responses too quickly to respond to them all. I'll choose this one as a representative of the majority. Basically, those countering my position that the author's article is irresponsible (honestly, the editor is more at fault) commonly state either that it is a "rant" (which the author does say). They say that it is and editorial and thus immune to standards of journalistic ethics.

Not so. Editorials are certainly given more sway on assertions of opinion, but not claims of fact. For an author to ethically assert wrongdoing on the part of a specific entity (s)he should provide at least some documentation, and sourced quotes (even anonymous quotes accepted as valid by the editor is fine). Printing an editorial doesn't give the author (and his editor) full impunity to catagorically assert whatever they want without supporting evidence (even if it's true). Please see the Poyntr school of Journalism's web site on Journalistic Ethics for additional details (that site is filled with a great deal of information).

Cheers,
--Maynard

This proves that the Longhorn fonts news from Poynter was right, at least. The type in the screenshots looks particularly good, especially compared to XP. Perhaps XP will catch up (or exceed?) OS X in terms of font rendering? Corbel (I think that's the main sans-serif in these screenshots, look at the 'g's) and Calibri are gorgeous screen fonts. A significant improvement over the current XP Tahoma and Verdana fest.

The Dutch public broadcaster has had most all of the shows streaming online for at least a year(even the racy ones like you'll find on bnn.nl. They have RSS feeds for their programs, and have even been said to actively promote redistribution.

Surely you can't be talking about the International Herald Tribune. The only clean, elegant, readable news site on the web? It looks great in IE and Firefox; what browser are you using?

Someone obvously put a lot of thought into designing this site. Text is arranged in narrow columns, making it more natural to read, kinda like a real newspaper. Navigation is intuitive; printing and emailing articles is easy. What more could you want?

The Beauty Queen
Functional and substantial... compelling...
The designer is a god among mortals..."

In terms of design, Google:search::IHT:news

It is dangerous to assume that you are protected when your language is inflammatory and misleading, though narrowly truthful in detail. Where Truth Fails as a Defense .

It's not only a matter of internal PhDs at the company which help along their R&D efforts. Thousands of developers outside of Google are using the Google APIs to create new Google applications. Some notable hits are BananaSlug and GoogleAlert (the latter of which is indeed the product of a PhD, according to this article). The fact that Google is able to tempt so many to build on their platform is another sign of their popularity with the academic nerdy elite.

Please read this for the correct usage of that term.

Penthouse has had many financial troubles over the past few years actually.

1. "In 1982... National Geographic ran a computer altered photo of the Pyramids at Giza on it's cover." Re: Photography in the Age of Falsification
2. Gulf War Conflict, soldier facing a local with his rifle; main subjects were repositioned and people in the background were cloned. Re: http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/articles/altered/ altered.html
3. The couple in some US State I don't remember, they had septuplets or something; the wife's teeth were extremely whitened compared to real life.

Related articles:

1. New York Times: Guidelines on Our Integrity
2. Washington Post: Policy on Manipulation of Photographic Images
3. Photographs that lie

1. "In 1982... National Geographic ran a computer altered photo of the Pyramids at Giza on it's cover." Re: Photography in the Age of Falsification
2. Gulf War Conflict, soldier facing a local with his rifle; main subjects were repositioned and people in the background were cloned. Re: http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/articles/altered/ altered.html
3. The couple in some US State I don't remember, they had septuplets or something; the wife's teeth were extremely whitened compared to real life.

Related articles:

1. New York Times: Guidelines on Our Integrity
2. Washington Post: Policy on Manipulation of Photographic Images
3. Photographs that lie

But the worst mental environment was at a shrill right-wing newspaper in the Midwest. I clumsily tried to write editorials, which the then-editor rarely ended up agreeing with as I stand somewhat to the left of folks like Michael Savage and Robert Bartley. (As does most of America....) The editor routinely spiked articles that might offend his buddies and insulted his staff in widely-leaked management memos that sometimes included graphic slurs. (Ah, journalism in the days before Romenesko!)

One day, after getting back a scathing set of reviews from an employee survey, the guy locked me and the other four writers from my department in a darkened room, where he harangued us for almost an hour about our "bad attitudes" and threatened us with even worse treatment unless our morale improved.

I swear, Scott Adams should have sued the guy for copyright infringement.

Here's a follow up on this non-story.

Matt Groening says he was only joking about Fox News suing the Simpsons.

So it was a story that was completely made up by one person, and all the lefty blogs were up in arms over it.

Where are the slashdotters complaining that Fox News was thin-skinned, censoring or plain evil now? Hopefully you would think they'd be man enough to apologize and admit they were wrong.

Oh, the parent isnt just funny but accurate. Check out how life at Fox News channel is really like.

Salon interview here too.

Fox News crew was Krusty For Congress, which mocked the perceived rightward-leanings of the channel with pseudo-news items such as "Do Democrats cause cancer?" and "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple" scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

It's not percieved, the proof is here. This is a former producer for Fox's News Watch media show giving the dirt on how the bias comes down from Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes everyday in an email nicknamed "The Memo".

Expect to see more info as "The Memo" starts getting leaked. Fox is truly biased, the proof is in information like this. For more analysis, including a rebuttal from Fox, check this out. You might also want to read this commentary over at Editor & Publisher deconstructing Fox's spin on the latest "liberal media" salvo they fired.

Much of this is froufrou. While I take some sort of glee in the fact that the *partial* rollback measure was attached as a "rider" to a spending bill - just like how Congress screwed LPFM back in 2000 - similar legislation must still be passed by the Senate, and then survive a conference committee, a veto, AND an override, in order to actually happen.

Symbolically, this is a very good thing (as well as being somewhat historic in a political sense), but in the real world it will likely get axed in the dead of night by the real string-pullers in Congress, and what the FCC did will stay in place.

That is why just ignoring the FCC to begin with makes for more fun. (viva microradio!)

Seriously tho, if you want the scoop on the politics you can get near-daily updates from media reform lobbyists working the Hill. I don't know if they keep archives of their reports, but I do remember seeing that more than this rider was in play at one time. One other proposed amendment (sunk before getting to the floor, I believe) would've rolled back most if not all of the FCC's changes, but the one that made the cut was the weakest of the bunch.

Looks like someone read this recently-posted-on-Fark article and decided to try the headline writing technique out =)

Coincidentally, that site also mentions Slashdot.

~Berj

Hope that link isn't too deep ;->

You are correct in that the media is made up of humans, and prone to make mistakes. But I think you misrepresent the entire situation with this statement, in implying that human error is the most significant factor in misreported news.

If you are not already aware, virtually all major news sources are intimitely tied in with large corporations that have major interests in slanting the media. Bias is a much larger problem than error.

If you check the CNN web page, you most likely see that the anthrax stories overshadow what is happening in Afghanistan. They are taking advantage of the current local scare to distract people from more important events happening elsewhere.

I suggest that you look into independent sources of media as well. They are error prone as well, but at least have a different bias than the conglomerates (unbiased media is a myth):

Independent Media

DMOZ: News -> Alternative Media
ZMag: Left Wing media resources
Indymedia: Non-Corporate news coverage
Guerrilla News Network
Project Censored: Censored news stories
Alternet: Alternative news, opinion, and investigative journalism
MediaChannel: "MediaChannel exists to provide information and diverse perspectives and inspire debate, collaboration, action and citizen engagement"
Common Dreams: "Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
The Public i: An Investigative Report of the Center for Public Integrity
Pacifica Network News
The Onion: Media Satire

Media Analysis

"Propaganda" at the University of Washington School of Communication
PROMO: Project on Media Ownership
Military school article on Psychological Operations (PSYOPs)
Media Access Project: "A Non-Profit Public Interest Telecommunications Law Firm
Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press
FAIR: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
The Poynter Institute: What journalists read
Columbia Journalism Review
Who Owns What
People for Better TV: "69 percent of Americans say TV is the most trusted source of information"

LS

1) It has mistakenly assumed it could replicate the success of Slashdot simply by repurposing the Slashdot message board system for the purposes of broad-minded subjects mostly related to pop culture, pop technology and pop politics. They have failed to realize that Slashdot's success has come through its specialization. The broader the subject matter, the less compelling the appeal to a broader base of people. The narrower the subject matter, the stronger the potential appeal to a smaller base of people. They are failing because they thought if they focused on broad subjects, that all your base would belong to them. But they ain't CATS. They are on their way to destruction. They have no chance to survive, make their time. HA HA HA HA.

2) It assumes it can create value through the aggregation of the readerships of several specific content sites into one single site. YET MANY OF THE CONTENT SITES CONTRIBUTING PARTICIPANTS ARE LOSING MONEY, SOME AT ASTONISHING RATES. If you're a fan of Poynter, which you should be, you'd already have read articles chronicling the plights of Inside.com, Feed, ModernHumorist, and others participating in Plastic. - It prolly aint gonna be with us much longer.

Try some of the publications that dedicate themselves to exposing poor reporting, or at least making a living doing good reporting that the other ones miss: Salon Magazine might just pick this /. story up on their own... Romenesko's Media News... Brill's Content... Reason Online... USC's Online Journalism Review... FAIR

Dallas Morning News president: People just love that CueCat!
"Our market research shows consumers love this product and can't wait to use it at home," says Robert W. Mong Jr., president and general manager of The Dallas Morning News. "I find that very reassuring." He should; his paper's parent has invested $40 million in the company making the device.
From RENEE HOPKINS: "You may have noticed that the Dallas Morning News' :CueCat artice carries no byline, only the cryptic 'from staff reports.' That tells me that my former DMN coworkers didn't want anyone's name associated with this biased puff piece. If the DMN staffers had been allowed to actually report on the OTHER side of the story -- that the :CueCat has so far received negative reviews for being a fairly useless and hard-to-use piece of technology -- the story would have been bylined."

According to this page not one person in this study ever looked slashdot, but SOMEONE looked at PostalNews.com 9 times.

If you want to skip the huge image and read the article in a larger frame, use this link.

I think it has a lot to do with connection speed...

I'm still stuck on a 56k modem... so on just about any page I look at... the text renders before any images....

Therefore I look at the text first.. since it is there first... But I still look at the pictures..

Link to full screen attention grabbing data:
http://www.poynter.org/eyetrack 2000/toc/frontpg.htm