Newsworthiness

Some of America's most prominent political journalists are, quite literally, wedded to the 2008 presidential race: Their spouses work for one of the candidates. Relationships that cross the media-political divide raise ethical questions for the journalists and their employers. Should the potential conflict of interest merely be disclosed to readers or viewers? Or should the journalists be shifted...

During 1963 and 1974 the big American media (agencies, television networks and newspapers) enjoyed a high international reputation for their critical coverage of Presidents Johnson and Nixon over Vietnam and Watergate. However, after 1974, the US media broadly reverted to their old cold war loyalty to the foreign policies of each incumbent President. Over a lengthy period (1951 onwards) The New...

NYU professor Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and Wired News have launched an attempt to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web. Inspired by the open source movement, the goal of Assignment Zero, as the project is called, is to develop a working model of an open newsroom. “An...

The "social journalism" that made Oprah Winfrey an international fairy godmother is the new rage in network and cable news, and it's expanding to other media. Increasingly, journalists and talk-show hosts want to "own" a niche issue or problem, find ways to solve it and be associated with making this world a better place, as Winfrey has done with obesity, literacy and, most recently, education by...

For the Sun, Feb. 20 was a banner news day. The tabloid London newspaper led its front page with an exclusive story on lingerie model Caprice Bourret checking into rehab. The story's three paragraphs were dwarfed by a poster-size color photo of the California-born woman wearing nothing but a bra and panties -- an image tailor-made for a newspaper that thrives on images of topless Page 3 Girls and...

So you may have heard: Paris Hilton was ticketed the other day for driving with a suspended license. Not huge news, even by celebrity-gossip standards. Here at The Associated Press, we put out an initial item of some 300 words. But it actually meant more to us than that. It meant the end of our experimental blackout on news about Paris Hilton. It was only meant to be a weeklong ban _ not the...

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. - Bill Donovan laughs when he describes the four times he was fired from the Navajo Times for writing stories critical of tribal government. The joking stops when he tells of the day 20 years ago when the newspaper was shut down. On Feb. 19, 1987, under then-Chairman Peter MacDonald Sr., the tribe closed the only daily newspaper in Indian country at the time, citing an audit of...

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch has announced that he will launch the new Fox Business Channel (FBC) in the fall. The channel is marketing itself as being “more business-friendly” than its rivals. Nevermind that FBC’s main rival — CNBC — is dealing with allegations that its star network host had an inappropriate undisclosed relationship with a Citigroup executive. Fox wants to push the limits even...

When I think back on the most momentous events of my professional life, they include scenes of both devastation and deliverance. The boulevards of Manila, flooded with peaceful demonstrators chanting for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to abandon power. The slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where a joyful, gyrating mob of slum-dwellers is celebrating the election of populist priest Jean...

A majority of Americans believe bloggers are important to the future of American journalism and three out of every four feel citizen journalism will play a vital role. A new WE Media/Zogby Interactive poll has relevealed that most respondents (53 per cent) also said the rise of free Internet-based media posed the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76...