Newsworthiness

When Congress Party boss Sonia Gandhi announced last month that she was resigning her parliamentary seat only to seek re-election in the by-election her resignation triggered, India’s corporate media all but unanimously proclaimed her a master political strategist. Once again, Gandhi had confounded her political opponents, or so the story went, while bolstering her credentials as a politician...

IS JOURNALISM dying? That’s a question increasingly being asked as entertainment supercedes news in most of our media. Across the world, fewer and fewer resources are dedicated to the gathering and processing of public information and the traditional role of journalists in providing two-way communication between the authorities and citizens. The latest annual report on the state of the news media...

ITivo Don Imus as much as I can because his putrid racist offerings are said to represent the secret thinking of the Cognoscenti. Maybe that's why journalists like Jeff Greenfield and others admire him so much. He says what they think in private. On any day, you might find Bernard McGirk, the man, who, according to "60 Minutes," Imus hired to do "nigger jokes," doing a lame imitation of New...

What difficult times American journalism has been having since 2003! That year, Jayson Blair rocked the foundations of The New York Times and a collective hallucination caused the American press to search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. In 2005, Dan Rather resigned as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" after an offensive from conservative bloggers. They were correct in exposing a...

1. "We're live, local – and more lurid than ever." The audience for local news has steadily declined in recent years. According to the 2005 "State of the News Media" report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, both early- and late-evening news lost more than 3% of their audience a year between 1997 and 2003, though the attrition slowed in 2004. As a result, local stations have gotten...

Type the words citizen journalism into Google, and you'll get roughly 17 million results. And each will have a different definition for the term. The discussion of the topic generally centres around blogs. Now, blogs are sort of online diary, right? Sometimes that means you're talking about just how cute your toy poodle is -- day after day after day. Entry 3368: "Toy poodle still cute! Click for...

Some of us in the news media have been hounding President Bush for his shameful passivity in the face of genocide in Darfur. More than two years have passed since the beginning of what Mr. Bush acknowledges is the first genocide of the 21st century, yet he barely manages to get the word "Darfur" out of his mouth. Still, it seems hypocritical of me to rage about Mr. Bush's negligence, when my own...

The recent sale of Knight Ridder to McClatchy was one of those events that speak volumes about an entire industry. The newspaper business's long-term, seemingly inexorable decline is an old story that is hardly fodder for stop-the-presses, page-one play anymore. But in the same way that every misstep made by Ford or General Motors prompts a rash of stories and hand-wringing about the U.S. auto...

Has the home page eclipsed the front page as the go-to place for breaking news and highly touted exclusives? News executives say yes, that on many days and for many stories, their dot-com properties have started to supersede their traditional news products. The shift is being driven by improved broadband and wireless technology, which makes Web video and text more accessible and allows people to...

A "new paradox of journalism" has emerged in which the number of news outlets continues to grow, yet the number of stories covered and the depth of many reports is decreasing, according to the State of the News Media 2006. THE KATRINA COVERAGE: One of the reasons coverage of Katrina stood out to Americans in 2005 was officials were unable to do that, though some efforts, including one incident of...