The Dreariness of Curation

Part of what’s nice about music, for instance, is that there are constantly new things to listen to. Or, if you’re a music journalist, part of what’s terrible about music is that there are constantly new things to listen to. Being a music journalist means turning the exploration dial all the way to 11, where it’s nothing but new things all the time. Music lovers might imagine working in music journalism to be paradise, but when you constantly have to explore the new you can never enjo...

 Modern Definition of Literacy

the increasing multiplicity and integration of significant modes of meaning-making, where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioral, and so on ... particularly important in the mass media, multimedia, and in an electronic hypermedia. (New London Group, 1996, p. 64)

 The Importance of Old, Well-Written Articles

...we overvalue new writing, almost absurdly so, and we undervalue older writing. I feel this market failure keenly each day when I recommend a fine piece of writing that deserves to be read for years to come and yet will have at most two days in the sun. You never hear anybody say, “I’m not going to listen to that record because it was released last year,” or, “I’m not going to watch that film because it came out last month.” Why are we so much less interested in journalism that...

 Write With Style

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style. These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bri...

 The Journalist's Responsibility in Health Science Reporting

Given that published medical findings are, by the field’s own reckoning, more often wrong than right, a serious problem with health journalism is immediately apparent: A reporter who accurately reports findings is probably transmitting wrong findings. And because the media tend to pick the most exciting findings from journals to pass on to the public, they are in essence picking the worst of the worst. Health journalism, then, is largely based on a principle of survival of the wrongest. (Of...

 Vonnegut on New Journalism - Thucydides

Thucydides is the first New Journalist I know anything about. He was a celebrity who put himself at the center of the truths he was trying to tell, and he guessed when he had to, and he thought it worthwhile to be charming and entertaining. He was a good teacher. He did not wish to put his students to sleep with the truth, and he meant to put the truth in strikingly human terms, so his students would remmeber.