Recently I have rubbed some people the wrong way by speaking frankly about the problem of ignorance in civic life and people’s lack of concern and lack of shame regarding it. I argued that we should not be trying to increase voter turnout when Americans feel so little responsibility in the way of self-education on … Read more Christine O’Donnell is just what I’ve been talking about
Michael Bugeja wrote in Inside Higher Ed (a month ago – sorry for not blogging it sooner) about the proposed discontinuation and reorganization of the journalism school at the University of Colorado at Boulder: “Half-Truths on a J-School.” Readers will notice parallels between what journalism schools and library schools have been facing. I think it … Read more J-Schools in question – a familiar story
Lawsuit Challenges Police and Secret Service Crackdown on Journalists Covering Protests at Republican National Convention CONTACT: press@ccrjustice.org May 5, 2010, Minnesota and St. Paul, MN —Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) with co-counsel De Leon & Nestor and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, filed a federal lawsuit against the Minneapolis and St. Paul police … Read more Goodman vs. St. Paul
This is big news for anyone dealing with politics or gov docs collections. The New York Times is reporting today that C-SPAN has made its entire archive of programming freely available on its website. The archive contains 160,000 hours of programming. It seems that this will be a major resource for studying domestic politics in … Read more C-SPAN puts entire video archive on the web
“Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper,” By Richard Rodriguez, in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine. This article is a beautiful explanation of the role that newspapers have had in defining and uniting cities. In this case it’s mostly about San Francisco, but it’s also about newspapers in general, their fate, and what it … Read more Rodriguez on the Twilight of the Newspaper
ITHACA, NY — Nominations for the 2009 Izzy Award are officially open. The annual award for special achievement in independent media — named after legendary muckraker I. F. “Izzy” Stone — is a project of the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College. Last year’s inaugural award was shared by blogger Glenn Greenwald … Read more Nominations for the 2009 Izzy Award are officially open
Two recent articles in the mainstream press are telling us that paper books and physical libraries are dead (Boston Globe and CNN.com). One of the easiest things to forget about the death of the book is for how many years it has been declared. A few quotations from past decades, from authors who were responding … Read more Death of a thousand paper cuts
Alternative Media Reception at Annual Conference On Monday, July 13, from 7-10 pm, the Alternative Media Reception (ALA Annual, Chicago) will join forces with the SRRT 40th Anniversary Celebration in a not-to-be-missed event featuring great food, drink, and music as well as books, zines, and other materials from progressive publishers in Chicago and all over … Read more Alternative Media Reception at Annual Conference
Attempted Censorship by U.S. Attorney — A Book to Watch! By Ann Sparanese On June 16, the paperback edition of Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI by Peter Lance will be released by HarperCollins. This is happening despite a prominent U.S. Attorney’s best efforts to … Read more Attempted Censorship by U.S. Attorney
MIT has posted podcasts from the five plenary sessions at Media in Transition 6, at the Comparative Media Studies program’s podcast page. The plenary sessions were on “Archives and History,” “New Media, Civic Media,” “Institutional Perspectives on Storage,” “The Future of Publishing,” and “Summary Perspectives.” I think these plenary sessions were the best part of … Read more Media in Transition 6 – Podcasts
From today’s Inside Higher Ed, “Digital Archives That Disappear,” a brief article about Google’s shutdown of the historical newspaper archive Paper of Record, which it secretly purchased in 2006. This is a good example of what many people have feared about Google’s success – that turning over information resources from shared, public control in library-related … Read more The constraining effects of information privatization: Google’s purchase and shutdown of Paper of Record
From the Izzy Award site: The first annual Izzy Award for “special achievement in independent media” was presented March 31, 2009, to blogger Glenn Greenwald and Democracy Now! host and executive producer Amy Goodman. Roughly 800 people attended the award ceremony at Ithaca’s State Theatre – including Izzy Stone’s son Jeremy, who spoke briefly. The … Read more Goodman & Greenwald win Izzy indy media award
I found these three items in Arts & Letters Daily…. In the New Yorker, a look back into the distant history of newspapers, “The Day the Newspaper Died,” by Jill Lepore. She puts the present newspaper crisis in perspective. In City Journal, Brendan Boyle reviews A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and … Read more Three from Arts & Letters Daily
From the site: The Izzy Award is named after legendary maverick journalist I. F. Stone, who launched I. F. Stone Weekly in 1953 and exposed government deception, McCarthyism, and racial bigotry. Presented annually for “special achievement in independent media,” the Izzy Award will go to an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our … Read more The Izzy Award – Call for Nominations
If you’re like me, you’re a librarian in part because you have a passion for the right to information, and by information I mean truth rather than lies. One of the books that originally kindled that passion for me in terms of its social meaning was Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies, … Read more The 2008 Falsies Awards
MediaLens is a UK organization dedicated to raising awareness of the way the media system distorts reality as a result of the forces of free-market capitalism. Their analysis of things is along the lines of Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model of media filtering. This month they have published a three-part analysis of current goings on … Read more MediaLens on journalism’s filtering system in action
I’m slow to catch this one, so I’ll just mention it (as an important scholarly paper that argues for the future of paper): William Powers’ “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal,” a discussion paper for the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.
Stephen Mitchell of UC Riverside wrote me the other day to ask, Do you know of academic libraries who have done BI on the War? We’re starting to talk about it and it occurred to me that someone has probably done a nice powerpoint somewhere that we could build on. I asked him if I … Read more BI on the War, anyone?
You could call it a bombshell if what the New York Times is reporting now were not already well known by skeptical observers, but it’s significant that the Times is reporting it, and that it’s being picked up by TV outlets. The big news is that “military experts” who have been been giving “objective analysis” … Read more NY Times reports on media manipulation by Pentagon
Eric Alterman, who writes on the news media regularly in The Nation magazine, has an interesting article in the current issue of The New Yorker on the decline of the newspaper: Out of Print: the Death and Life of the American Newspaper. I thought I knew a bit about what was happening to American newspapers, … Read more Alterman on Journalism in the New Yorker