Murrow, Newspapers, Media

Is History Repeating Itself? — Medium: " . . . . One of Murrow’s contemporaries, a writer named Robert Landry, summed up Murrow’s advantages: “Murrow has three advantages over correspondents for the greatest American newspapers: 1) He beats the newspapers by hours; 2) He reaches millions who otherwise have to depend on provincial newspapers for their foreign news; 3) He writes his own headlines. That is to say he emphasizes what he wishes—whereas the newspaper correspondent writes in cablese.” Today we see a similar phenomena happen again and again. The media industry establishment initially dismisses, and then embraces, the new communication technologies the internet has given us: blogging, Twitter, social, mobile, web video. And the people who pioneer the new formats, do the most innovative and creative work, and who bring the rest of the public from skepticism to enthusiasm, are mostly the ones who don’t care what the establishment thinks, who come to the industry with a fresh mind without anything to unlearn, and who have a broadly optimistic disposition toward new communications technology. . . ."

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Sorkin, DealBook, Sponsors, Conflicts

Deal Me Out | Alex Pareene | The Baffler: "Sorkin is close to his sources, who are also his sponsors. His compensation is tied to the financial performance of his financial news blog empire, which is underwritten by the finance industry. This is a fine example of exactly the sort of twisted incentive structures that led Wall Street firms to produce and sell a lot of toxic debt. In this one limited sense, you might say, DealBook does shed inadvertent light on the inner workings of finance."

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NBC, MSNBC sink to bottom of who the public trusts

NBC (owned by Comcast) in a Race to the Bottom --

NBC, MSNBC sink to bottom of who the public trusts | WashingtonExaminer.com:
NBC News and sister cable network MSNBC rank at the bottom of media outlets Americans trust most for news, with Fox News leading the way, according to a new poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling. In its fifth trust poll, 35 percent said they trusted Fox news more than any other outlet, followed by PBS at 14 percent, ABC at 11 percent,CNN at 10 percent, CBS at 9 percent, 6 percent for MSNBC and Comedy Central, and just 3 percent for NBC.

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Automated Breaking News

Steiner’s new service uses the output from the Wikimedia Live Monitor as the input search term for Social Media Illustrator. The result is a set of images associated with the breaking news event organized in a grid. Steiner’s assumption is that these images somehow tell the story behind the news event. He publishes these images on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mediagalleries. (source infra)

The Evolution of Automated Breaking News Stories | MIT Technology Review: "A quick glance at the twitter feed reveals where more work is needed. One problem is that in many cases, it is not at all clear what breaking news stories the images refer to. Neither are the images generated in the media gallery hyperlinked, so it’s not possible to click through and see where they came from. What’s more, the images need to be cropped so they fit together in a grid but this often results in important information being lost, such as captions being cropped. That’s not to say that the approach doesn’t have potential. There is a growing interest in the automated production of news, and algorithms now exist that van do this in some circumstances with varying degrees of success. It’s quite possible that some of the news we consume in the future will be spotted, evaluated and written and illustrated by an algorithm." (read more at link above)

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