Taylor Miller Thomas
May 23, 2013
2:25 pm
An
online fundraising effort for New Orleans freelancer Deborah Cotton met its $15,000 goal within four days. While some of the donations came from her friends and family, others came from people who have never met Cotton.
Cotton was
shot while covering a parade in New Orleans on Mother’s Day. The campaign has since increased its goal to $75,000. With it, Cotton’s friends hope to “help with the enormous expense she will incur from her injuries.”
Crowdsourced journalism yielded less-than-stellar results after the Boston Marathon bombing: Reddit users
identified the wrong suspects; the police asked people to stop
live-tweeting from scanners. But the intersection of crowdfunding and journalism grows more interesting every day. A Gawker Indiegogo project is attempting to
raise $200,000 to buy a video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking a crack pipe; it’s raised more than $132,000 so far. Planet Money raised
more than enough to fund a story about the global garment trade.
Crowdfunding isn’t a perfect mechanism for all journalism projects. An attempt to
buy the Tribune Company to “free the press” (ostensibly from the Koch brothers, who are interested in the company), for instance, has raised a little more than $100,000, far short of its goal to raise $660 million.
Related:
Planet Money’s crowdfunded T-shirt project surpasses goal by more than $200,000
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Taylor Miller Thomas
May 23, 2013
12:58 pm
Knight Foundation
The Knight Foundation
has given $1 million to the Internet Archive so it can expand its
TV News Search & Borrow project, a library of television news broadcasts.
The expansion will help Internet Archive make the library more searchable and increase the content available to historians, journalists, documentarians and others who use the service.
“One of the things that we’re going to be putting the Knight funding towards is really looking at this interface,” Roger Macdonald, director of the Search & Borrow project, said by phone. The improvements will “make it easier for people to do what has been a fairly novel thing.”
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Andrew Beaujon
May 23, 2013
9:17 am
TVSpy |
Perazzi |
KDVR |
KUSA |
Examiner.com
Denver TV station KDVR, a Fox affiliate, broadcast a story Saturday that
claimed an Italian shotgun-company executive "was taken in for questioning by law enforcement"
after a taxi driver mistook him for a terrorist. KDVR didn't speak to the executive, Daniele Perazzi, but to his "U.S. attorney," who "told FOX31 Denver that her client was scared during the incident because he’s not familiar with U.S. gun laws and thought he’d done something wrong."
Daniele Perazzi
died in 2012. The "
incident is devoid of any foundation and the news is completely fabricated," the company said in a statement.
And the woman who contacted the station wasn't an attorney, KDVR now says.
But she wasn't the only one flogging the story, KDVR reports:
David Kopel, a nationally-recognized Second Amendment attorney with the Independence Institute in Denver, first told FOX31 Denver about the alleged incident Saturday. He referred us to Korrine Aguirre, who, it now appears, concocted an elaborate but false story.
Kopel has been
visiting faculty at Poynter and
recently spoke at a Poynter seminar on how to cover guns.
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Joshua Gillin
May 22, 2013
4:16 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
May 22, 2013
3:45 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
May 22, 2013
1:31 pm
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May 22, 2013
12:52 pm
Gregory J. Millman writes about the IRS nabbing his phone records in 1991: “Outside the DOJ, any law-enforcement entity with subpoena power can obtain phone records without notice.”
To this date, I do not know how many of my phone records, covering what period of time, went to the investigator working on both the IRS and DOJ investigations of a tax story published in 1991. The government never told me and the telephone company refused to release the information. I never again phoned my sources on that story. Maybe that’s what people mean by “chilling effect.”
“
Gregory J. Millman, The Wall Street Journal
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Andrew Beaujon
May 22, 2013
10:31 am
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Andrew Beaujon
May 22, 2013
9:13 am
Adam Cole is not an "Arrested Development" superfan: "I have friends who are much more into it than I am," the NPR reporter said in a phone interview. But Cole took a scientist's eye to the cult television series, which will be resurrected Sunday after its 2006 cancellation.
Cole's employer, NPR, presented his data Friday in an insanely complex news app called "
Previously, on Arrested Development." The app lets you delve into, say, how many times Tobias "giggles ambitiously," or do a deep dive into
Buster and missing limbs.

- A selection from the graphic.
Cole originally envisioned a static graphic, saying that "I didn’t think I would bring this to work. I thought it would be a fun thing." But he added that when Netflix announced it would revive the series, "I was like, 'Wow, this is as good a peg as I’m ever gonna get.' "
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Taylor Miller Thomas
May 21, 2013
12:03 pm
The San Francisco Chronicle changed its style on “illegal immigrant” Monday. It’s the latest of several publications to reconsider the term.
The newspaper’s new style will “essentially match” the Associated Press’
style on the term, David Steinberg, copy desk chief at the Chronicle, said in an email to Poynter.
Chronicle journalists are now advised not to refer to a person as “illegal” or as an “alien;” instead, “illegal” should only be used in describing the means by which they entered the country, and only with proper attribution.
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May 21, 2013
10:40 am
AP photographer Sue Ogrocki talks about photographing children at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., Monday.
In the 30 minutes that I was outside the destroyed school, I photographed about a dozen children pulled from the rubble.
I focused my lens on each one of them. Some looked dazed. Some cried. Others seemed terrified.
But they were alive.
I know that some students were among those who died in the tornado, but for a moment, there was hope in the devastation.
“
Sue Ogrocki, Associated Press
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Andrew Beaujon
May 21, 2013
9:46 am
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Andrew Beaujon
May 20, 2013
5:01 pm
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Joshua Gillin
May 20, 2013
3:20 pm
Los Angeles Times |
Committee to Protect Journalists |
Texas Observer |
Wired
Escalating cartel violence in Mexico has led to bouts of self-censorship among journalists fearing reprisals, but few so prominently as Nuevo Laredo's El Mañana, which has decided to quit reporting on local cartel violence altogether.
The Los Angeles Times' Molly Hennessy-Fiske writes that since the paper's editor Roberto Mora Garcia was killed in 2004, there have been
a number of attacks on the paper's journalists and offices, leading to the extreme measure.
Two years later, armed men shot up the Nuevo Laredo office, leaving a reporter paralyzed. Afterward, the paper installed bulletproof glass and fortified walls.
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May 20, 2013
11:31 am
At Columbia Business School Sunday, New York Times Co. President and CEO Mark Thompson spoke to new MBAs about “conventional wisdom and all the apparently excellent advice that flows from it.”
Take my industry. The movies are finished. TV advertising is dead. Exactly what happened to music will happen to TV. Nobody wants news anymore. No one will ever pay for anything on the internet. Not just said, but said widely and widely believed. And – for the most part and within the time horizon which the prophets themselves were suggesting – just plain wrong.
“
Jeff John Roberts, Paid Content
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