CNN | Walk your camera
Photographer Stacy Kranitz has been traveling to Appalachia for a project called "Regression to the Mean," in which she explores whether stereotypes accurately represent a place and its people. She said she was honored when someone from CNN.com contacted her looking for photo stories and expressed interest in her project.

But then she saw the photo essay. As first published, it opened up with an image of a burning cross at a Klan rally, followed by a snake-handler at a Pentecostal church. The introduction stated that she had spent months exploring "the everyday lives of Appalachian people."

Kranitz told Roger May, a documentary photographer and a self-described "proud Applachian" that CNN had chosen only the images that confirmed stereotypes of the region:

I feel ashamed and humiliated for trusting CNN. I am stunned that they would take my work out of context. ...

I made clear to the editors at CNN that I was in the very early stages of the project and was not willing to make any claim that my work accurately reflected the Appalachian region. But they chose to make it sound as though that was exactly what I did.

I think people are rightfully angry. I am disgusted to see the words ”the everyday lives of Appalachian people” next to images of the KKK. That is a real insult to the region as is the reductive edit of my work and I understand why people are so offended by it.

CNN spokeswoman Erica Puntel said that CNN.com had chosen 16 of the 33 images Kranitz submitted, and that someone from CNN called to listen to her concerns. Puntel said by email:

[Kranitz] said that she had received a large amount of negative feedback and was concerned. She also said that she felt that the edit of the photographs did not represent her work in the way she had intended. (more...)

Mike Daisey | The Washington Post
"This American Life" is considering fact-checking David Sedaris' work for the program, Paul Farhi reports:

In an interview, [host Ira] Glass said no one at his program was concerned about Sedaris before the [Mike] Daisey episode. “We just assumed the audience was sophisticated enough to tell that this guy is making jokes and that there was a different level of journalistic scrutiny that we and they should apply,” he said.

But the Daisey debacle has brought about a reassessment. Glass said three responses are under discussion: fact-checking each of Sedaris’s stories to ensure their accuracy, labeling them to alert the audience that the stories contain “exaggerations” or doing nothing.

At the moment, Glass said, he thinks the best course is to check Sedaris’s facts to the extent that stories involving memories and long-ago conversations can be checked. The New Yorker magazine subjects Sedaris’s work to its rigorous fact-checking regime before it publishes his stories.

(more...)

Time Techland
The latest rumor of a new Apple product prompted Harry McCracken to check the track record of Digitimes, the Taiwan-based website that frequently cites "industry sources" in passing along rumors of new products and features. Turns out Digitimes' crystal ball is pretty cloudy (which means it must not be made by Apple):

When it comes to the big Apple stories, it’s wrong most of the time. Sometimes wildly so. ... At least some of its sources appear to be so lousy that suppressing their scuttlebutt would make more sense than publicizing it — and partway through its stories, it sometimes stops hedging and starts stating the rumor as fact.

McCracken was able to assess the accuracy of 21 of 25 stories (the remaining four could turn out to be accurate) and found that 16 were completely or largely "off-base." His advice: Ignore Digitimes' stories unless you can confirm them. On a related note, did you hear about Apple's latest game-changer, the iTV? || Related: David Cohn says everyone who can report substantially on tech industry is beholden to it | Is tech blogging over, or entering a new golden age?

(Thanks to Sarah F. Kessler for pointing this out.)

Federal Bureau of Investigation | Security Management
The FBI has posted a list of traits of corporate spies, and Security Management's Carlton Purvis says they'd have helped identify Joe Muto as the Fox Mole: "What Muto did wasn’t exactly espionage," Purvis writes, "but Fox News would no doubt categorize him as an insider threat."

The trouble with this theory is that the FBI's tip list sounds a lot like your average Mediabistro job listing, or lines from a pretty good annual review. Possible moles:

• "work odd hours without authorization." • "take proprietary or other information home in hard copy form and/or on thumb drives, computer disks, or e-mail." • "unnecessarily copy material, especially if it’s proprietary or classified." • "disregard company policies about installing personal software or hardware, accessing restricted websites, conducting unauthorized searches, or downloading confidential material." • "engage in suspicious personal contacts with competitors, business partners, or other unauthorized individuals." • "buy things they can’t afford." • "are overwhelmed by life crises or career disappointments."