This is a piece I wrote about the importance of media outlets sharing the raw data on which their articles are based, as they do with prose (e.g., FOIAed documents) with increasing frequency. →
Tag Archives: media
Rep. Pete Stark accused—then retracted—a charge against a journalist.
Pete Stark, a twenty (!) term Democrat from San Francisco, accused a San Francisco Chronicle reporter of contributing to one of his opponents. This took place while he was being videotaped, in the Chronicle’s offices. The reporter, who was in the room, said that wasn’t true. Then he said that he’d gotten the name wrong, …
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Warren Olney is emblematic of what’s wrong with modern journalism.
Warren Olney’s “To the Point,” the PRI show carried by NPR affiliates across the country, has long struck me as a bit of a parody of NPR. The name, for starters. I can’t remember the names of any of the faux NPR stations in “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” but they’re all names exactly like …
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Links for September 20th
Ars Technica: Patent trolls have cost innovators half a trillion dollarsA study by some Boston University researchers have found that, from publicly traded companies alone, $500B has been spent on paying off patent extortionists. That's a quarter of all U.S. R&D expenses, wasted. If we want to get serious about reducing the cost of doing …
Links for June 27th
WordPress Publisher Blog: A complete publishing system on WordPressThe Bangor Daily News managed to turn WordPress and Google Docs into an entire newspaper publishing system, by using a bunch of plugins to create an editorial workflow. Having written a lot of code to perform this very task, I'm really impressed by this. Better still, it …
Links for March 28th
Jim Loy: Converse, Inverse, ContrapositiveI never know when to use "converse" versus "interverse." (And I'm not smart enough—and possibly not pretentious enough—to ever use "contrapositive.") Turns out it's pretty straightforward. Philip Greenspun’s Weblog: How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?Forty million dollars? That's just stupid. I really …
Links for March 24th
Data Science ToolkitA self-contained virtual machine with a toolkit of brilliant data analysis utilities. Geolocation for IPs, street address to coordinates, coordinates to political divisions—that stuff you'd expect. But it can also pull country, city, and region names out of unstructured text. It can render HTML and return the text that would be displayed in …
Links for March 11th
The Blaze: Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics?This undercover video of an NPR exec is such a hack job that even Glenn Beck is calling foul. Comparing the edited version to the raw video makes obvious that unrelated bits of audio were edited together to make it appear that the …
The Virginian Pilot’s verified commenting system.
Three months ago, the Virginian Pilot started an interesting experiment. In the face of the same crappy reader comments that virtually every media outlet gets on their site, they decided to do something different. They started requiring proof of identity in order to comment on the editorial section of the site—verified in the form of …
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Links for February 16th
Washington Post: Ex-rep. Perriello might run for U.S. Senate in Va. if Kaine doesn’tGood. Kaine is my first choice, for practical reasons, but Perriello is my second. Library of Congress: Chronicling AmericaThe LoC has the complete contents of long-ago newspapers from all around Virginia, mostly from around the turn of the last century. The Richmond …