Black and Blue? Gold and White? What does #thedress mean for journalism educators? At the time of writing, the original Buzzfeed post has just under over 38m visitors and 3.4m people have voted in poll at the bottom of the post. Slate created a landing page, aggregating all their posts including a live blog. Cosmo copied Buzzfeed. Time produced a quick post […]
Category Archives: Academic Work
Nieman Lab 2015 Predictions for Journalism
Last week I delivered the first lecture in our Introduction to Journalism unit. I am building on the material that my colleague, Caroline Fisher, developed in 2014. One of the things about teaching journalism is that every example has to be ‘up to date’. One of the things that Caroline discussed in the 2014 lecture […]
The Australian Newspaper Outrage Cycle
Media editor of The Australian, Sharri Markson, has produced an article titled ‘Activism a threat to journalism‘. In it she draws on sources to argue that ‘activist journalism academics’ on ‘social media’ are a threat to journalism. She paraphrases her boss and Australian newspaper editor, Chris Mitchell: Editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, said the greatest […]
Vox the News Cycle
Interesting discussion at Nieman Journalism Lab triggered by a recent post by Vox Media’s VP of Engineering, Michael Lovitt, on launching Vox.xom as a nine week development project. Vox.com has some very cool features, not least of which is the threading of topically related stories into ‘StoryStreams’, including the stream of “How We Make Vox“. Co-founder of Vox, […]
Building Research Capacity
Ben Eltham‘s analysis of the cuts to investment in science and research also touches on some general points about building research capacity in the contemporary era of underfunded research institutions. The main point that needs to be emphasised is the lack of stability that the current de-funding approach produces. Eltham quotes Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt on the difficulties of […]