With apologies to the regular audience, I’m talking to students tomorrow morning at Lobocamp, using this post to share some links with the students: Census Bureau Census Bureau: Economic Characteristics of New Mexico Counties St. Louis FRED St. Louis FRED: New Mexico construction St. Luis Fred: New Mexico and its neighbors’ construction employment Energy Information …
I consider the business model that supports my journalism a great privilege. But I understand that a big part of the benefit offered by news production is a classic case of what economists call a “public good“. That is to say, civil society as a whole benefits, even if you don’t have the time to …
I happened to be in the midst of reading Kuhn vs. Popper when I ran across this, by Nicholas Lemann, on the sometimes clumsy dance between narrative and analysis in journalism: Forming a hypothesis. It’s healthier to admit to yourself that you have one than to go into a story with the idea that you have no …
I first met Christy George a couple of years back on the edge of a lovely lake outside Stockholm, where we spent two glorious days kicking around the joys and struggles of environmental storytelling. Christy is the former president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a public broadcasting news veteran and a clever teller of …
Continue reading ‘“My Vanishing Hometowns,” a climate change storytelling project’ »
On the twitter this evening, I stumbled across a fascinating paper (pdf) from a couple of years ago by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler documenting problems that can ensue when journalists try to debunk bunk that has an ideological component: Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several …
Political news, and especially the important news that really affects the campaign, proceeds at an irregular pace. But news coverage is produced every day. Most of it is filler, packaged in the form of stories that are designed to obscure its unimportance. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise.
A treasure found in an old file drawer – a 1995 congressional press pass:
Dan Kahan, the Yale “cultural cognition” guy, has a new paper highlighting the problem with the argument that a more scientifically literate public will solve all our scientized problems, things like climate change, GMOs and nuclear stuff where the scientific argument has become intractably embedded in a political context. (The paper’s actually targeted at climate …
Continue reading ‘Science literacy, numeracy and science policy challenges’ »
I don’t know who “qbertplaya” is, but I am eternally thankful to him or her for this: It’s Patti Smith closing CBGB, the last song played there, a moment in history captured by someone wise and generous enough to hold up some sort of mobile recording device. I was struck by that act when I …
A group with one set of interests in California water has tried to frame the discussion over how much water can be diverted from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the classic “farmers vs. fish” framework. Others disagree. Traditional “view from nowhere” journalism quotes one from Column A and one from Column B and calls it …
Continue reading ‘Mike Taugher tells us what’s really going on with Sacramento Delta diversions’ »