Mike Taugher tells us what’s really going on with Sacramento Delta diversions

Posted by jfleck on 2 October 2011, 5:41 pm

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 …

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Central Basin Municipal Water District ignores the first rule of holes

Posted by jfleck on 17 September 2011, 12:26 pm

In my automated news searches on California water issues, I’d run across a number of stories of late on a web site called “News Hawks”, which seemed to be devoting an inordinate amount of time to detailing the efforts of an obscure Southern California water agency called the Central Basin Municipal Water District. I didn’t …

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Elephant Diaries: The Revenue Problem

Posted by jfleck on 24 July 2011, 11:21 am

Heartbreaking words by Josh Brodesky inside the Arizona Daily Star newsroom last week as another round of layoffs came: The cuts filled the newsroom with an eerie stillness accented only by tears and typing. The next day’s paper still had to be put out. I think most staffers knew a day like Thursday would come, …

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What I did with my week, social media edition

Posted by jfleck on 3 July 2011, 11:29 am

Up early this morning to watch the team time trial at Le Tour, I flipped on the computer to check what was going on with the Los Alamos fire. (I was hoping to take a few minutes during a commercial break to post an updated fire map.) It was a little before 8 a.m., and …

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Protecting the Tribe

Posted by jfleck on 12 June 2011, 10:16 am

Seen in the morning print edition of the Sacramento Bee, Tim Johnson on the dangers faced by those plying our trade in Mexico: Some 66 Mexican journalists have been killed in a little more than five years, many if not most for exercising their professions. Just last week, authorities found the body of Noel López …

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Worn Proudly

Posted by jfleck on 22 April 2011, 9:51 pm

When I’m telling stories, I look for the telling example that can represent something deeper – some small but memorable tip to stand in for the rest of the iceberg. There are ways in which Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, the two photojournalists killed this week in Libya, are terrible examples, bad choices as the …

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Elephant Diaries: Dallas Goes Paywall

Posted by jfleck on 9 March 2011, 10:46 pm

In a coda to my old Elephant Diaries series on the economics of news, a brief note from Dallas as the Morning News goes paywall: “Local newspaper websites are never going to scale to page view levels that make the math work,” he said. “The volume of traffic to these sites is inherently limited by …

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Social Media and the Journalist’s Toolkit

Posted by jfleck on 5 February 2011, 10:01 pm

Three interesting case studies this week in the use of social media in my journalism (or in one case just my life), which I hope might be of some interest to others (especially colleagues who have been skeptical of its utility – you know who you are). New Mexico had a historic storm this week, …

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Favorite newspaper corrections

Posted by jfleck on 2 September 2010, 1:50 pm

From the New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003: An obituary of the nuclear physicist Edward Teller on Thursday misstated the number of hydrogen atoms that join to make helium in the fusion process. It is four, not two.

Why David Appell Might Quit Reporting on Climate

Posted by jfleck on 17 July 2010, 3:07 pm

David Appell, the science journalist whose work more than anyone else’s got me thinking hard about the implications of climate change and its relationship to my journalism, spewed some frustration last week that resonated. It doesn’t quoteblock well, go read the whole thing, but in a nutshell he argues that there’s not much point for …

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jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

Archive of posts filed under the journalism category.