Elephant Diaries: On Endorsements and Bias

An intriguing analysis by RIccardo Puglisi and James Snyder, published this month in NBER (gated), finds statistical evidence for a correlation between newspapers’ endorsement patterns (R vs. D) and the papers’ news coverage of scandals involving Republican and Democratic politicians: [T]hose with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elec tions give significantly more …

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Elephant Diaries: Information in Meatspace

Bruce Barcott on the loss of newspapers: It matters because papers exist in the physical world, the meatspace with the rest of us, and the fact of their existence, in print on paper, sitting on every corner of downtown Seattle, reminds us that there’s a larger conversation going on around us. She’s worried that the …

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Elephant Diaries: Report from Colorado

Tom Yulsman, from the Center for Environmental Journalism in Boulder, bemoans a life without Rocky Mountain News and, potentialy, the Denver Post? If Scripps cannot find a buyer for the Rocky Mountain News — and no one thinks it will — then the paper will go belly up,  leaving the Denver Post as the only …

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Elephant Diaries: The Great Paradox

Surowiecki in the New Yorker: The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind …

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Elephant Diaries: Science Journalism Edition

Chris Mooney had a nice piece this week on Science Progress about the decline in science specialist journalists at major mainstream media publications. I think Chris nails the problem squarely, but I’d like to elaborate on the implication, because it applies much more broadly. Here’s Chris’s key point: Science journalism, at its best, should also …

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Elephant Diaries: The Economics of Local News

Saul Hansell explains the underlying economic reality that comes with the Internet’s unbundling of the previously bundled product that my various employers over the years have been tricking you into buying: [T]he bad news for anyone who actually likes reading about where they live is that no one seems to be able to develop an …

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Elephant Diaries: The Superhero Metaphor

My daughter, Nora, notes by way of metaphor the story line in the sixth season of Buffy when Buffy realizes she can’t support herself saving people from vampires. “Her younger sister and one of her friends suggest that she start charging people for saving them,” Nora said. Me: I’m guessing that didn’t work out well? …

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Elephant Diaries: The NPR Model

One model being discussed in the journalism world as an alternative to the faltering for-profit newspaper model for the production of local news is what we call “the NPR model” – not-for-profit, supported by philanthropies. That is how I would describe the Independent, for example. My aforementioned smart old pal Chuck, one of the founders …

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20 years and 5,767 posts on, a thank you note to Inkstain readers

Thanks, y’all, for 20 years of stopping by to read stuff here. There’s a game we used to play back in the day called “googlewhack”. It involved searching for a two-word phrase that was unique – that had never before been catalogued in Google’s even-then-vast archive of humanity’s digital use of written language. We’d stick …

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