Category Archives: Uncategorized

Staying safe while covering news

Carlos Gonzales 2017, Wikipedia

US Journalists face war zone conditions at home (E & P )

U.S. Press Freedom Tracker  showed at least 32 detentions or arrests of journalists — all occurring while reporting on immigration action, and 90% occurring at demonstrations. Most detained journalists were released without charges or had the charges quickly dropped.  (Also) direct attacks on the press with tear gas, pepper balls and other less-lethal projectiles tripled in 2025.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has a long list of things you can do to keep safe.

 

Race, protests and journalism

Journalism skills – BBC

SPJ Media Ethics – photo editing

Journalism @ RU

‘Stranger Things’ misses part of the story

Cool? Yes. Accurate? Not entirely.

The Netflix series “Stranger Things” does not do justice to the way women were moving up in journalism in the 1980s, according to Kelly McBride writing for the Poynter Institute.

She writes:

“Yes, there was plenty of sexism in both newsrooms and the broader world. (And racism, too, which isn’t acknowledged much in the series.) But The Hawkins Post looks more like 1955 than 1985, when women were making enormous strides in journalism.”

Media trust issues in UK

John Cleese talks about disappointment with the UK government, the Brexit vote, and the conservative domination of UK media.

Report for America

Report for America, a partnership between the GroundTruth Project and Google News Lab with support from the Lenfest Institute, the Knight Foundation, and a number of other journalism organizations, has the ambitious goal of putting 1,000 journalists into underserved newsrooms across America over the next five years, according to an article in Nieman Reports.

A journalists call to action

One thing is certain in the wake of the 2016 presidential election,  says  Margaret Sullivan’s  Nov 11 2016 column in the Washington Post 

“Journalists are going to have to be better — stronger, more courageous, stiffer-spined — than they’ve ever been.

“Donald Trump made hatred of the media the centerpiece of his campaign. Journalists were just cogs in a corporate machine, part of the rigged system. If many Americans distrusted us in the past, they came to actively hate us.

“…  We have to be willing to fight back,” she said. Continue reading

A poet’s view

Neruda