Andrew Beaujon and Julie Moos
Dec. 21, 2012
2:41 pm
At a Friday "press conference" (no questions were allowed), National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre provided
the gun lobby's explanation for
the shooting deaths of 28 people a week ago today in Newtown, Conn. Among LaPierre's culprits: the media. Here is a breakdown of ways the NRA says media causes gun violence, along with a factcheck.
Media inspires copycats:
The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn't planning his attack on a school he's already identified at this very moment?
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 21, 2012
9:42 am
Cabel.me |
The Oregonian
Cabel Maxfield Sasser
explores the "very, very old basement" of a building in Portland, Ore., and realizes that a major Internet hub for the Northwest used to be a pressroom. Old newspaper pages and humorous rules about conduct in the pressroom are still plastered to the walls (if "you wish to get intoxicated, do so only on the job"). Someone who works in the building tells him "they used to print The Oregonian down here, way back."
It's
probably not The Oregonian's old pressroom, Mike Rogoway writes in The Oregonian: "historical evidence suggests that the newspaper printed continuously at another site -- the old Oregonian Building at Southwest Sixth and Alder -- from the 1890s until the late 1940s."
The
Pittock Block, where Sasser conducted his exploration, had been a potential home for The Evening Telegram in 1914, Rogoway writes.
Pittock did house other publishers at times -- a 1924 directory lists both the American Educational Association and Western American Publishing Co.
So the mystery remains. Sasser's pictures are beautiful, and with the
changes that have come to The Oregonian's corporate siblings in the past year, they have some extra resonance.
"The roar of the presses that ruled these rooms has been replaced, just as we all suspected, with the calculated silence of the conduit that carries our data," Sasser writes. "[N]ever has the building's transformation been so lyrically conveyed," Rogoway writes about Sasser's post.
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Julie Moos
Dec. 21, 2012
9:15 am
During the five days
Richard Engel and a crew of four others were held in Syria, the kidnappers "didn't really know who we were," Engel told Savannah Guthrie during an interview that aired Friday on the "Today" show. The NBC News chief foreign correspondent also described their escape.
We weren't expecting, obviously, a rescue, but the rebels knew we were in the area. They'd been alerted. They'd been alerted by NBC. They'd been alerted by other friendly forces who had told the rebels, 'You've got people in your neighborhood. Increase your security. Go find these people.' That pressure inspired our kidnappers to move us to a safer place, deeper into their territory. And if we had gotten to that territory, that's goodbye. You wouldn't see us for a long, long time or you may never see us again."
During that move, they were freed by the rebels.
The ordeal, Engel said, is "not gonna change what I'm doing with my life, what is my life."
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 20, 2012
4:56 pm
ABC | CNN
ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper is moving to CNN. At the foot of an ABC News announcement about re-assignments in its D.C. bureau, ABC News President Ben Sherwood writes:
Jake is leaving ABC News for an opportunity at CNN. You’ll hear more about his new anchor role from his new network. For years, Jake has set the pace for the White House press corps. A ferocious reporter – and now a best-selling author – he has built a reputation as one of the most prolific and multi-talented journalists on the beat, scoring scoop after scoop. For the last three years his fellow White House correspondents have honored his work with a streak of Merriman Smith Awards for Presidential Coverage under Deadline Pressure.
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 20, 2012
4:06 pm
The Boston Globe |
The New York Times
Metro columnist Brian McGrory has been named the new editor of The Boston Globe. McGrory's appointment follows the departure of Marty Baron,
who left to become Executive Editor of The Washington Post.
In a story announcing his appointment, McGrory says, “What I want is more digging, more narrative journalism, more reporting that holds people accountable and more enterprise stories on the front page."
McGrory
was a paperboy for the Globe, Christine Haughney reports in The New York Times, whose parent company also owns the Globe. Globe publisher Chris Mayer praised McGrory's ability to "inspire the talent and attracting and retaining the talent.”
Globe staffers were informed of McGrory's appointment by email. Thursday, they were live-tweeting his subsequent introduction to staff as the boss:
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 20, 2012
3:44 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 20, 2012
11:25 am
One of the Christmasy animals is visiting the Toronto Star's newsroom. It seems to be making a good argument for keeping animals outdoors: The animal "peed on the carpet and now it smells," photo editor Canice Leung
tweeted, adding soon after that the reindeer had disgraced another office:
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 20, 2012
11:10 am
McCracken County Sheriff's Dept.
Sheriff Jon Hayden reflects on the unusual events of this past week, when The Paducah (Ky.) Sun
refused to release the name of the author of a letter alleging a fellow student had made threats to a local high school. As it turned out, the sheriff's department had already investigated those purported threats and found they were based on a misunderstanding: The students some thought were threatening the school were actually discussing the videogame
Minecraft.
"This incident would have been cleared up by Monday afternoon, had the name been provided," Hayden writes.
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 19, 2012
6:28 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 19, 2012
3:51 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 19, 2012
11:38 am
Quartz
Quartz added credit to a New York Times-made graphic it featured in its
list of great charts of 2012, defusing a request from the paper's legal department to remove the graphic.
"The issue in the Quartz piece as it was originally published was that they did not mention The Times as the source of the graphic in the write-up (although they did link to our site)," Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy tells Poynter in an email.
Quartz notes, correctly, that
the same graphic was featured on Poynter.org, which did credit the Times. Both publications featured screenshots of the
original chart, which is interactive.
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 19, 2012
11:06 am
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 19, 2012
9:17 am
CBS and NPR's coverage of the Syrian uprising were recognized by the 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards, whose
winners were announced Wednesday morning by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
CBS reporter Clarissa Ward "bravely reported on what was happening inside Syria’s dangerous and largely inaccessible insurgent strongholds despite government efforts to keep foreign journalists away," the awards say.
To report this extraordinary series of nine stories, Ward entered Syria posing as a tourist carrying only a small camera. She gave viewers the rare opportunity to meet the people behind the shaky cell phone videos posted on YouTube. With deliberate and straightforward reporting, Ward provided riveting details about activists and regular citizens as their struggle brought Syria to the brink of civil war.
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 19, 2012
9:09 am
Time
The Taliban "wanted to silence" Malala Yousafzai when they shot her and several classmates on Oct. 9, Aryn Baker writes. "
Instead, they amplified her voice."
The Pakistani teenager was targeted for championing girls' education, a campaign that gained international recognition when she began
blogging about her education for the BBC, anonymously at first. After she acknowledged she'd written the blog, Malala was attacked in her hometown of Mingora, where one would-be assassin
put a bullet in her head. The authorities
made arrests, but didn't find the attack's planner. The Taliban complained later that
the media showed bias while covering its attempted murder of a child: "this filthy, godless media has taken huge advantage of this situation, and journalists have started passing judgment on us," a Taliban spokesperson said in October.
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Andrew Beaujon
Dec. 18, 2012
5:12 pm
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