Spectacular: @InsideClimate News Pulitzer Prize for coverage of pipeline problems. Shows how dogged reporting can persist outside mainstream journalism. Here’s the citation and links to the work:
Steve Coll is super forward-looking choice for new Dean of @ColumbiaJourn.alism School. From President Lee C. Bollinger:
I am pleased to announce my appointment of Steve Coll, one of the most experienced and respected journalists of his generation, as the new Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Our Journalism School, now completing an extended celebration of its centennial, is in the midst of a period of institutional innovation as significant as any since the school’s founding a century ago. Under the exemplary decade-long leadership of outgoing Dean Nicholas Lemann and his team, the School has launched centers focused on digital journalism, media innovation and investigative reporting, and created a comprehensive new curriculum, including a dual degree program in Computer Science and Journalism with our School of Engineering and Applied Science. It also has added an exceptional master of arts program that provides journalists with the kind of substantive grounding in academic knowledge that is needed for intelligent coverage and commentary on the critical issues facing our society. As a result Columbia has solidified our standing as having the premier school of journalism in the nation and, indeed, the world.
Nonetheless, Nick Lemann would be the first to acknowledge that these developments cannot be seen as a legacy to be preserved, but as work that must be ongoing. We all recognize that sweeping changes in digital technology and the global marketplace have created unprecedented challenges and opportunities for the news media that demand constant reflection on the mission and substance of a modern journalism education.
That Steve Coll is ideally suited for taking on this leadership challenge is made clear by more than the experience he and Nick happen to share as admired long-time writers for The New Yorker. In 1985, Steve joined the Washington Post as a general assignment feature writer for the Style section and over the next twenty years served as a foreign correspondent and senior editor, culminating in his successful tenure as managing editor from 1998 to 2004. A Pulitzer Prize winner in explanatory journalism for a series of Post articles on the Securities and Exchange Commission, which he reported with David Vise, Steve is the author of seven books including “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” for which he received a second Pulitzer in 2005 for general non-fiction. His latest book, “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,” was published this past November, and won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs prize for best business book of the year. Most recently Steve served for five years as president of The New America Foundation, a leading public policy institute in Washington that has supported a remarkable range of thinking on the issues facing our society, including the changes in journalism. It is experience that will serve him well here at Columbia, not only at the Journalism School but across a University community whose breadth of scholarship makes this a unique place to help shape the future of journalism.
I want to express my gratitude to the members of the search committee for their dedication of time and energy. While we are glad to have completed our work together, I will personally miss collaborating with such a collegial, insightful and diverse team dedicated to the School, the University and the profession.
For the present, please join me in thanking Nick Lemann for his enduring contributions over the past decade and in welcoming Steve Coll as the new Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
“The Crisis in Climate Reporting.” - An event by climate, environment, and media experts on how journalists are a critical conduit to discussing climate change.
The speakers explored several practical solutions and then launch into a decent Q&A. Some were simple, such as directing readers to share their reading materials or collaborate with authors from various news outlets (e.g., Mother Jones partnering with, say, Washington Post to work on and cross-post the same stories, which would reach different audiences.). It was good to hear some practical solutions rather than esoteric brainstorming.
The public is poorly served by reports about climate change that follow familiar lines and surface only when there’s a severe weather event or UN conference; meanwhile, media outlets like the New York Times are scaling back on environmental reporting.
Orion and media watchdog Free Press convened a panel of authors and activists (including Kate Sheppard, M. Sanjayan, Bill McKibben, and others) to propose concrete actions for improving the state of climate reporting in the mainstream media.
Climate Science Communications Week is winding down at Climate Adaptation! For the entire week of Feb. 18 - 23, I covered how climate change is discussed by the media, scientists, researchers, academics, and politicians. If you have sources or ideas on communicating climate change, send to: http://climateadaptation.tumblr.com/submit
“Greening the Media” report contains some pretty awful conclusions. e.g. this line is self-contradictory: “There are more resources to support robust environmental reporting than ever before in the form of news services, academic institutions, journalism training organizations and science-based civil society organizations, and making use of these resources enables a news organization to increase coverage of environmental stories without necessarily having to incur additional costs.”
Robust environmental reporting would not require the use of “news services” for content, for instance. What it needs is money and top-down support in newsrooms, and that’s going away.
The picture is not all dark and there are fabulous training and networking efforts, particularly EJ-Net.
And other forms of environmental communication will expand in the place of environmental reporting. Some of these alternatives can be excellent, but they are not journalism.
Journalism job: ClimateWire, an award-winning Internet daily published in Washington, D.C., is looking for a science writer to lead its coverage of the impacts of climate change on research, technology and weather patterns long regarded as “normal.” The ideal candidate would be a good writer with a science background and at least two years of reporting experience. The job pays $50,000 a year and up, depending upon your qualifications. Please send a resume and a few clips to John Fialka, editor ClimateWire, at jfialka@eenews.net
Via @amarguriro, great to learn of launch of National Council of Environmental Journalists in Pakistan - first forum of environmental journalists at national level there. His note:
“The forum comprises on 30 journalists from 21 cities of Pakistan. NCEJ members are attached with mainstream newspaper (Including Dawn, Express Tribune, Awami Awaz, Daily Duyna, The Nation, Sindhi Koshish, Daily Ibrat and others), FM Radios, television channels of English, Urdu, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashtoo, Punjabi, Saraiki, Balti and Dari languages.
The forum was established in June 2012 during an Environmental Journalism Training Workshop. our website www.ncejpak.org On November 13, 2012, we have formally launched the forum in PC Hotel Karachi.
U.S. Newspapers and the People Who Read Them
Sent via a friend (anyone know origin?):
A Guide to U.S. Newspapers
1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
2. The WashingtonPost is read by people who think they run the country.
3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country, but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could find the time — and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.
A sorry fish tale as BBC deconstructs media hype over “only 100 cod left in North Sea.” Reality here. The BBC menu of hyped stories here:
- Only 100 cod in North Sea - Sunday Times, 16 September
- Just 100 cod left - Telegraph Online, 16 September
- Good Cod! - The Sun, 17 September
- Scientists fear for cod stocks - Daily Mail, 17 September
- Just 100 Fully Grown Cod - Atlantic Wire, 17 September
- Is it the end of the line for North Sea cod? - Socialist Worker, 25 September
- Too few fish in the sea? - Globe and Mail, 27 September
Study of ADHD research & media coverage shows how lure of the provocative torques media toward conveying conclusions that end up wrong. Seen via @keithkloor alert on @economist article.
The study:
”Because newspapers preferentially echo initial ADHD findings appearing in prominent journals, they report on uncertain findings that are often refuted or attenuated by subsequent studies. If this media reporting bias generalizes to health sciences, it represents a major cause of distortion in health science communication.”
The Economist article, on “Journalistic Deficit Disorder.”
Some broader context provided through my past coverage of “whiplash” in science and journalism, as on Dot Earth here — “On Plankton, Warming and Whiplash” — and in “Whiplash Climate Journalism” in the Columbia Journalism Review.
How norms in newsrooms & top journals lead to much that you read about science being wrong. Great @sethmnookin post below. More on the perils of the “front-page thought” at Dot Earth. Here’s an excerpt from Seth’s piece:
[A] team of researchers based in France published a paper in PLOS ONE titled “Why Most Biomedical Findings Echoed by Newspapers Turn Out to be False: The Case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” (The paper’s authors were intentionally evoking the title of John P. A. Ioannidis’s groundbreaking 2005 piece, “Why most published research findings are false,” which built off of his earlier JAMA paper, “Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research.”) After examining every newspaper report about the ten most covered research papers on ADHD from the 1990s, the authors were able to provide empirical evidence for a troubling phenomenon that seems to be all but baked in to the way our scientific culture operates: We pay lots of attention to things that are almost assuredly not true.
