Founded as St. Louis Journalism Review in 1970
Coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing once again revealed the great strength and enduring weakness of TV’s news channels. As during past events, from people’s demonstrations to natural disasters, the cameras were there for us, witnessing and recording. We watched, even when irritated by relentless repetition of the same incident, and the images etched themselves into our minds.
This is a listing of media notes as compiled by Benjamin Israel.
The number of reporters covering statehouse news has decreased sharply while the complexity and volume of legislation continues to increase, and news organizations could be missing major stories because of this lower level of staffing. Those were the sentiments of Mike Lawrence and Terry Ganey during a session with journalism students at SIU Carbondale.
If Joseph Pulitzer could return to Missouri’s state capital, he’d probably recognize a recent development that was familiar during his time: politicians publishing newspapers. At the beginning of this legislative session, Rod Jetton, a former House speaker, launched a startup weekly, the Missouri Times. The newspaper and its website promotion promised “a different kind of media outlet” that would become “Missouri’s newspaper of politics and culture.” The journal’s arrival represented a new phase in the evolution of Missouri government coverage.
The board of directors of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals, recently passed a resolution regarding the 25th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court significantly reducing the level of First Amendment protection afforded to students’ journalistic speech in the case of Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier. In the ruling, the court’s 5-3 majority concluded that schools could lawfully censor student expressions in non-public forum media for any “legitimate pedagogical purpose,” and that among the recognized lawful purposes was the elimination of speech tending to “associate the school with any position other than neutrality on matters of political controversy.”