Founded as St. Louis Journalism Review in 1970
If you haven’t listened to the NPR show “Serial” (available for free as Podcasts online as http://serialpodcast.org), you are missing some of what may be the best journalism ever. Serial is a spin-off of NPR’s “This American Life.” The premise is simple. Reporter Sarah Koenig examines a single murder case with an abundance of questions surrounding it. Is the man convicted of the crime really the one who did it?
On Tuesday, January 20, Channel 5 (KSDK) meteorologist Bree Smith appeared on the Today Show and made the people of the area proud. Smith was invited to do the weather with Al Roker in the 8 am segment after St. Louisians contributed more than any other city to a Today Show fund raiser (for food). The winning city’s NBC affiliate got their weathercaster on the Today Show to present the weather with Al Roker. Her performance? Just about perfect.
Articles such as Rave Somaiya’s Jan. 15 story in the New York Times, titled “Times and Other News Organizations to Test Use of Drones,” should come as a surprise to no one who’s been paying attention to the technology behind these unmanned aerial vehicles. After all, what makes drones so appealing to journalists is that they give reporters access to the sky. That’s something that was not so readily accessible before these machines made their presence known. To get aerial shots used to require a helicopter, a hot-air balloon or an airplane, all of which usually are dependent on others to operate – and cost money to use, too. But using aerial technology take pictures of the world around us is not new at all.
Right after the January 7 murderous attacks on the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” and a kosher supermarket in Paris, TV and internet commentators regaled or outraged us with immediate analyses of what these attacks might mean. Predictably enough, conservative pundits saw in them another attack on Western values by radical Islam while liberal and left ones emphasized the “blowback” element of Islamic rage against the West’s often violent interference in the politics and culture of Muslim countries. Comments, lacking information about the attackers’ inspiration and motivation, were therefore mostly recycled hot air. But one internet journalist outdid many others in intellectual laziness and shallowness the Journalism Iconoclast decries. And that was the onetime Washington Post and MSNBC wunderkind Ezra Klein, now Editor in Chief of the VOX media website.
“We’ll always have Paris,” Humphrey Bogart said to Ingrid Bergman in the 1942 movie classic. After the response, so far, to the murder of ten Charlie Hebdo journalists and two policemen by Islamic gunmen on January 7, maybe not. There’s plenty of sadness and rage in France, but the response by world leaders and in establishment media recalled the “blah, blah, blah” made famous by Charlie Brown’s teacher in “Peanuts” cartoons.