BY JOHN SHRADER / Sports journalism is dead. That was the notion in late August, when ESPN abruptly ended its relationship with PBS’ “Frontline.” ESPN had partnered with “Frontline” for more than a year on a documentary film examining the NFL’s handling of head injuries. It looked like the perfect collaboration of the hard-hitting documentary team and the biggest, most powerful media machine the sports world has ever known.
BY WILLIAM A. BABCOCK / According to the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, the three stories constituting news for that paper’s “The Nation” section on pages A 10 and 11 were all shooting related. This is not to say these three stories were neither of national importance, nor that they failed to constitute the most significant news of the day. What seems odd, though, is in the midst of so much well-documented news of horrific shootings across the United States, the media carry so few gun-related items
BY EILEEN BYRNES / Ten days before Christmas Eve and on the one-year anniversary of the slaughter in two first-grade classrooms, Newtown became a sort of Who-ville. The media – viewed by a most people here in the once- sleepy town as an evil, callous Grinch – showed that, perhaps, it does have a heart after all.
BY MADELINE SMITH / Mobile phone subscriptions are sweeping across the African continent like never before. After years of technological repression caused by colonial rule, Africa’s mobile phone usage in the 21st century has gone viral. At the Africa Com 2013 conference in Cape Town, Africa, annual mobility reports were revealed. It was reported that mobile phone subscriptions had increased in Africa about seven percent.
BY WILLIAM H. FREIVOGEL / St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce has called upon St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Gilbert Bailon to order an “independent audit of the reporting” for the paper’s high-profile “Jailed by Mistake” investigation. She wrote in a Nov. 26 letter to Bailon that her staff had found “substantial factual errors” in the paper’s conclusion that more than 100 people had been mistakenly jailed for more than 2,000 total days.