A long, long time ago in 2007, Alysia Santo wrote an article for the Columbia Journalism Review on the incorporation of data security into journalism classes. Since then, we’ve had the Wikileaks debacle, Snowden’s leaks and Manning’s leaks, leading to worldwide state crackdown on journalism: “I spoke with a number of journalism schools, to see…

Radio is one of those things that most people just don’t get enthusiastic about. Sure, it’s nice to have on in the background when you’re driving, but the days of gathering around the radio for the latest news, radio dramas and presidential addresses pretty much ended with the introduction of TV. Radio gave a voice…

In earlier times, the New York Times was a New York staple; the way you held the paper on the subway indicated whether or not you were from the area. Nowadays, most of us read the Times on our iPads, but although the New York Times and other print publications have cut staff and budgets…

George Orwell’s declaration of: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations,” not only might not be an Orwell quote, is a gross oversimplification of the relationship between journalism, PR and the public. Plus, Orwell probably hadn’t heard of Wikipedia. This week, ten of the biggest public relations…

Hi, all! My name is Juliana; I’m taking over Missing Comma for Trevor at the moment — big thank-you to Trevor for reading all of my agitated Facebook statuses about the media — but will most likely be sticking around when he’s back. I’m a journalism student at Marist College, a staunch advocate of press…

Hi friends, From now until mid-July, I’ll be taking a break from writing Missing Comma, as well as most of my other duties at the Center for a Stateless Society. I’ll be tweeting at @illicitpopsicle and writing on some other projects in the meantime. Missing Comma won’t be on hiatus, though! I’m pleased to announce…

So there are at least two student newspapers on the UC Santa Barbara campus: The Daily Nexus, and The Bottom Line. One paper, the Nexus, has had nearly wall-to-wall coverage of the Isla Vista shooting that happened last Friday. By all accounts, Nexus editor-in-chief Marissa Wenzke was one of the first journalists on the scene, period –…

This week’s blog topic is derived from a tweet posted by Dave Zirin earlier this week, following new media site and Ezra Klein vessel Vox posting a silly and weightless article about Solange Knowles beating up on Jay Z in an elevator titled, “Who Is Solange? And Why Is She Attacking Jay Z?” The article…

The American Journalism Review reported last week that journalists’ wages were falling behind the national average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While reporters’ wages increased from $40,000 to around $44,000 in the period between 2003 and 2013, the rest of the country rose from $36,000 to over $46,000 in the same time span….

So, this is pretty exciting. As of today, C4SS podcasts is a thing! You can grab the RSS feed here, and very soon we will have confirmation from iTunes and Stitcher Radio that we’ve been added to their sites as well. So why podcasts? Don’t y’all have YouTube? The Center does indeed have a YouTube…

What happens when the New York Police Department – famous for its racial profiling, Stop and Frisk, spying on Muslims, ripping people’s testicles out and beating up and groping protesters – tries to use Twitter to improve its public relations image? Well, people who have been stop-and-frisked, racially profiled, spied on, beat up and groped…

The Daily Beast’s Geoffrey Stone has drawn the line in the sand when it comes to the Free Flow of Information Act. He has made it clear which side he’s on. He believes that the only way journalism can continue to be free in the United States of got-dang America is if journalists have the…

The Society of Professional Journalists is one of those institutions within journalism that can be counted on to almost never change. That’s why the release of their latest draft of their new ethics code is such a big deal. If you remember back a ways, you’ll recall that I’ve brought up SPJ in the ethical…

Last week’s blog excerpted a piece from Ann Friedman over at the Columbia Journalism Review that mentioned the term, “horizontal loyalty.” Coined by Radiolab host and longtime public radio producer Robert Krulwich during a commencement speech he gave to UC Berkeley grads in 2011, Friedman used the term as a way to challenge perceptions on…

*Not really. I was surprised to open up the Columbia Journalism Review’s website last week and see this article by Steven Brill peering up at me: “Stories I’d Like To See: A fair view of the Koch brothers, and explaining bitcoin.” This section in particular cracked me up: This article in the Washington Post last…

In 2013, I noted a rise in stories about so-called “Republican Anarchists.” Articles appearing in every publication and website from the Huffington Post to the New York Times decried the emergence of these Harry Reid-coined “anti-statists.” At the time it seemed like just another annoying turn of phrase that was popular in the moment but…

Bitcoin has had a rough couple of weeks. With the closure and bankruptcy of MtGox and the closure-from-hacking of at least one smaller “bank,” the value of Bitcoin has fluctuated wildly. Predictably, this instability have caused some media outlets to make the exaggerated and premature announcement of the cryptocurrency’s death. But while most in the…

Journalist infighting is the most “Inside Baseball” thing I can conceive of talking about on this blog, but Mark Ames is the subject, and that’s always the signal for a good time. His latest target is the new foreign policy analyst for The Intercept, Marcy Wheeler. In an article from Feb. 28, Ames writes that…

Initial thoughts on “Informing the News” I recently picked up a copy of Harvard journalism professor Thomas E. Patterson’s latest book, “Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism.” One of the things that immediately interested me about the work was its thesis, that the cure for journalism’s current “crisis of confidence,” as Patterson refers…

Previous columns in this series explored briefly the hows and whats of studioless podcasting. This final installment hopes to explain the “why”. Why is studioless podcasting important? Podcasting represents a radical decentralization of the airwaves that can’t actually take place on the airwaves, for a few reasons. Most people conceive of FM radio as being…