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…

C4SS Media presents Trevor Hultner‘s “Missing Comma: Concerning ‘Horizontal Loyalty’” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. I think, for a long time, we’ve been trying to look for new ways to talk about concepts like mutual aid and solidarity; horizontal loyalty, at least as Krulwich describes it (and as Friedman uses it), serves exactly this…

C4SS Media presents Trevor Hultner‘s “‘Free Flow of Information Act’ is Bad for Journalism” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. In fact, the Free Flow of Information Act spends more time detailing what it will not cover than describing who it will protect. Luckily, it isn’t hard to see who ends up in the clear…

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…

US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) believes the Senate has enough votes to pass the Free Flow of Information Act, creating a federal “shield law” for the first time. The bill was ostensibly written to address the Justice Department’s unprecedented acquisition of Associated Press phone records, as well as several other high-profile cases where journalists might…

*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…

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…

After reading last week’s column, you went out (or stayed in, depending on the weather) and bought/downloaded/rigged up your own podcast studio, and now you’re… stuck. You’re staring at your phone, the app you’re recording with is running, and no words are coming out. You might feel the urge to panic; I’ve spent more time…

(Emilie Rensink at the Anti-Media has a really, really good basic intro post to independent journalism. Go check that out over here. Read this blog, split up into two parts, when you’re done.) I’ve been on a podcast binge recently, thanks to my job graciously granting me a forced, unpaid two-week vacation. Over the past…

The future of news is much like the future anarchist society we all dream about but can never succinctly put into words: at the end of the day, we just don’t know what it’s going to look like. Professional prognosticators, including many of my colleagues(?), make a pretty penny predicting the predilections of newsophiles five,…

On January 15, freelance sports blogger Caleb Hannan published a longform article at Grantland documenting his eight-month search for the truth behind Yar Golf’s “physics-defying” putter and its inventor, Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt. Over the course of Hannan’s reporting for this essay, he discovered that Vanderbilt’s claims regarding her academic credentials turned out to be…

Over the weekend, Bill and Emma Keller declared which side they were on in the ongoing blogger vs. journalist debate, and they did it in the worst way I could conceive of: They tag-team attacked a woman with stage four breast cancer for daring to tweet about her experiences, and daring to be optimistic about…

One of the bigger media stories coming into 2014 is over whether Patch, AOL’s so-called hyperlocal news organization, will survive or bite the dust. While rumors of the controversial network’s demise were greatly exaggerated, it does appear that the future of the service is in flux – and what that means for hyperlocal. For y’all…

We’re happy to announce the creation of another regular column here at Stigmergy: the C4SS Blog, devoted to the analysis and criticism of mainstream and independent media. Regret the Error will publish every Tuesday. Every entry-level journalism and media writing textbook will stress objectivity as one of the central standards and practices of the craft….

I am now prepared to state without reservation that the ongoing NSA/surveillance story ranks among the more momentous and nauseating charades perpetrated on a frighteningly gullible public. Any remaining doubt I had on this question — and, in truth, no substantial doubt remained in my own mind — has been obliterated by this story concerning the remarks…

Let’s briefly review several critical facts. If there is a single general theme to Glenn Greenwald’s career as a journalist, it is that he constantly confronts and challenges power and those who exercise power, primarily in the political sphere. Greenwald himself has often proclaimed this to be his major concern, and he repeated this conviction in…