Trevor Cook on public relations, social media and politics

Tag Archives: journalism

Journalism – a defence

November 6, 2009 – 11:56 am

It’s easy to take the piss out of journalists, and to blame the media for everything.
Journalists often over-estimate how much they know, and exaggerate their own importance.
But they’re not alone in having those shortcomings.
Where you sit is where you stand.
And people in different sectors of our complex democracy are quick to identify and lampoon the [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Social Media | Also tagged , , | Comments (13)

2009 Orwell Prize winners

April 23, 2009 – 5:34 am

Journalism.co.uk
Patrick Cockburn has won the 2009 Orwell Prize for political writing.
Each year, the prize in association with the Media Standards Trust, The Orwell Trust and Political Quarterly, awards a Book Prize and a Journalism Prize to recognise works that ‘achieve George Orwell’s ambition to make political writing into an art’. 
Cockburn beat competition from Observer writer Catherine [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Politics | Comments (0)

Decimate: the usage problem

April 18, 2009 – 6:13 am

I hate the way people do this.  Lias Davies (Daily Telegraph) writes:
As she clung precariously to life, the world as the Huxleys knew it was completely decimated.
The word ‘decimate’ is commonly and routinely abused, but this is a step further along the road to meaninglessness.
Here’s a dictionary explanation of the problem:
Decimate originally referred to the killing [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Newspapers | Comments (3)

Fairfax – who edits your crap?

April 17, 2009 – 3:06 pm

From today’s SMH website comes this gem of factual accuracy:
Reflecting organised labour’s hobbled growth after a decade of pressure from the Howard-era’s WorkChoices legislation, last year saw the first increase in the total number of union members since 2005.
Well, no, actually WorkChoices came into effect in March 2006. That’s not some obscure piece of knowledge [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Newspapers | Comments (1)

Binishells and the training of a young journalist

February 12, 2009 – 8:41 am

Bob Meade’s recent post on Binishells (concrete domes named after their designer) at Killarney Heights school reminded me of a story a young Glenn Milne told me in the bar of the old parliament house twenty years ago. There was some controversy about these innovative concrete domes, one had failed or it was alleged that [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections

February 4, 2009 – 8:22 am

Canberra academic, Julie Posetti, has posted an interesting case study on the MediaShift blog on the PBS site in America: 
my University of Canberra radio journalism students used Twitter as a political reporting device for live online election coverage. This resulted in both improved speed and clarity in writing as well as a breakthrough engagement with democratic processes and [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Politics, Social Media | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

One-stop media death watch site

January 9, 2009 – 2:09 am

Finding it hard to keep up with the growing torrent of bad news about traditional media? Well, this Canadian site (“Traditional publishing RIP”) provides an aggregation of grim headlines from around the web and around the world. Gee, there does seem to be a lot of it. (Warning: If you’re a journalist, the frequency with [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media | Also tagged , | Comments (1)

Lisa Pryor (SMH journalist) responds on objectivity

January 7, 2009 – 1:59 pm

A few days ago I criticised Lisa Pryor for this line in her opinion piece: “that is what reporters do; they write news stories from a range of perspectives”. Today, she has responded with a fulsome explanation of what she means by ‘perspectives’. Lisa explains, for instance:
For all the balance and objectivity, the very act [...]

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‘Lifestyle’ destroys journalism

January 7, 2009 – 12:22 pm

In an excellent article in the current issue of Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn makes the point that serious newspaper journalism has been under threat since well before the Internet came along:
But the business strategy of TheNew York Times, as practiced since Abe Rosenthal’s editorship in the early ’70s, when New York magazine first threatened the daily’s [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Newspapers | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

Fairfax journalists don’t understand ‘reporting’

January 3, 2009 – 3:23 pm

This interpretation comes from Lisa Pryor in the SMH today:
As a former property reporter, I know a bit about this tax. I have written news stories about the injustice of it, because that is what reporters do; they write news stories from a range of perspectives, including those they disagree with. But with my reporting [...]

By Trevor Cook | Posted in Media, Newspapers | Also tagged , , , | Comments (4)