Tag: media

Boston Panic

The discovery of suspicious objects on bridges, near a medical center, underneath an interstate, and in other crowded public places has ignited fears across Boston, snarling traffic and sending state and local police scrambling across the city.

this is what happens if headless chickens run the news.
2007-02-09: Do you have what it takes to save Boston from the Lite Bright menace?
2007-03-01:

if it’s not an american flag, it’s probably a bomb.

heh. i wonder what happens if someone wraps a bomb in a flag? will they declare a war on flags? that would actually be neat.
2013-03-31: reminds me of their war against things with LEDs from a few years back. among their bumbling peers, boston pd are the most incompetent. so funny.

Boston Punk Zombies Are Watching You! The Boston police go undercover on the Internet to stop the city’s most dreaded scourge: DIY indie-rock shows.

Colbert/O’Reilly Surrealism

This back-to-back interviewing on Thursday night of Stephen Colbert (who plays a kinda Bill O’Reilly) by Bill O’Reilly on his show, followed by Bill O’Reilly (who is really Bill O’Reilly) being interviewed by Stephen Colbert on his show, is truly an Escher-ian moment in navel-gazing, postmodern media surrealism.

Media Innumeracy

Certain types of news — for example dramatic disasters and terrorist actions — are massively over-reported, others — such as scientific progress and meaningful statistical surveys of the state of the world — massively under-reported.

2013-08-25: Media reporting

2021-02-22: Vaccine effectiveness is a great example of media innumeracy:

It is imperative to dispel any ambiguity about how vaccine efficacy shown in trials translates into protecting individuals and populations. The mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were shown to have 94–95% efficacy in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, calculated as 100 × (1 minus the attack rate with vaccine divided by the attack rate with placebo). It means that in a population such as the one enrolled in the trials, with a cumulated COVID-19 attack rate over a period of 3 months of ~1% without a vaccine, we would expect 0.05% of vaccinated people would get diseased.

Craigslist Whining

So when Bunch says Craigslist should run text ads and “pay for the college education of the 10s of displaced journalists across America losing their jobs everyday,” he’s attacking the wrong problem with the wrong solution. And to name laid-off or pensionless journalists as Craigslist’s victims instead of the victims of an industry that didn’t turn around fast enough? As Buckmaster says, that’s not the point.

comedy gold

Media Radical Transparency

Here are some thoughts on what a truly transparent media organization would do.

  1. Show who we are

    2. Upside: Readers know who to contact. The organization is revealed as a collection of diverse individuals, not just a brand, an editor and some writers.

    Risk: Competitors know who to poach; PR people spam us even more than usual.

  2. Show what we’re working on

    3. Upside: Tap the wisdom of crowds

    Risk: Tip off competitors(although I’d argue that this would just as likely freeze them; after all the prior art would be obvious to all); Risks “scooping ourselves”,robbing the final product of freshness.

  3. “Process as Content”

    4. Upside: Open participation can make stories better–better researched, better thought through and deeper. It also can crowdsource some of the work of the copy desk and editors. And once the story is done and published, the participants have a sense of collective ownership that encourages them to spread the word.

    Risk:Curating the process can quickly hit diminishing returns. Writers end up feeling like a cruise director, constantly trying to get people to participate. And all the other risks of the item above.

  4. Privilege the crowd

    5. Upside: Maximizes participation.

    Risk: If we don’t deploy voting tools or (sigh) a login system, trolls may rule.

  5. Let readers decide what’s best

    6. Upside: A front page that reflects reader interest better.

    Risk: A more predictable and lowbrow front page.

  6. Wikify everything

    7. Upside: Stories live and grow, remaining relevant long after their original publication (at no cost to us!)

    Risk: Stories get progressively less coherent as many cooks mess with them. Whatever brand authority the Wired name brings is diminished over time as the stories become less and less our own work.