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Journalism’s Essential Value | The New York Times Company
Their first duty—the reporting of news—ensures the citizenry has access to reliable information to make informed arguments and decisions.
Marie K. Shanahan • Journalism, Online Comments, and the Future of Public Discourse
I had spent the past 40 years as a journalist and ended my career believing as strongly as ever that reliable, unpolluted information is as necessary to a community as a legal system, an army or a police force.
Alan Rusbridger • Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This visi... See more
Matt Taibbi • The American Press Is Destroying Itself - Reporting by Matt Taibbi
Many regard early newspapers as cradles of modern democracy and human rights, and there’s obvious truth to that. But Innis worried that newspapers had a structural bias: They focused culture relentlessly on the present. To make money, newspapers had to train us to come back every day—to become convinced that if we stopped keeping up, stopped checki... See more
Clive Thompson • Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment
sari added
Adolph Ochs, founder of the Times dynasty that has owned and operated the paper for more than a century, boldly stated that the Times’s mission is “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.”1 We’ve seen in this book that the Times failed in this regard—drastically and often tragically. Aga
... See moreAshley Rindsberg • The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History
At the core of this is a debate on whether The New York Times, The Washington Post and others are failing the American people by pushing more content behind the paywall.
Jarrod Dicker • Don’t Blame Media’s Business Model
sari added
Watching this from inside the media, I’ve experienced two contradicting feelings. First is a kind of powerlessness from working in an industry with waning influence amid shifting consumption patterns. The second is the notion that the craft, rigor, and mission of traditional journalism matter more than ever.
Instead of understanding journalism as either a collection of neutral entities who process unassailable fact into truth or as partisan operators hacking away at an agenda, we should see the endeavor as encompassing a spectrum of ideas and opinions that approximate or come as close as possible to the truth.