Adrian Monck

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Losing control of a TV discussion: a masterclass
2011-09-30 11:43:00
When Jeremy Paxman engages, he is an excellent presenter. When he is bored?not so much. The clip below shows what happens when Newsnight attempts to recreate the kind of boorish conversation that would not have passed for debate in ye … Continue reading →
More About: Journalism , Control

Creative destruction
2011-09-23 21:55:00
When we follow through the history of particular industries and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is possible to forget that the old skill and the new almost always were the perquisite of different people? Even where … Continue reading →
More About: Creative , Journalism , Destruction

Can you trust the author?
2011-09-02 10:22:00
Apparently not. And I owe Stephen Bates an apology. Mr. Monck, I just purchased a copy of your book Can You Trust the Media? I found your discussion of the 1940s Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press on p. … Continue reading →
More About: Journalism , Author

News of the World: victim and villain in the poisonous communication of pub
2011-07-08 10:19:00
Most aspects of the News of the World ?s demise have been picked over. But this is not, for all the headlines, a scandal of journalism, or proprietors, or mergers and acquisitions. Journalists are journalists, proprietors are businessmen and deals are … Continue reading →
More About: Communication , Journalism , The World

Education by evensong
2011-05-17 23:00:00
Nothing enshrines so completely the idea of decline as an English cathedral. Millennial in age, monumental in scale, meticulous in decoration, the cathedral is dedicated to a medieval deity. A god of buildings, worshipped through spires and flying buttresses and arches, … Continue reading →
More About: Education

Democracy after journalism
2011-04-12 22:26:00
I suppose the title reveals my concerns, which are more about the former than the latter. We?ll be talking about it in Perugia this week at the International Journalism Festival. Here?s a reading list: Journalism was long ago seen as … Continue reading →
More About: Democracy

The price of blogging
2010-10-28 13:07:00
In the mid-2000s City University?s Journalism school ? well me, to be precise ? had a number of conversations with the Bahraini authorities about journalism education, in the context of a more open and robust political culture. The conversations began with an approach by a junior member of the ruling family, a former academic of ...
More About: Blogging , Price

Barbarians at the Gate ? Britain?s Broken Public Sphere
2010-10-11 22:01:00
Alan Rusbridger?s What is the future of the fourth estate prompts a thought on the state of British media, or ? more simply ? the BBC/Murdoch duopoly. The BBC commands radio, online, magazines (Top Gear, Gardener?s World) and mainstream TV viewing. Sky and Newscorp command subscription TV and print. They are ? natch ? deadly ...
More About: Gate , Journalism , Britain , Sphere , Public

A roughing up for history?s first draft | FT [del.icio.us]
2010-09-27 23:38:00
Hind wildly overestimates the appetite for information and revelation, as he does the ability of journalism to create the kind of public he wants. But there is something large-hearted in the view that the facts will not just set us free, but allow us to be fuller citizens
More About: History , Draft

James Bacon Dead: Legendary Hollywood Columnist Dies At 96 [del.icio.us]
2010-09-19 20:49:00
"Posing as a coroner, he once made his way past a police barricade to get Lana Turner's firsthand account of the fatal stabbing of her lover Johnny Stompanato by her daughter Cheryl Crane."
More About: Hollywood , Dead

Replies to a journalism student
2010-08-30 21:58:00
Belinda Giles sent me the following email: Dear Adrian I am a university student in Western Australia, studying law/journalism. I am working on an opinion piece for the journalism component ? the subject is ?journalism is the lifeblood of democracy?. During my googling I came across your blog ? ?a blog about news?. I have ...
More About: Journalism , Student

Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain | Pharyngula [del.icio.us]
2010-08-19 14:03:00
I'll make a prediction, too. We will not be able to plug a single unknown protein sequence into a computer and have it derive a complete description of all of its functions by 2020.
More About: Brain

Hidden in Plain Sight: The News Media's Role in Exposing Human Trafficking
2010-07-16 13:24:00
Panelists urged reporters and editors to avoid salacious details and splashy, "sexy" headlines that can prevent a more nuanced examination of trafficked persons' lives and experiences. Journalists lamented the lack of solid data, noting that the available statistics are contradictory, unreliable, insufficient, and often skewed by ideology.
More About: News , Human , Plain , The News , Human Trafficking

How supermodels are like toxic assets | 3quarksdaily [del.icio.us]
2010-07-14 15:44:00
Without a view of the market as a social body?composed of individuals acting in concert with each other, aided by financial models, and bound together by conventions to help them anticipate one another?s actions?we can?t see how participants act together. Yet their collectively attuned steps can inflate or deflate the value of assets, thus building economic values from cultural ones
More About: Supermodels

Open data doesn't empower communities | internet.artizans [del.icio.us]
2010-07-07 16:50:00
There are many missing steps between open data & an empowered citizenry that can fulfill David Cameron's claim that ?People will be the masters. Politicians the servants. And that?s the way it should be?. It might be useful to contrast the histories of libraries and of Chartism - libraries are a necessary platform for an informed citizenry, but it takes the channeled anger of a social movement to focus that in to historic change.
More About: Internet , Open , Data

Solitude and Leadership | William Deresiewicz [del.icio.us]
2010-07-06 16:31:00
[E]xcellence isn?t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it?s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that ... you have nothing inside you at all.
More About: Leadership

Changing the World, One Friend at a Time | Don Tapscott [del.icio.us]
2010-07-06 13:20:00
Facebook thinks that transparency is not just an opportunity for companies and other institutions to disclose pertinent information, and in so doing to be more trusted and effective. They believe it's an opportunity for individuals to do so as well. Facebook's founders, Kirkpatrick says, believe that "more visibility makes us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarrassing things."
More About: World , Time , Friend , Changing , The World

The Highest Form of Mention | Economic Principals [del.icio.us]
2010-07-05 23:36:00
Precisely because paper is expensive, heavy, durable and, since it is costly, scarce, attention in print will remain the ultimate source of social currency for many decades to come. A case in point, at least in the making, is Bloomberg?s Businessweek, which in the past few months has become the most interesting thing in my (postal) mailbox. Yes, it is a magazine, not a newspaper, but Bloomberg?s 2,000 staffers in 125 bureaus around the world make the company?s beachhead in print especially interesting.  That?s about as many as The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Financial Times put together..
More About: Economic

The Myth Of Creativity | Robin Hanson [del.icio.us]
2010-06-30 15:52:00
Critics complain that schools squelch creativity, but most people are inclined to be more creative on the job than would be truly productive. So schooling is mostly about selecting the smarter and more diligent, and learning to show up day after day to somewhat boring jobs with ambiguous instructions.
More About: Hanson , Creativity

Mounting Web Woes Pummel Newspapers | Advertising Age [del.icio.us]
2010-06-29 09:51:00
Newspaper sites still typically command much higher rates than most of the internet -- collecting $6.99 for a thousand impressions in April compared with $2.52 across the web as a whole, according to a recent ComScore report. That's partly because advertisers trust newspaper sites to provide safe, sober environments for their brands and partly because marketers want newspapers' authority to rub off on their ads. But general news sites -- everyone from MSNBC.com to Yahoo News to Examiner.com -- don't trail newspaper sites by much.
More About: Advertising , Newspapers

The General speaks? | USC Center on Public Diplomacy | Newswire ? CPD Blog
2010-06-22 12:00:00
The appeal of 18 June has a number of lessons for contemporary public diplomacy. It is a reminder of the historical impact of the radio, which still has a role to play in today?s world. More than this it is an example of the public diplomacy of empowerment. The British government could (and did) address the people of France themselves, but Churchill for one understood that there was infinitely more to be gained from empowering a credible Frenchman to speak. One can imagine how counterproductive it would have been if Churchill himself had broadcast to France that day, and told the people that he wanted them to fight on. Britain used a similar proxy approach in its broadcasting to the United States: placing special emphasis on facilitating the broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow and other American correspondents rather and appealing directly for American aid.
More About: General , Public , Blog , Diplomacy , Center

Kim Andrew Elliot [del.icio.us]
2010-06-21 17:18:00
"[V]oice of the voiceless" doesn't capture what successful international broadcasting really does. "News to the newsless" would be much better, though, admittedly, it doesn't sound as good.
More About: Andrew , Elliot

Janet Malcolm on journalism
2010-06-04 17:39:00
Janet Malcolm has some choice words about journalism in her extended essay in the 3 May 2010 New Yorker. Over the years, the social status and the education level of journalists has risen and some journalists write extremely well. But the profession retains its transgressiveness. Human frailty continues to be the currency in which it ...
More About: Journalism

What we learned from social media
2010-05-11 23:00:00
What We Learned From Social Media View more presentations from Adrian Monck. From the Lac Leman Communications Conference.

Pre-Review: Too Big To Fail | Barry Ritholtz [del.icio.us]
2009-12-19 22:18:00
What is the problem with non-fiction novels? It represents at best a loosely correlated approximation of reality. No one really knows what Tim Geithner was thinking about when he was jogging. We cannot know for sure what entered Jamie Dimon’s head when he walked into a room full of anxious bankers. Instead of eye witness testimony made at the time of events (itself often inaccurate), we get instead recollections and remembrances. How accurate are these? How self-interested self-aggrandizing are they? Are these parties remotely objective? Are their thoughts, recollections and beliefs after the fact accurate? How likely is it we are getting a highly self promotional version from them?
More About: Review

The future (and history) of newspapers, continued | tomstandage.com [del.ic
2009-12-19 22:14:00
If I was setting up a newspaper today I’d want it to look a lot like Bloomberg: global network of reporters, cash-cow terminals/financial information business to pay the bills, and (now) a consumer brand in the form of BusinessWeek.
More About: History , Newspapers , Future , The Future

The power of Google: New evidence on predicting US unemployment | vox - Res
2009-12-17 00:13:00
Following the popularity of the internet as a means for searching for jobs (Stevenson, 2008), this approach has recently been extended to unemployment forecasting. In particular, the Google Index – the incidence of Google job-search related queries over total queries – proved to have predictive power in forecasting unemployment in Germany and Israel (see Askitas and Zimmermann 2009 and Suhoy 2009). Choi and Varian (2009) use the Google Index to predict the initial unemployment claims in the US.
More About: Power , Evidence , Unemployment

How much information? | UCSD [del.icio.us]
2009-12-16 22:17:00
In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

“Voice� Leads to More Credibility and Political Efficacy | Changing New
2009-12-15 23:10:00
As early as 1989, scholars Newhagan and Nass were finding that television news anchors were more trusted than their newspaper counterparts, in large part because people just felt like they really knew them.  This was before the cable shout-fests began, but simply being able to show a hint of personality and to be a “real person� on air led to higher credibility.
More About: Political , Leads , Changing

Why Are We Surprised E&P and Kirkus Review Closed? | Pauline Millard [d
2009-12-14 22:13:00
"Business, like anything else, evolves. I'm sure there was a time in history when being a typewriter or encyclopedia salesman was a great way to earn a living. As technology changes, so does one's employment options. I would hope no one on staff at either of those publications was surprised that they suddenly didn't have a job. Both publications reported on shrinking, if not dying industries. Half of E&P's stories over the past two years were about the closing and downsizing of newspapers. Did they not think that eventually the downsizing would come for them? To not have seen this coming would mean they were totally asleep at the wheel."
More About: Review