The early reports on the Boston Marathon bombing and the Texas fertilizer plant explosion are not first drafts of history, but "tentative notes for the first drafts of the first drafts of history," as Tabitha M. Powledge writes...
Category: The New Yorker
The early reports on the Boston Marathon bombing and the Texas fertilizer plant explosion are not first drafts of history, but "tentative notes for the first drafts of the first drafts of history," as Tabitha M. Powledge writes in On Science Blogs. Meaning that we can expect plenty of revisions before that first draft is correct.
Powledge notes, interestingly, that the Boston Marathon bombing got far more coverage than did the apparent accident in Texas, although it caused far more casualties. Terrorism is a better story than industrial accidents, but which kills and injures more people?
She points out a couple of pieces she didn't like in the bombing commentary. I hadn't seen Paige Williams's post ...
The media blogger Jim Romenesko posted an alert yesterday announcing that Jonah Lehrer, the disgraced journalist accused of plagiarism and faulty reporting who was forced to resign from...
The media blogger Jim Romenesko posted an alert yesterday announcing that Jonah Lehrer, the disgraced journalist accused of plagiarism and faulty reporting who was forced to resign from The New Yorker, will be the speaker today at the closing luncheon of the Knight Foundation's Media Learning Seminar 2013 in Miami.
“Yes he is going to speak about decision-making — including the bad decision-making that caused him to wreck his journalism career,” Knight Foundation spokesman Andrew Sherry told Romenesko.
Romenesko also told Sherry that he was "surprised that there’s no mention of Lehrer’s serial plagiarism in the bio that Knight prepared for this three-day event." Sherry responded, "You’...
4Sep 2012
At 7 p.m. Friday night--the time during the week when people release news items they hope nobody will see--Evan Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Wired.com,...
At 7 p.m. Friday night--the time during the week when people release news items they hope nobody will see--Evan Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Wired.com, announced that a "preliminary Wired review" had found that numerous posts by Jonah Lehrer on his Frontal Cortex blog at Wired did not meet Wired's "editorial standards."
Even for a Friday night release on a holiday weekend between two noisy political conventions and after a hurricane, that's pretty tepid language. Here's what Hansen did not say: The review was intended to do much more than discover whether Lehrer violated "editorial standards." It was intended "to determine whether he [Lehrer] recycled, fabricated, plagiarized, or otherwise breached journalistic ethics." And it...
Barbara Feder Ostrov at Reporting on Health has put together a short list of summer healthcare stories you shouldn't miss. I've mentioned a couple of them here: Atul Gawande's...
Barbara Feder Ostrov at Reporting on Health has put together a short list of summer healthcare stories you shouldn't miss. I've mentioned a couple of them here: Atul Gawande's story on healthcare and The Cheesecake Factory in The New Yorker, and a New York Times exposé on excessive use of cardiac procedures. But she has a few other tasty tidbits as well, including a couple that I missed.
Find her recommendations here.
-Paul Raeburn
Last month, I reported that Jonah Lehrer, a noted young writer who covers neuroscience, had recycled material from other stories in his new blog for The New Yorker. Lehrer admitted wrongdoing and...
Last month, I reported that Jonah Lehrer, a noted young writer who covers neuroscience, had recycled material from other stories in his new blog for The New Yorker. Lehrer admitted wrongdoing and briefly appeared able to weather the storm. He was not immediately dropped by The New Yorker, which promised that this sort of thing would not happen again.
Now Lehrer is in ashes, after admitting making up quotes from Bob Dylan, and insisting to a reporter that the quotes were not made up. The fabricated quotes appear in his new book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works," which has sold 200,000 copies, an achievement most authors can only dream of. The sad tale is recounted in this story in The New York Times...
23May 2012
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Nicholas Thompson, the editor of NewYorker.com and a co-founder of The Atavist, has just tweeted news of the creation of a new "health care hub" at The New Yorker's website.
One of the lead pieces, currently, is a recent story on face transplants, with a photo that will...
For those who have followed my discussions here about industry-produced blog posts...
For those who have followed my discussions here about industry-produced blog posts at ScienceBlogs and at Forbes, you might be interested to know that this is not a new phenomenon. Long before "blog" entered our lexicon, E.B. White, the eminent prose stylist--who, to my knowledge, was not especially known as a defender of journalistic mores--railed against a similar situation in Esquire magazine--in 1976!
David Cay Johnston reminds us of the episode,...
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