Bob Collins
Editorial cartoonists usually get pretty wide latitude.
This was too wide. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Tag: Media
The identity of small towns is disappearing in a cloud of regional newspaper mush intended to ‘relevant’ to an audience across communities. Read more →
Knowing what social media can do to a person’s career in short order, however, it was a little scary watching what happened to WCCO meteorologist Mike Augustyniak, who lives downtown and looked out the window at the reality below, and dared to tell people. Read more →
A glance around the ‘news’ coverage of the Super Bowl shows the National Football League has done it again. It’s convinced the skeptical world of journalism to fall head over heels over the celebrities who latch onto the Super Bowl, and the theater surrounding the “big game.” It’s hard to tell where the public relations arm of the NFL ends and journalism begins when a Super Bowl comes to town. The league’s ability to tamp down a discouraging word is how the NFL has become a billion-dollar non-profit organization.
Read more →
Every day across America, the country becomes a little better place because investigative reporters shake off the bricks thrown by readers, viewers, and listeners who refuse to accept what they don’t want to believe, and hold accountable the powerful who corrupt decency on a daily basis. Read more →
In the end, it was easier for NPR to use an obscenity than it was during the presidential campaign to use a word that is far less offensive: ‘lie’. Read more →
People in Russia — Russia! — are more likely to feel their news media is doing their job well than Americans are, the survey says.
Read more →
The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore is being credited with ‘rescuing’ a woman who had to put her car in reverse during the big storm in the coastal town of Scituate, Mass., on Thursday.
Read more →
Radio people of a certain age get accustomed to departures. It’s the nature of the business. Long before the “gig economy” became a thing, radio was one giant gig economy. People come, people go, the institution moves on as if they’d never been there at all. Read more →
I would have liked to have known Jon Tevlin because he wears his heart on his sleeve and that’s a good thing for a newspaper columnist. It’s also what will get you killed on social media. Read more →
Listeners to a Story Corps episode on NPR about what happened when a man met the imprisoned man who killed his son in a shooting spree on a Western Massachusetts campus apparently noticed the same thing about the episode that I did when I wrote about it the day it aired: There was a lot left out. Read more →
Mary Louise Kelly, who made a name for herself weeks ago with a grilling of her boss in the wake of a sexual misconduct scandal, is the new anchor of NPR’s All Things Considered. Read more →
It’s almost as if NPR’s standards & practices boss had Minnesota newswriters in mind when he issued his annual memo today on what not to say when telling stories about the weather. Read more →
This tweet, from Rochester Post Bulletin photojournalist Andrew Link, is the sort of thing that can bring a tear to an old-school news junkie. Read more →
The boss of The Takeaway broke her silence today, answering allegations that she and members of WNYC, which owns the public radio program, did not respond to sexual and racial harassment allegations against former host John Hockenberry.
Read more →