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President Bush bid his final farewell to the White House press corps on Tuesday. “Through it all,” he told reporters gathered in the briefing room, “I have respected you.” Really? Let’s look at the record.
The inaugural address is one of the first tests of the incoming president; a rhetorical declaration that is supposed to speak to the moment, address a world audience, inspire with eloquence and stand the test of time. Harvard historian and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore explains the stakes for President Barack Obama and the lyrical lessons of the past.
As talk of bailouts abound, some in the media are asking “why not us?” Surely journalism is as valuable a national industry as airlines or insurance. Sweden thought so when it bailed out its newspapers back in the 1970s. But did it work? We ask Robert Picard, director of the Media Management and Transformation Centre in Jönköping, Sweden.
As financial difficulties for newspapers mount, the prospect of shutting down the presses and going web-only is frequently raised as an option. But Josh Karp is attempting to do the exact opposite. He's launching The Printed Blog later this month in Chicago, San Francisco and New York, which will take all its content from blogs to create a free, hyper-local daily paper.
With newspapers fighting for their lives, foreign coverage has become a luxury they can’t afford. Enter globalpost.com, which has enlisted some 65 correspondents around the world to file dispatches that will be featured on the site and syndicated to the very papers that can no longer afford their own correspondents. Co-founder Charles Sennott explains his new world order.
The Newbery Medal is awarded annually to the year’s most distinguished work of children’s literature. But there's some controversy over what “distinguished” means. Pat Scales of the Association for Library Service to Children discusses the award, its discontents, and the role of literature in children's lives.
Government spending data has long been publicly available but it's never been easier to find and interpret. That's thanks to USAspending.gov, a site created by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 which was sponsored by Tom Coburn and Barack Obama. The Sunlight Foundation's Greg Elin explains what makes the site so revolutionary.
News about Guantanamo made a huge splash this week. Obama will most likely close it. Inmates have most definitely been tortured there. But as The Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg describes, the only place the news didn't seem to make an impact was at Guantanamo, where the PR offensive continues unchanged.
Highlights from Past Shows
In what the Foreign Press Association has called an “unprecedented restriction of press freedom,” the Israeli military has barred foreign correspondents from entering the Gaza Strip and thereby covering the war close-up. New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner says that in order to understand the current crackdown on media you have to think back to the summer of 2006.
Last summer, as the Olympics approached, China was making the final
preparations for the PR push of the century, pitching brand China to the world. Meanwhile, young urban Chinese were sorting out new identities and advertisers everywhere were revving their engines, preparing to sell to the fastest growing consumer market in the world. OTM visited China last spring and returned with these stories which originally aired in June.
On the Media in China was made possible by a generous grant from the Freeman Foundation.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
