Thanks to Jon Keller for having me on “Keller @ Large” Sunday morning to talk about “The Return of the Moguls.” We’re having a launch party at Northeastern today at 5 p.m. Hope to see you there!
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Tag: Northeastern University
I want you to help me with my reading list for a course on Trump and the media
I’m teaching a course in May and June called The Media in the Age of Trump, and I’m trying to flesh out my reading list. I’ll be asking my students to subscribe to The Washington Post (because it’s free for anyone with an .edu email address), and I have a number of worthwhile readings already chosen. Although I probably won’t assign all of these, I am listing them below.
What else would you recommend? In a perfect world, I would have two or three in-depth, evidence-based pieces arguing that President Trump is getting a raw deal from the press.
- “David Fahrenthold tells the behind-the-scenes story of his year covering Trump,” David Fahrenthold, Washington Post, Dec. 29, 2016
- “Winter Is Coming: Prospects for the American Press Under Trump,” parts one and two, by Jay Rosen, PressThink, Dec. 28 and 30, 2016
- “What So Many People Don’t Get about the U.S. Working Class,” by Joan C. Williams, Harvard Business Review, Nov. 10, 2016
- “Chill, America. Not every Trump outrage is outrageous,” by Tom Nichols, Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2017
- “How to Build an Autocracy,” David Frum, The Atlantic, March 2017
- “We Cannot Tolerate Legal and Personal Attacks on Journalists For Doing Their Jobs,” by Michael Oreskes, NPR.org, Jan. 17, 2017
- “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, July 25, 2016
- “How the Haters and Losers Lost,” by McKay Coppins, BuzzFeed, July 17, 2016
- “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology,” by David Roberts, Vox, April 16, 2017
- “Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda,” by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman, Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017
- “How Bannon’s multimedia machine drove a movement and paid him millions,” by
- “Is Trump Trolling the White House Press Corps?,” by Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker, March 20, 2017
- “CNN Had a Problem. Trump Solved It,” by Jonathan Mahler, New York Times Magazine, April 4, 2017
- “The 1.6 Billion Dollar Hoax,” by Ken Bensinger, Jason Leopold and Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed, March 15, 2017
- “Reporters, Don’t Let Baby Donald Make You Cry,” by Jack Shafer, Politico, Feb. 27, 2017
- “Bannon molded Breitbart into a far-right sledgehammer. How will it be wielded in the Trump era?,” by
- “Has the White House press office’s silence become a weapon in its war on the media?,” by Paul Farhi, Washington Post, Feb. 20, 2017
- “What the post-Trump debate over journalism gets wrong,” by Tom Rosenstiel, Brookings Institution, Dec. 20, 2016
- “News Coverage of the 2016 General Election: How the Press Failed the Voters,” by Thomas E. Patterson, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Dec. 7, 2016
Please offer your suggestions at the Facebook version of this post. Or send an email to me at dan dot kennedy at northeastern dot edu.
WGBH News publishes Northeastern students’ map project on indie coffee shops
My super Northeastern journalism students in Digital Storytelling and Social Media have reviewed and mapped their favorite independent coffee shops for WGBH News. You can find it here. A great job by everyone.
Northeastern students’ multimedia projects are published by WGBH News
WGBH News, the online arm of Boston’s largest public media organization, published nine multimedia projects from my Digital Storytelling and Social Media class this past fall. From oyster farming in Wellfleet to activism aimed at assisting immigrants in Greater Boston, Northeastern journalism students hit the streets and back roads to report, write stories, take photos, and shoot and edit videos.
Here is what you will find by our students at WGBHNews.org:
- Janine Eduljee: “Despite Long Lines, Early Voting Proved To Be A Hit In Massachusetts”
- Timothy Foley: “Poetic Justice: How Boston Pulse Is Helping Students Find Their Voice”
- Mayeesha Galiba: “Mass. Coalition Fights To Promote The Rights Of Immigrants And Refugees”
- Elise Harmon: “New England Activists Rally For Victims Of Violence In Syria”
- Christie Macomber: “Standing Up For Standing Rock: The Harsh Realities Of Environmental Racism”
- Alexandra Malloy: “In Wellfleet, An Oyster Farmer’s Life Is Dictated By The Tides”
- Gwendolyn Schanker: “Seeing Is Believing: Using Multimedia To Tell The Climate Change Story”
- Rowan Walrath: “Fossil-Fuel Divestment Campaigns Hit Boston’s College Campuses”
- Elle Williams: “Standing Up For Black Lives: How Asian Americans Are Showing Their Solidarity”
Many thanks to Peter Kadzis, who edits the WGBH News site, as well as to the web folks who made it happen: Brendan Lynch, Paris Alston, and Joshua Eaton.
My 1996 interview with the late Nat Hentoff about his years at Down Beat magazine
The great journalist and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff died on Saturday at the age of 91. In 1996 I had the privilege of interviewing Hentoff and his former colleague Dom Cerulli for Northeastern University’s alumni magazine. Hentoff and Cerulli, who died in 2013, were both Northeastern alumni, and both served as the editor of the jazz magazine Down Beat in the 1950s. I can’t find the clip, but I did manage to dig up my last rewrite before I turned the article in to my editor. I cannot defend the way the piece opens; all I can say is that I’m glad I’ve continued to improve as a writer. Hentoff was a giant. His death creates a deep void, especially at this moment of crisis.
It was the 1950s, Manhattan, 52nd Street. And it seemed like the whole world was in a groove.
Check it out—over there, at the Five Spot. It’s Thelonious Monk, plunking out the chords to “ ’Round Midnight” on the house piano.
Charlie Parker’s seen better days. You know how it is: sometimes he shows up, sometimes he doesn’t. But he’s still Bird, and if he can borrow an alto sax he’s supposed to be playing tonight at Birdland, the club they named after him.
Dizzy Gillespie’s around, of course, only now he’s not playing much bop. He’s got himself this new trumpet that’s bent up toward the ceiling, and he’s doing some Afro-Cuban thing.
Like the old guys? Well, they’re still holding forth. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, you name it.
Miles Davis, that skinny kid trumpet player who used to be in Bird’s band, is starting to turn heads. And Charles Mingus has a band that’s making the biggest, wildest noise you’ve ever heard.
“It was magical. It was incredible,” says Barry Kernfeld, editor of “The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz” (St. Martin’s, 1994).
It was also a hell of a lot to keep track of.
And from 1952 to ’59, two of the most important witnesses to this musical revolution were a couple of Northeastern guys, Nat Hentoff (Class of 1944) and Dom Cerulli (Class of 1951). They were the New York eyes and ears of Down Beat, a Chicago-based magazine that was—and still is—the most authoritative publication covering jazz.
Continue reading “My 1996 interview with the late Nat Hentoff about his years at Down Beat magazine”
Do presidential newspaper endorsements still matter?
From my just-published Q&A with news @ Northeastern:
Presidential endorsements are a way for newspapers as community institutions to express their values and their vision. I’ve written plenty of endorsements over the years, and I was never under any illusion that what we had to say about the presidential candidates was going to change anyone’s mind. Rather, it is a way for a newspaper’s editorial board to say, “This is who we are. This is what we believe.”
Why the Gawker case could set a dangerous precedent
Gawker’s problems began in October 2012, when the gossip site ran a portion of a sex tape featuring wrestler Hulk Hogan, which Hogan claimed violated his privacy and infringed on his publicity rights.
It was later revealed that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel—an outspoken critic of the website—provided financial backing for Hogan’s suit, which came to a close earlier this year, when a Florida court ruled in Hogan’s favor and the jury handed down a $140 million verdict that ultimately doomed the media company.
Here, Dan Kennedy, associate professor in the School of Journalism and a nationally known media commentator, weighs in on the effect of shuttering the gossip site on the broader media landscape and the “troubling” mechanics behind the suit that served as its demise. Its termination, he says, could empower “wealthy interests” to use the legal system to drive media organizations out of business.
Slides for my AEJMC talk on recording and transcribing
Doing this on my phone. I’ll try to pretty this up later, but for now, just click here.
Peering into the post-Roger Ailes future of Fox News
Roger Ailes is out at Fox News. The media tycoon resigned on Thursday, just two weeks after former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment. Ailes, the founder and now former CEO of Fox News, had a long history in Republican politics before building Fox News into a media powerhouse. Here, Dan Kennedy, associate professor in the School of Journalism and a nationally known media commentator, talks about Ailes’ swift downfall and what his departure may mean for the future of journalism.
Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post wrote, “Two weeks. That’s all it took from Gretchen Carlson’s filing a sexual harassment suit against Fox News chief Roger Ailes to the evident demise of one of the most powerful figures in American media and politics.” Are you surprised at the swiftness of the investigation and Ailes’s ultimate resignation?
I’m surprised and I’m not surprised. We talked about this recently on WGBH-TV’s Beat the Press. At the time we were all in agreement that if no other women came forward, then Carlson’s claims were likely to fizzle into a he said/she said standoff. As it turned out, numerous other women emerged to level serious accusations of sexual harassment against Ailes. Once that occurred, it was only a matter of time before he’d be shown the door.
What does Facebook Live mean for journalism?
In April Facebook Live was launched, allowing users to broadcast live and tap the social media giant’s colossal audience. But it was last week, as the world now knows, that Facebook Live had its watershed, technology-transforming-history moment in the broadcast of Philando Castile’s final moments as filmed and narrated by his girlfriend after he was shot by a police officer.
To understand what Facebook Live might mean for newsrooms, Storybench sat down with Northeastern University journalism professors Dan Kennedy and John Wihbey.
