Category Archives: Journo

Eat the news, not too much

By Frank Paynter | Published: March 4, 2011

…most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and [...]

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Several people showed up at the rally

By Frank Paynter | Published: October 30, 2010

It had kind of a Woodstock vibe… except the music, well the music was good, but… well, okay. It didn’t have that kind of Woodstock vibe. But it was meaningful as all get out.

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On the bus or into the pudding

By Frank Paynter | Published: October 26, 2010

My generation grew up with a binary political perspective. For us, everything was black or white, white or black, no shades of gray. You were either “on the bus, or off the bus.” As we matured, the children of the sixties, the boomers, or–as I like to call us–the greatest generation set aside the bus [...]

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Procrustean news patterns

By Frank Paynter | Published: October 5, 2010

The “daily news cycle” killed twentieth century journalism. It drained meaning, the life blood of news dissemination, from the stories we needed to hear. The artificial constraint of deadline driven journalism forced journalists and news-makers to collude in an elaborate ritual more suited to ancient Greek dramatic arts than to newscasts or newspapers. Nine years [...]

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Silly Season

By Frank Paynter | Published: September 19, 2010

Today, “Talk Like A Pirate Day” marks the official end of the silly season, those glorious few months toward the end of summer when the gherkins are ripening and the mass media hit their lowest audience levels of the year competing for their share with lies, fables, fantasies, and frivolity. Around 1950, C.M. Kornbluth published [...]

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Whole lotta lynx

By Frank Paynter | Published: December 31, 2009

PhD Comix Kulcha Round-up Betsy Blair, comsymp Federal government muffs another one Whining Joe Klein Invisible Inkling Prison Health and Our Community: A Public Health Investigation Pew, that decade STANK Steve Outing, Welcome to Elba Jim Long on the Verge of Something New John Siracusa, the Ars in Arstechnica Community Supported Journalism Public Knowledge Progressive [...]

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Web versioning

By Frank Paynter | Published: November 15, 2009

Ethan Zuckerman refers to Dan Gillmor’s slow news advocacy here, and he extends the concept to journalism criticism, the stories about stories that critics write. His post traces the update history of a recent story about a story that dominated the news cycle for a few days last week. He says, “What I’d love to [...]

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Slow news

By Frank Paynter | Published: November 14, 2009

First there was slow food and then came slow money. Dan Gillmor proposes that we add slow news to the list. I’ve long been a slow news advocate. Partly this is because I can’t keep up. I’ll admit it. The Amazon (it’s a river–look it up) of information that comes my way every day threatens [...]

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