One big part of The New York Times’ post-newspaper strategy: video. The publisher rolled out a new video player this week. It swallows four times the screen real estate of its predecessor, spanning the Times homepage edge to edge. But the new player represents more than a design enhancement. It’s a recognition that video is a chief priority for the company as it looks to a digital future.
Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist cultural critic, has for months received death and rape threats from opponents of her recent work challenging the stereotypes of women in video games. Bomb threats for her public talks are now routine. One detractor created a game in which players can click their mouse to punch an image of her face.
Not until Tuesday, though, did Ms. Sarkeesian feel compelled to cancel a speech, planned at Utah State University. The day before, members of the university administration received an email warning that a shooting massacre would be carried out at the event. And under Utah law, she was told, the campus police could not prevent people with weapons from entering her talk.
“This will be the deadliest school shooting in American history, and I’m giving you a chance to stop it,” said the email, which bore the moniker Marc Lépine, the name of a man who killed 14 women in a mass shooting in Montreal in 1989 before taking his own life.
The threats against Ms. Sarkeesian are the most noxious example of a weekslong campaign to discredit or intimidate outspoken critics of the male-dominated gaming industry and its culture. The instigators of the campaign are allied with a broader movement that has rallied around the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate, a term adopted by those who see ethical problems among game journalists and political correctness in their coverage. The more extreme threats, though, seem to be the work of a much smaller faction and aimed at women. Major game companies have so far mostly tried to steer clear of the vitriol, leading to calls for them to intervene.
The New York Times, “Feminist Critics of Video Games Face Threats In ‘GamerGate’ Campaign” (via inothernews)
Reblogged from BLOGGING via TYPEWRITER.
With two years of her four-year term as the Times’s Public Editor (Graylady-ese for ombudsman) under her belt, she has not only adapted to the speed of the web, but managed to keep pace with its topicality and bottomless appetite for controversy. Sometimes that’s required stirring up controversy herself. But this is what makes her so different from her predecessors: she has ushered the position into a new media age by reimagining the very purpose of the job.
Sometimes the CIA or the director of national intelligence or the NSA or the White House will call about a story. You hit the brakes, you hear the arguments, and it’s always a balancing act: the importance of the information to the public versus the claim of harming national security. Over time, the government too reflexively said to the Times, “you’re going to have blood on your hands if you publish X,” and because of the frequency of that, the government lost a little credibility. But you do listen and seriously worry. Editors are Americans too. We don’t want to help terrorists.
Jill Abramson, former Executive Editor of The New York Times, to Cosmopolitan. I’m Not Ashamed of Being Fired.
In a Q&A with Cosmo, Abramson talks about life after the Times and offers good advice to young journos. For example:
I taught at Yale for five years when I was managing editor and what I tried to stress for students interested in journalism, rather than picking a specialty, like blogging or being a videographer, was to master the basics of really good storytelling, have curiosity and a sense of how a topic is different than a story, and actually go out and witness and report. If you hone those skills, you will be in demand, as those talents are prized. There is too much journalism right now that is just based on people scraping the Internet and riffing off something else.
It all comes back to storytelling.
(via futurejournalismproject)
Reblogged from The FJP
We just feel that we need to offer as much variety as possible and force ourselves to experiment with how we tell the stories.
Nieman Lab talks with Jason Stallman about the planning the Times put into its World Cup coverage and how audiences have responded to the range of work the produced.
(Source: niemanlab.org)
When you talk about the cultural legacy for newspapers, if you talk about the cultural legacy inside and outside newsrooms, print still fundamentally matters, and it’s really difficult to let go of how that works.
While China’s government blocked access to the newspaper’s main site last year, in both English and Chinese, the Times found another route into its lucrative market through the October launch of a Chinese-language T Magazine site. Taking its name from the Times’ style magazine, the Chinese-staffed publication offers cultural reporting that appeals to luxury advertisers and is less likely to agitate China’s authoritarian government, which censors its domestic media and has increasingly turned down visa requests from foreign news outlets.
At a conference last month in China, Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said the Chinese T site would not focus on politics, foreign policy or business – all potential minefields in the country – but instead would be geared toward lifestyle coverage. Upon launching, The Wall Street Journal reported that “The Times is hoping the website could pave the way for the unblocking of the publication’s English and Chinese news websites.”
Loading tweets...
There are any number of pressing media issues in the digital age -- we're sure you can come up with a handful without breaking a sweat. ONA Issues is your platform to define them, share them, explore them and get a better fix on how they impact the work you do. Here we'll look to you for your perspectives and conversations and help jump-start discussions by posting insightful reporting, commentary and analysis from anywhere and everywhere. We're here to listen and learn. Join us.
Email
Twitter
Subscribe via RSS
Follow on Tumblr
Mobile version
Random post