Month: May 2005

  • Tsunami coverage conference

    Via Mark on Media: The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma held a conference in April on coverage of last December’s tsunami. Lots of journalistic questions about how to cover disasters here, including this one: What do you do when the interviewee is crying on your shoulder?

  • Knight/Princess/Dragon: More on the importance of story structure.

    Knight/Princess/Dragon. In business/marketing/advertising, Cluetrain/Hughtrain style: The story of your company sells your product. Tell us why your product will better hook us into our ideals, into our more efficient day, into ourselves, into our own narrative. Tell us where your product fits into that narrative we write for ourselves. In government/politics: The story of your…

  • All conversations are stories.

    SO – Yesterday I threw up my gut reaction to the Pat Tillman bamboozle, including some of what I wrote when the story broke. The reason the friendly-fire truth of the story was covered up? Because the “fallen hero” angle made for a better story. It plugs right into our collective unconscious mythic tagging system,…

  • On the lighter side: Kevin Smith blogs.

    Enough warblogging. Here’s something that will weigh a little less heavily on your soul(s) dear reader(s): Kevin Smith is blogging. For those who don’t know…ah well, you’ve probably seen one of his movies, or your brother or boyfriend or husband mumbles something about one from time to time, or you’re a full on Smithophile. Personally,…

  • Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire and the Army knew.

    Today’s Washington Post reports the Army was perfectly aware that Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire, but covered it up.

  • Uncensored: Flag-Draped Coffins via Flickr

    The U.S. military thought that it would be easier to keep public opinion about the war in Iraq from degenerating into a Vietnam-type situation by censoring images of dead soldiers returning to the States. During Vietnam, the flag-draped coffins of the soldiers who were actually out there dying every day for whatever we fight wars…

  • Photo.net lives

    Apparently <a href="the pictures I posted (a few years ago) on photo.net were not sucked into the black hole of server rotation as I had previously assumed. Some of these were, in fact, sucked into the black hole of a deceased hard drive, so I’m glad to see them again. Now where’s that export to…