Off topic: Tomorrow’s reporters
Thanks everyone, for bearing with me through exams. I’m finished now, so I will be posting more consistently. I will also be assuming one of my other roles, as the new Director of Training and Recruitment for Canada’s top student paper.
So here is my question for you, dear readers. If you could impart two or three skills, ethical guidelines or ways of thinking to the next generation of Canadian journalists, what would they be? Better grammar? A commitment to fact checking? Fantastic interviewing technique? Better basic math?
A commitment to fact checking indeed. And please, PLEASE, stop the abuse and manipulation of statistics, interpreted to produced manufactured outrage. Enough already, of the potential dangers lurking around every corner. As well, once the horse is dead, leave it be.
Anti-chrysler
14 August 2008 at 2:16 pm
More fact checking, less fear mongering, and less fluff news — on the global scale there’s no such thing as a “slow news day” so bad that there’s a reason to do any kind of story on celebrities or kittens stuck in trees or nice old ladies that use Facebook. I think getting the math right could fall under fact checking. They don’t need to actually be able to do the math themselves, but it’d be nice if they learned to use a calculator properly, or asked a “basic math” expert (like their children
).
Meg
21 August 2008 at 1:18 am
News is news. Select it as things that the readers will regret not seeing; not as background to a line you want to put over.
Comment is comment. Always make that clear.
Read and remember that excellent (and short) textbook “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff.
Diversity
30 August 2008 at 8:34 am
Better basic math/statistics.
Eric
15 September 2008 at 7:31 pm