Are the days of dominant No.1 news stations over and done? Not quite. But the headlines from this year's February sweeps period do make you wonder. When former powerhouses struggle and former rivals are neck-and-neck, have we entered a new era of local news? Let's start …
After more than a year of work, NPR has issued a revised ethics handbook to provide guidance in sticky situations. NPR has weathered quite a few of those recently, from the firing of commentator Juan Williams to the decision to stop distributing an opera program because …
If blogging is just writing, why is it so hard to do well? Maybe because it's not just writing, or at least it shouldn't be. Journalists who ought to know the basics seem to struggle with blogging as much as anyone else. They aren't sure …
Lots of news stories are here today, gone tomorrow. But many come back again and again, stories that have twists and turns, a history and new developments that need to be reported. Here's one example: A crime, an investigation, an arrest, a trial and a …
Forgive the apocalyptic headline, but when two columns cross my desk the same day warning broadcast executives to wake up or face extinction, I pay attention. Technology-driven threats to the broadcast business model aren't new, but these columns suggest a bazillion-channel future is closer than …
A new mobile app aims to give YouTube a run for its money in the "citizen journalist" assignment game. Rawporter is the latest competitor to YouTube Direct, giving newsrooms the ability to request and rebroadcast video from anyone who happens to be at or near …
by John Larson, correspondent, PBS Note taking for me has always been defined by deadline -- the tighter it is, the more my notes tend to reflect immediate needs: the in/out cues of the best potential quotes, the most important facts/statistics that I'll need RIGHT NOW. …
Some things rarely change. TV news writing is one of them, unfortunately. More than a decade ago, I noticed something about both network and local newscasts that drove me nuts and wrote a column about it. This morning, I got a message from Rick Tillery, …
"Leave the notebook at home." That's what one journalism site recommended when reviewing Evernote, a digital service that stores notes, pictures and Web clips online so users can access them anywhere from any device. It's a cool tool but it hasn't replaced my reporter's notebook and …
Television's need for pictures can be a two-edged sword. Great pictures can make a story memorable, because viewers remember what they see longer than what they hear. But a lack of pictures can turn an important story into a throw-away anchor reader, giving it less …
Interviews are an essential building block for just about every news story, so it's obviously important to know how to conduct a good one. Most interviewing advice comes in the form of tips and hints, like these dos and don'ts from Canadian journalist John Sawatsky and …
For years, critics have complained that the nightly national TV newscasts are all basically the same, leading with the same stories, covering the same developments, often in exactly the same order. And the networks have been criticized for ignoring international news unless the U.S. was …
