Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper
This essay is the cumulative a-ha moment born from years of potshot speculation about the decline of the newspaper. It’s everything I wanted to say without being able to say it.
The Globe and Mail used some of the Journal photographers’ shots on their website including a few taken by yours truly.
Train Jumping: A Desparate Journey
A multimedia photo show by Gary Coronado about South American workers riding the trains through Central America to reach the United States. A truly in-depth and laborious report into the subject.
This guy may not be able to go back to his home because of the Taliban, but he can still protest their brutality with his incredible stylishness.
More accurate description of the AP “Protect, Point, Pay” clusterfuck of a monetization play.
Hilarious.
“Creamy White Thighs”
A funny little aside in what was a completely unrelated Strobist article:
A little aside: Legend has it there was an ongoing challenge between many of the reporters at The Baltimore Sun — with real money involved — to sneak the phrase “creamy white thighs” into a story in print.
Reporter Joel McCord is said to have come closest, in describing a painting over the bar at a joint on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Copydesk, also apparently aware of the bet, cut it at the last minute.
Stephen Colbert to be Newsweek Guest Editor
From The Observer:
When we asked Mr. Colbert about past guest editors at other books, he said, “I’m confident we’ll have mixed results! I want to be apart of that proud tradition.”
A People in Despair: Haiti's year without mercy
Incredibly moving slideshow from photographer Patrick Farrell on his photographic coverage during the aftermath of Hurrican Ike and other storms in Haiti.
Every once and a while I see a piece like that this that reminds me of the power of the photograph.
Burma is home to the longest-running civil war on the planet, its people oppressed by a brutal, crushing regime… in my mind, the importance of these execution photographs has never been their ability to shock; rather, it is that they are perfectly illustrative of the cycles of violence that develop in areas suffering decades of non-stop conflict…
These images are not only about the victims, but about the person who carried out the executions, and the tragic circumstances of his brief life… in the frontal photograph of this young man, 18 years of age, holding a bloody knife after taking the lives of two people, you will notice (aside from the aforementioned knife and the “Give Me Liberty or Death” t-shirt) that he is missing his right eye… when he was 12 years old, Burmese government troops came into his village and killed his mother and father right in front of him… they then bashed him in the head with a rifle butt and left him for dead… the boy survived this ordeal, but suffered the loss of his right eye - and the loss of his childhood… he immediately fled his village and joined a guerrilla army that was waging war against the government… by the time I photographed the executions, he was 18 and a member of a special commando unit… his superior officer told me that the young man often had to be restrained after an engagement with government troops, to keep him from sneaking back to the corpses and eating body parts… when he carried out the executions, it was unimaginably savage and shocking - much of the worst of it I did not capture on film… he was oblivious to the horror, lost in a haze of hate and revenge… each stab of the blade was a way to get back for the loss of his parents, his eye, his childhood… A few months later, this same young man - who had both endured and caused so much suffering, was dead at 18, killed in a clash with government troops…
Towards Better Technology Journalism
TechCrunch’s is one of the most widely-heard voices in technology reporting. This should be considered an embarrassment to our industry.
Dayummmm, girl.
