Posts tagged new yorker
To Strongbox or Not to Strongbox
Last week we noted that the New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online system meant to preserve the anonymity of leakers submitting sensitive material to the magazine.
Strongbox is based on the work of Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen and, as Amy Davidson noted when announcing its implementation, “Even we won’t be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them.”
Which is a good thing given recent news about the Justice Department’s surveilling of journalists and news organizations.
But can it be be a newsroom boon?
Writing at CSO Online, John P. Mello argues that while Strongbox “provides strong protection of the identity of a source, it removes an important element in the process: authentication.”
Here’s what he means:
A system where anonymous leakers are dropping documents into a folder has advantages when government investigators start probing a story’s sources, but it also creates tremendous disadvantages. “The government can’t come after you to find out who gave you the document because you have no way of knowing,” [Northeastern University assistant journalism professor Dan] Kennedy said.
“That gives more protection to the source, but it makes it harder to vet the document because you don’t know who gave it to you,” he said…
…”All sources, anonymous or not, have to be evaluated. That’s impossible to do without context. “Knowing your source’s motivations helps contextualize the information,” said Mark Jurkowitz, associate director for the Pew Research Project for Excellence in Journalism.
“A solution that prevents the news organization from knowing the identity of a confidential source has value, but it’s not an ideal solution because it is important to know the identity of the source to weigh the information,” he told CSO.
“Information supplied by a confidential source needs to be evaluated, weighed and understood in the same way that information of somebody speaking on the record does,” he added.
FJP: A tool is a tool. While Mello illustrates important drawbacks, if the alternative is no documents to work with then you work with the tools available. It’s just important to know going in what their limitations are.
Images: Independent Twitter posts via Nicholas Thomson and Kevin Anderson.
Everyday Africa Takes over The New Yorker’s Instagram Feed
Via The New Yorker:
This week, the photo collective Everyday Africa, a project focussing on images of daily life in Africa, will be posting to The New Yorker’s Instagram feed. Nine photographers across the continent, from Mali to Kenya, are contributing.
Here’s The New Yorker on Instagram.
And here’s Everyday Africa on Tumblr.
Image: A motorcycle taxi driver uses his feet to steer in Bamako, Mali on January 29, by Glenna Gordon
Preventing errors from appearing in the magazine is not a simple process. For openers, you need to know that in addition to the basic reporting pieces, we also check “The Talk of the Town,” the critics, fiction, poetry, cartoons, art, captions, the table of contents, certain of the several-paragraph-long essays in the “Goings On” section. We also fact-check the contributors page, the cover wrap, the letters column, all the press releases, and a good deal of the recently mounted Web site.
To start checking a nonfiction piece, you begin by consulting the writer about how the piece was put together and using the writer’s sources as well as our own departmental sources. We then essentially take the piece apart and put it back together again. You make sure that the names and dates are right, but then if it is a John McPhee piece, you make sure that the USGS report that he read, he read correctly; or if it is a John le Carré piece, when he says his con man father ran for Parliament in 1950, you make sure that it wasn’t 1949 or 1951.
Or if we describe the basis on which the FDA approved or disapproved the medical tests that ImClone used for Erbitux, then you need to find out what the complexities of that whole situation were. And of course, this kind of thing has consequences, because if you get it wrong, it matters. We also work on complicated pieces such as the ones we’ve been running this fall about the Pentagon’s top-secret team that is trained to snatch nukes away from belligerent countries, or the piece about the Predator drone that had a clear shot at Mullah Omar, for better or for worse, and didn’t take the shot because the CENTCOM attorneys were not clear on the legality of that operation.
Back in 2002, New Yorker fact-checking director Peter Canby gave a lecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism about… fact-checking The New Yorker. The lecture is now a chapter in The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry, an anthology released this September from this and similar Columbia lectures given over the years.
Peter Canby, Columbia Journalism Review. Fact-checking at The New Yorker.
Too Hot for Facebook
The News: The New Yorker was temporarily banned from Facebook for violating their nudity and sex standards with this cartoon.
In their funny response they provide a solution and we learn that “’male nipples are ok.’ It’s the ‘female nipple bulges’ that are the problem.”
But why would a writer as accomplished as Lehrer become this much of a copy/paste addict? Because he has ceased to be a writer. With the success of his recent books How We Decide and Imagine: How Creativity Works, Lehrer has moved into the idea business. This is the world of TED talks and corporate lectures, a realm in which your thoughts are your product. For the idea man, the written word is just one of many mediums for conveying your message and building your brand.
Oh, God! We may NEVER KNOW!
Via the New Yorker.
Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable.
Françoise Mouly, Art Editor, the New Yorker, on how she works with artists on the magazine’s covers. Secrets of the New Yorker cover.
Mouly’s just published a book called Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See, that shows rejected work and the sketches made in the process of arriving at the covers that ended being used.
We just launched our Facebook timeline! We unlocked pivotal pieces from our archives to mark the milestones in our eighty-seven-year history. Take a look and tell us what we’ve missed, or what you’d like to see, and we may unlock your article, story, or poem and add it to our timeline.
FJP: And there goes any work I thought I might get done this afternoon. — Michael
OK, but what I’m about to tell you does not leave this news cycle. — Paul Noth, The New Yorker.
The New Yorker did a great profile on Jill Abramson in true New Yorker fashion. Read it now for free. For a young, female journalist, Abramson is truly inspiring; and for digital journalism enthusiasts out there, Abramson is making a huge push to take advantage of the web as a multimedia publication platform. We’ll see how she does but I’m hopeful. ~Chao @cli6cli6
Evidently, they’re not on Tumblr.
Graphic novelist James Sturm wanted to see if he could get a cartoon into the New Yorker. To prepare, he decided to draw one “gag comic” a day until his 90-page sketch book was filled.
If making graphic novels felt like a staid long-term relationship, then doing gag comics is like playing the field. One day I could draw a fortuneteller; the next, an astronaut. I went from sultans to superheroes, robots to rabbits. I felt liberated. I refused to get bogged down or fuss over the drawings. I spent no more than an hour with any one cartoon, and many took far less time than that. For the first two weeks I was feeling my oats. I already had a half-dozen keepers and was confident there were plenty more winners on the way. It was at this point that I started dreaming of actually selling a cartoon to The New Yorker…
…By my fourth week of daily drawing, I hit a wall. It got harder and harder to generate gags, and I often found myself staring at a blank page at eleven o’clock at night, just wanting to get something down so I could go to bed. My measuring stick was the great New Yorker cartoonist William Steig. Besides knowing what made people tick, Steig possessed that holy combination of looseness and precision that gives great cartooning its casual authority. I knew I could never compare with Steig, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself, either. I had my pride, and if I was going to produce another 60 gags I needed to approach things differently.
James Sturm, Slate, How Hard Is It To Get a Cartoon Into The New Yorker?
Click through to see more of Sturm’s work, find out if it got published and learn about the inner workings of New Yorker cartoon culture.
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