Tagged: Journalism

As the media covered the tragic Boston Marathon bombing, they also made mistakes. News outlets, with reputations built on truth and accuracy, spent air-time speculating rather than reporting.  Some of the early, incorrect reports posed threats to innocent people who were wrongly-implicated in the bombing.

A group of student journalists is getting a course in professional radio reporting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The class has opened a world of experience to them. One of the students, Mark Haywood, had the opportunity to report on an incident of human trafficking right in his hometown of Randolph County, North Carolina. 

During Superstorm Sandy, the HMS Bounty - a 180 foot, three-masted, wooden ship - was tossed about helplessly in the middle of a raging storm. Two members of the ship's crew died, and the remaining 14 members had to be dramatically rescued by the Coast Guard. A member of the Coast Guard snapped this photograph on his phone from a helicopter that day:

The Pew Research Center released its annual State of the Media report for 2012, and television news viewership is down. Political coverage has declined, and on local TV news, 40 percent of the content is made up of traffic, sports and weather. Meanwhile, newspaper newsrooms in 2012 employed 40,000 people, the smallest number of full-time journalists since 1978.