By Ken Auletta, excerpted in Nieman Reports: While covering the media business for The New Yorker for more than 25 years, Ken Auletta has profiled many of the most important leaders of the Information Age and reported on the disruption roiling the industry. Among his books are “Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way” […]
By James G. Robinson, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review: A central irony of the newsroom is that while many journalists’ decisions are made with readers in mind, the audiences for their work often remain unfocused, imagined abstractions, built on long-held assumptions, newsroom folklore, and imperfect inference. This is not particular to journalism. Writing, like […]
By Thom Fladung/Hennes Communications This 4th of July, amid the fireworks, hot dogs and parades, let’s remember another grand American tradition: making stuff up. Or, as John Adams noted with delight in his diary in 1769, he’d spent the evening in “a curious employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurrences etc. – working the political Engine!” […]
From Madeleine Aggeler, writing for The Cut: Few things fill me with a greater sense of dread than getting a message from a co-worker that says: hi The greeting — short, blunt — makes me imagine that the other person is taking a deep, weary sigh before delivering a piece of awful news. I’ve made […]
By Arthur Solomon, writing for CommPro: We soon will be approaching June 1, the birthday of the death of TV journalism. And Americans who care about truthful, factual, accurate news should still be in mourning. People who grew up during the age of cable news might not know that once upon a time, TV journalism […]
By Charlie Warzel, writing for the New York Times: You can’t see much in the haunting video of Tuesday’s shooting at the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colo. — just darkness and an eerie voice repeating a prerecorded warning over a loudspeaker. “Attention please. Lockdown. Lock, lights, out of sight.” Two videos with a combined runtime of 82 seconds […]
From Insurance Business Magazine, with quotes from Thom Fladung, (now) managing partner of Hennes Communications: First there was Harvey Weinstein. We were horrified, but we’d seen things play out like this occasionally before, like with Bill Cosby or Clarence Thomas. But then there was Kevin Spacey. And Jeffrey Tambor, Louis CK, US Senator Al Franken, […]
By Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications Some believe President Trump and his closest advisers committed illegal acts by conspiring with Russian officials on a wide variety of political and financial activities. Some believe President Trump and his closest advisers indeed had contacts with Russian officials, but that those contacts were benign or perhaps even stupid, but […]
From Rose Minutaglio writing in Elle: A slew of nameless sources claiming to be “close to” Lori Loughlin and “familiar with her case” have been feeding what seems like endless fodder to tabloids since news of the college admissions scandal broke in March. “It’s killing her that her squeaky-clean reputation has done a total 180. […]
If you’ve ever attended any of our training seminars, you know we often talk about how reporters are often storytellers, often using familiar tropes and archetypes, accompanied by all their embedded values. On that subject, here’s writer Jeff Jarvis, writing for BuzzMachine on this topic: In journalism, we think our job is to “get the […]