Edward Wasserman
Edward Wasserman, a veteran South Florida newspaper editor and writer, is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. He was previously Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. Before that, Wasserman worked for news organizations in Maryland, Wyoming and New York City, was executive business editor of The Miami Herald and CEO and editor in chief of American Lawyer Media's Miami-based Daily Business Review chain. He was educated at Yale, the University of Paris and the London School of Economics.
On the warm, clear morning of 9/11, with the towers still ablaze, a workmate and I set out on foot from our office in midtown Manhattan toward what later became known as Ground Zero. This was years before smart phones. With electricity out in much of the downtown, people we passed had turned to a decades-old news source: They huddled around the open doors of parked cars and listened to the radios.
Just how private is the closed-door talk of the powerful? And if the unguarded comments of politicians who assume they’re speaking in confidence are captured on tape, is it OK to make those tapes public?
Word that The Washington Post was doing away with the job of ombudsman after 43 years was greeted, by and large, with a shrug and a yawn by news habitués.
People who make their living by writing for publication had good reason to follow the recent hoo-hah over publishers who think paying writers for their work is optional.
In media mythology, the years from the mid-1960s to the mid-’70s were the classical age, a heroic time of moral clarity.
Media throughout the country carried news recently that a half-dozen email accounts belonging to ex-President George W. Bush and several of his friends and relatives had been hacked. The words and images that were pilfered weren’t all that interesting, so all in all it wasn’t a huge story.
The spectacle of TV personality Geraldo Rivera using his soapbox with Fox News to test-market a possible run for the U.S. Senate has, not surprisingly, caused some real journalists to cough up hairballs.
Even while some media organizations roll out new online subscription plans, the Internet continues its steady drift toward a business model built overwhelmingly on money not from readers, but from advertisers. It’s advertising that’s emerging as the revenue source that everybody, from Facebook and Google to newspaper websites and gadfly bloggers, wants a piece of.
RSS|
My Yahoo|
Newsletters|
Mobile|
Alerts|
Twitter
Terms of Service| Privacy Policy| About our ads| Copyright| About The Miami Herald| About the McClatchy Company| Corrections| Contact Us| Advertise| Work for Us
Partners: El Nuevo Herald| Newspaper in Education| WLRN | Miami Herald News| CBS4 WFOR-TV| More
Copyright 2013 Miami Herald Media Co. All rights reserved
