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What Makes Good Journalism?

Journalists and others concerned about the status of the news industry in North America and Europe keep arguing that we are getting poorer journalism because of the economic state of the industry. But when you ask them “what makes good journalism?” they find it nearly impossible to articulate the concept. Those trying to articulate the elements good journalism tend to use comforting and immeasurable platitudes and to describe it through attributes based on professional practices: pursuit of truth, fairness, completeness, accuracy, verification, and coherence. These are not a definition of quality, but a listing of contributors to or elements of quality practices. Each attribute alone is not sufficient for good journalism and degree to which each contributes is unclear. In practice, most of us settle on identifying journalistic quality by its absence or by its comparison to poor or average quality journalism. Thus we know it when we don’t see it or we describe by...
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Vanity thy name is Chinese internet company

Why does a Chinese internet company wish to get listed in the US ? I can't fathom the logic. Hence this post. The Chinese internet landscape is a strange one. Almost every one of the global majors is blocked. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, you name it and it is blocked. Instead there is a carbon copy of each one of them locally in Chinese. For Google, read Baidu . For Facebook, read Renren , for YouTube read Youku or Tudou , for Twitter read Sina Weibo or the dozens of similar clones. These are the ones that are wildly popular, having millions of users, only in Chinese and therefore almost exclusively used by Chinese. Never mind that these  are all censored , watched, bullied, etc etc by the jīndùn gōngchéng (The Great Firewall). This post is not about that cursed censorship. These sites are all by entrepreneur led start up companies , similar to the American originals.  And they all want to list and make huge money. Fair enough. But they seem to want to list in the U...
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This is why business leaders are reviled

If you behave like this, you deserve to be cursed, reviled, and generally hated. Unfortunately many business leaders are exactly like this, which is why a business tycoon is considered by society as a figure to be loathed. The "this" I refer to is Stephen Elop, Chairman of Nokia being entitled to a $25m payout for the the sale of Nokia's handset business to Microsoft. Nokia, as everybody knows, has been in dire straits for quite some time. In 2010, the Board fired its existing Finnish leaders and brought Stephen Elop, from Microsoft, as the CEO to "rescue" Nokia. Elop abandoned Nokia's operating system Symbian and tied its fortunes to Microsoft by adopting the Windows platform. It did not work and Nokia has continued to slide. During Mr Elop's tenure, Nokia's market capitalisation fell  by $ 14 bn - that's the amount Nokia's shareholders have lost. Finally Nokia has decided to sell its handest business to Microsoft for under $ 10 bn. Elop...
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