Mediagazer: The problem with data journalism (Allison Schrager/Quartz)

4:25 PM ET, March 19, 2014

Top News:

Leon Wieseltier / The New Republic:

Nate Silver could learn a lot from those op-ed columnists he maligns — Nate Silver could learn a lot from those op-ed columnists he maligns — I wish to say a word or two in defense of “bulls**t.” That is Nate Silver's meticulously chosen term—he does nothing imprecisely—for opinion journalism.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells / New York Magazine:
Why Do We Expect So Much From Nate Silver?

Discussion: The Week, @bryanjoiner, @thestalwart, MIT, @nymag, Talking Points Memo, Columbia Journalism Review, @jayrosen_nyu, @themarkberman, @chadwickmatlin and @edmundlee

The Atlantic Online:

David Frum Named Senior Editor at The Atlantic — Washington, D.C. (March 19, 2014)— The veteran political commentator and author David Frum is joining The Atlantic as a senior editor beginning March 31, James Bennet, editor in chief of The Atlantic, announced today.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, Politico, Capital New York, Mediaite, @mlcalderone, @jaywattsiii, @gzornick, @shanedingman and @over_rated

Justin B. Smith / Medium:

Bloomberg Media—A New Direction — Bloomberg L.P. has built a significant media business over the last 20 years. Our television, digital, magazine, radio and live event platforms span the globe. Our influence is considerable, but Bloomberg Media's greatest potential has yet to still be realized.

Discussion: Poynter, @msquinn, @daweiner, @brianstelter, @atossaaraxia and Talking Biz News

Brian Morrissey / Digiday:

Justin Smith's plan for where Bloomberg Media goes next — It has now been 100 days since former Atlantic Media CEO Justin Smith took over as CEO of Bloomberg Media. He has used that time to craft his vision for where Bloomberg goes next. — In Smith's eyes, Bloomberg Media's opportunity is immense.

Discussion: TVNewser, Mediawire Daily and Talking Biz News

Allison Schrager / Quartz:

The problem with data journalism — The recent boom in “data-driven” journalism projects is exciting. It can elevate our knowledge, enliven statistics, and make us all more numerate. But I worry that data give commentary a false sense of authority since data analysis is inherently prone to bias.

Discussion: @sisiwei, @urbaninstitute, @noahpinion, @glichfield, @moorehn and @jenlucpiquant

Ben Branstetter / Daily Dot:

Newsweek's Bitcoin facepalm got Internet culture wrong — When Newsweek ceased publishing their print edition at the end of 2012, ending an 80-year stint as a stalwart of the American news industry, it was largely seen as the first national casualty of the digital era, a titan felled …

Discussion: PandoDaily and The Huffington Post

Eugene Volokh / Washington Post:
Reverse defamation, the Newsweek Bitcoin story, and Satoshi Nakamoto

Discussion: @jerrybrito and @marshallyoum

Michael Holden / Reuters:

News Corp executives pressured ex-reporter to take phone-hacking rap - court — (Reuters) - The former royal editor at Rupert Murdoch's now defunct News of the World told a London court on Wednesday senior figures at News Corp.'s British newspaper arm put pressure on him to take the flak for phone-hacking to protect others.

BBC: Phone-hacking trial: Andy Coulson ‘urged silence on hacking’

Ricardo Bilton / Digiday:

Rap Genius wants to annotate the news — For publishers today, context is king. The recent surge in interest in explanatory journalism is predicated on the idea that there's a lot of value — and hence money — in publishers explaining dense topics to readers in a way that they can understand and easily digest.

Discussion: @mathewi, @digiday and @ryansholin

Rachel Bartlett / Journalism.co.uk:

Huffington Post UK pursues 60-second political news videos — In its first foray into short-form video content creation, Huffington Post UK has reported ‘more than 25,000’ plays of the first eight versions of its minute-long opinion-led videos — Huffington Post UK is the latest news outlet …

Marc Weisblott / Canada.com:

John Stackhouse is no longer the editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail — There will be a new editor-in-chief at the Globe and Mail next week. — David Walmsley, who was most recently the director of content at CBC News, will return to the national newspaper where he previously worked …

Discussion: @scroll, @canadadotcom, @newsillustrator, @taylor_owen and @mathewi

Joseph Lichterman / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The nonprofit Africa Check wants to build more fact-checking into the continent's journalism — The words are superimposed over a photo of a soccer stadium sitting empty at dusk: “Imagine a dead body in each seat of this World Cup soccer stadium...THAT is the amount of whites killed in [South Africa] in black on white violence!”

Discussion: Forbes, @raju and @niemanlab

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

NAA's new chairman says newspaper biz should have collaborated sooner — At the Newspaper Association of America's mediaXchange conference Tuesday, Robert Dickey, the president of Gannett's U.S. Community Publishing division, said U.S. papers should have collaborated more before the meteor hit:

Discussion: Newspaper Association …, NetNewsCheck Latest, Financial Times, PandoDaily, Gigaom and Nieman Journalism Lab

Mary Clare Fischer / American Journalism Review:

No Analytics for You: News Sites Grapple With Who Can See Data — Editor's Note: This is the second post in a series examining the influence of analytics on how news is produced. — When journalist Russell Brandom first came to The Verge, he was on the “weird” beat.

Discussion: @reckless, @utknightcenter and AJR.org

Ryan Chittum / Columbia Journalism Review:

Too good to check: study of robot journalism spawns coverage showing journalism's weaknesses — Automatic approval for weak study on robot journalism — Poor reporting accepts a flimsy report as gospel — “Could robots be the journalists of the future?” asks The Guardian.

Discussion: BBC, Motherboard and The Huffington Post

Donald R. Winslow / NPPA:

Reuters Denies Ethical Allegations, While Some Syria Photographs Still Questioned — In response to a story last week in The New York Times that raised serious ethical questions about the practices of some news photographers in Syria following the death last year in Aleppo …

Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke / The New York Observer:

How a Fleet Street Scandal Sheet Conquered the Internet — In the cutthroat world of British tabloids, where the explosive Fleet Street editor is a stock character, Martin Clarke still stood out as a particularly fearsome newsroom presence. Even more so when he came to New York in 2011 to expand the Daily Mail's digital footprint.

John McDuling / Quartz:

Twitter's dream for TV: You will never watch alone — Twitter's head of television, Fred Graver, admits that his sister is completely baffled by the social network. “She still doesn't get why you would open up Twitter and watch a TV show,” he told a packed audience at Quartz's event …