Congratulations
to Professor Richard Murphy
If you are in the business of finding
out what’s true — whether that business is social science, military
intelligence, journalism, the hard sciences or something else — there is an elusive quality you find among the best in the field. It might be called the Cold Eye.
It’s not a term you will find in textbooks. It’s a matter of
character as much as professional skill. It’s some combination of having
the mental discipline to gird yourself against your own biases, the
instinct to resist the tendency to think that knowledge once learned is
static and an ability to look at more signals, data points and ideas
from disparate places than other people usually do.
Perhaps more important, the Cold Eye is motivated by a deep
intellectual independence and a passionate psychological connection to
telling the truth.
Andy Kohut, who passed away at age 73 today, had the Cold Eye as much as anyone I ever knew. Andrew Kohut: An appreciation
In the dwindling days his presidency, Barack Obama has granted
facetime to a smattering of outside-the-Beltway personalities and a few
ascendent digital news outlets. His selection can appear haphazard — selfies with BuzzFeed one day, riffing on comedy with podcaster Marc Maron the next. So how’d they land their interviews?
That’s the question political reporter and documentarian Patrick
Gavin is trying to answer over the next 500 days. Every day until the
next presidential inauguration, Gavin plans to upload one video to his YouTube channel
that chronicles his attempt to score a sit-down with the commander in
chief. Taken as a whole, he’s hoping the videos provide a
behind-the-scenes glimpse at the process of landing the biggest get in
journalism.
The style and subject of this series isn’t far afield from Gavin’s previous work Patrick's Exclusive
Note this list of some posts
you may have missed about journalism and the media on Medium. Thanks to Gurman Bhatia, Ren LaForme, Katie Hawkins-Gaar and Julia Haslanger for helping to curate.
Questions are the new comments
Jennifer Brandel’s
post this from Saturday was adapted from a talk she gave, and it looks
at the cycle news goes through and how late the audience comes into that
cycle.
But what if, Brandel asks, journalists started with questions instead of ending with comments?
