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Wednesday, September 09, 2015

Andrew Kohut: An appreciation and Facetime with Obama

 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.
Screen shot, Medium
Screen shot, Medium
But what if, Brandel asks, journalists started with questions instead of ending with comments?