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Collaboration the Key to Future of Investigative Journalism Mark Glaser by Mark Glaser, April 5, 2009 Tagged: future, investigative reporting, logan symposium, public media, uc berkeley BERKELEY -- The second day of the Logan Symposium at UC Berkeley is more of a half-day with one panel devoted to the future of investigative journalism and a brunch at the Frontline World offices near campus. Just like last year, I had trouble getting an Internet connection in the journalism school library so had to live-Twitter the panel and put up this blog post later. (You can see the earlier report on yesterday's sessions here.) The panel was lively, and included a lot of optimism for the future of investigative journalism despite the business cratering for newspapers and their investigative journos. The panel was moderated by Lowell Bergman, and included David Fanning of PBS Frontline, Esther Kaplan of the Nation Institute, Bill Keller of the NY Times, Chuck Lewis at American University, Robert Rosenthan of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Buzz Woolley, chairman of the board and primary funder of Voice of San Diego. The following are my notes from the panel.

2.8: a wide-open view on the practice of street photography by Michael David Murphy, While Seated

Photographic retouching exposed April 29th, 2009 The issues surrounding photographic meaning, manipulation and Photoshop have been prominent recently (see my previous posts here and here, with some updates amongst the comments for each). Via Fred Ritchin's After Photography (see his 24 April post) comes news of a Swedish government project Girlpower dealing with sexism in advertising. One element is a magazine cover where, step-by-step, you can un-do the manipulation of the model to see how the glamorous cover was produced. You can go through each of the twelve changes that have been made, and at the end click on a red button to see the complete before and after images. We know it happens, but in this case, seeing is really believing.

Photographic truth and Photoshop April 17th, 2009 Photography's anxiety about truth, manipulation and reality has been on show recently. In different ways and from different contexts, people have been asking: "how much Photoshop is too much"? From the realm of fashion, French Elle is being celebrated for running a cover story in which the models photographs have not been 'Photoshopped' (thereby confirming, as I've noted previously, that digital manipulation is the norm in this visual domain). From the world of photojournalism, blogs like 1854, PDNPulse and the Online Photographer (with a follow-up here) have been buzzing with the story of the Danish photographer Klavs Bo Christensen who was excluded from that country's Picture of the Year competition for excessive colour manipulation of his Haiti story. Along with two others, Christensen was asked to submit his RAW files to the competition judges who felt that the colour in his photographs had been excessively saturated (their debate can be heard here), and removed his images from the competition as a result. Christensen was subsequently happy to have his files put on the web for comparison and discussion, thereby performing an important service to the photographic community.

Photographic truth and manipulation February 23rd, 2009 We know photographs can be false yet we want them to be true. Indeed, the desire for photographic veracity has persisted, perhaps even intensified, even as knowledge about image manipulation becomes more widespread. Reflecting on the Oscar ceremonies, MediaGuardian has documented the widespread use of Photoshop to enhance celebrity photographs in fashion and gossip magazines. Every cover, says one media insider, has been altered to some degree, with some of these changes exposed in the "Photoshop Hall of Shame" and "Photoshop Disasters". So common is the practice that when an October 2008 Newsweek cover of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was not airbrushed, conservative anchors on Fox television complained that this amounted to liberal bias. (Fox knew about the political power of such changes because it had earlier manipulated the photos of two New York Times journalists it wanted to discredit).

THEORY: "Susan Sontag - On Photography" "Susan Sontag - On Photography" By: David L. Jacobs, Afterimage, Sunday, March 1 1998 The initial critical reception of Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977) is one of the most extraordinary events in the history of photography and cultural criticism. No other photography book, not even The Family of Man (1955), which sold four million copies before finally going out of print in 1978, received a wider range of press coverage than On Photography. The scores of reviews of Sontag's book extended not only across the spectrum of specialized photography and art magazines - that is, from Popular Photography to Artforum - but also across an expansive range of general-interest and intellectual periodicals from the Christian Science Monitor to the Village Voice, from Esquire to Encounter, and from the Saturday Review to the Antioch Review. What's more, On Photography won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for 1977 and was selected among the top 20 books of 1977 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add

The iconic South African photographer, in conversation with Max du Preez, discusses the literary influences on his work, including Athol Fugard and Herman Charles Bosman.

An interview with magnum photographer, Alec Soth