Daniel Mendolsohn is one of the more brilliant writers in the country today. Here he applies his keen analytic skills to a piece of pop culture. This is the kind of analysis that AP Comp teachers slobber over. But it's also an example of how you shouldn't be afraid to apply your best academic skills to popular culture to produce outstanding reviews and/or columns.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/07/women-and-thrones/?pagination=false

What do you think of Mendolsohn's critique and supporting evidence?

More importantly, what are some pop culture items you might consider critiquing in your publication using literary analysis skills? (For example, a feminist criticism of of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy?)

This is a long but informative online discussion about the kind of impartial approach to news writing practiced by the Tam News. Bill Keller defends the philosophy of impartial journalism embraced by the New York Times and The Tam News. Glenn Greenwald says impartial journalism is a myth and you are kidding yourselves; every journalist is an activist and you might as well be open about that.

Whom do you side with - Keller or Greenwald - and why? Read the story below then post a comment explaining your point of view.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/opinion/a-conversation-in-lieu-of-a-column.html?pagewanted=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131028&_r=0

I consider this an example of an outstanding profile-feature.

http://www.xlr8r.com/features/2013/04/ladies-mic-maya-jane-coles-nina

Elissa Stolman was an ed in chief a few years back and is living out her dream as a student at NYU who gets paid on the side interviewing some of the best DJs in the world and walking into virtually any club in NYC with full press privileges.

What aspects of this article make it a good feature?

If you knew they would say yes, who would you ask for a press pass to cover an event? What's stopping you from asking?!

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/10/stranger-than-paradise/

1) What do you think of the piece? Do you feel it is accurate/fair?
2) If a national writer can find these quirky stories and places in Marin, what are we missing? Give some examples of places, people, history in Marin that we might want to look into. Feel free to steal from this article. Would kids want to read about the water skiing elephant on Richardson Bay?

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

IMPORTANT: click on the bottom right test: PROJECT IMPLICIT: FEATURED TASK

In theory, this should be a great tool for any journalist to improve awareness of his/her bias. What do you think?

With the continuing growth of both the Tam News staff and new, inexpensive web publishing technologies, we have a lot of options for how we want to build out our multi-media platform. Please use this topic thread to post examples of new stuff you might want to try on tam news.org.

For example, this pretty much blew me away. Play around with it a bit.

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek

What do you think?

Update: "Snow Fall" just won a Pulitzer.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/new-york-times-digital-snowfall-feature-wins-pulitzer/s2/a552683/