The acclaimed and popular Marginal Revolution is a blog run by two professors at George Mason University, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw’s blog is broad in its ambit of reflections, delivered as pithy entries with sharp humor. Cafe Hayek and The Becker-Posner Blog are two other economics blogs of liberal and libertarian oriention.

Somewhat different in their political perspective are Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal and Joseph Stiglitz’s I Dissent: Unconventional Economic Wisdom.  The Project Syndicate initiative also includes Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs’ writings in his blog Economics and Justice and Harvard University professor Dani Rodrik’s blog Roads to Prosperity.  Angry Bear, a blog that brings together contributors from academic and other professions, describes its mandate as “slightly left of center economic commentary on news, politics, and the economy.”

Santa Clara University professor, Marc Bousquet’s blog How the University Works addresses issues of academic freedom, the corporatization of the university, and the relationship of academic labor and capital. Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, describes himself as a “small-l libertarian Republican who studies international relations.”  Drezner comments on policy, globalization, and, as of this week, international relations issues in The Dark Knight!

Columbia School of Journalism professor and South Asian Journalists Association founder, Sreenath Sreenivasan, gives us the “lowercase world” of Sree.net. The site includes access to free talks/ classes on technology, media, and journalism, recent reading, and new blogs discovered by Sree. Boston University journalism professor, Chris Daly reflects on journalism and journalism history in Chris Daly’s Blog.

Read the first part of this series: Napoleon to heavy metal

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Here is a list of academic blogs — the first in a series of brief surveys aimed at providing readers with the contours of the blogging landscape.

Crooked Timber brings together an impressive list of contributors who blog on matters academic and non-academic. The blog’s home page today includes posts on American kleptocrats, philosopher Richard Rorty, the elections in America, and a blind reviewer vodoo doll.

The Social Science Research Council website includes a series of blogs edited by experts on the relevant topics. The list of blogs is modest as of now, but each blog appears to be the site of vibrant, engaged discussions as indicated in the often lengthy and detailed entries. The blogs cover questions of secularism, civic and public life, intellectual property and the knowledge economy, the violence in Darfur, and identity politics.

Juan Cole’s Informed Comment presents the author’s views on Middle Eastern politics, history, and religion. Cole also runs the historical blog, Napoleon’s Egypt, which, as the title suggests, is about Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.

Manan Ahmed’s Chapati Mystery with its whimiscal rotating images, comments on empire, colonialism, Islam, technology, and history. Ahmed also offers insightful critiques of the mainstream American media coverage of Islam. William Turkel’s Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive relentlessly examines innovative and creative ways to bring together the worlds of technology and history. Turkel has also compiled a valuable list of digital history blogs, which can be seen here.

Both Ahmed and Turkel also blog at Cliopatria, which is part of the History News Network. The winnners of the Cliopatria awards (from 2005 to 2007) for best history blogging defintely warrant a look.

Henry Jenkins runs the prolific Confessions of an Aca-Fan, which chronicles an extensive range of interests, including gaming, media convergence,the social impact of media, popular culture, and fan culture. Theory.org.uk is another media-related site that explores the intersection of popular culture and social theory. Run by David Gauntlett, the site addresses the emergence of ‘Media Studies 2.0,’ problematizes the media effects model, and offers viewers a resource archive. Eszter Hargittai blogs about communication, media, and technology at the eponymously named Eszter’s Blog.

What marks a blog as ‘academic’ is an interesting question: one that surely deserves a detailed examination in an article (or post!) of its own. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a detailed list of academic blogs, which detail a spectrum of academic concerns, interests, commitmments, and experiences in all their diversity that may shed some light on the matter.

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SIX PULITZERS. Very nice.

At the 2008 Pulitzer Prizes, The Washington Post’s Dana Priest, Anne Hull and Michel du Cille bagged the Public Service award for exposing the mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital…

Steve Fainaru the International Reporting for his work on Blackwater and other private security firms accused of abuses in Iraq…

Jo Becker and Barton Gellman the National Reporting for “their lucid exploration” of Vice President Dick Cheney…

Gene Weingarten the Feature Writing for “chronicling a world-class violinist who, as an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station filled with unheeding commuters”…

Steven Pearlstein the Commentary “for his insightful columns that explore the nation’s complex economic ills with masterful clarity”…

And Post staff the Breaking News with their coverage of the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech.

My fav from the lot? At the risk of comparing apples and whatnots, it’s gotta be the Weingarten piece. It’s so offbeat and cool.

Angry, journalist?

Well, vent your frustration at AngryJournalist.com.

Launched in early February by 23-year-old web editor Kiyoshi Martinez, the site’s doing just great, reports breitbart.com.

For “underpaid, overworked, frustrated, pissed off and ignored media professionals to publicly and anonymously vent their anger”, AngryJournalist.com is a message board with a single, no-frills question: Why are you angry today?

And boy, are there angry journalists! Sample some ire:

Angry Journalist #2570: “Our executive editor, the man who’s supposed to be leading our newsroom, wanders around the building like he forgot where he left his coffee cup.”

Angry Journalist #2559: “Whatever I write ultimately either ends up as cage lining or as blankets for bums.”

Angry Journalist #241: “Just like the rest of the industry, [my company] wants me to do more with less. They’ve said, ‘To hell with quality. Let’s just fill the website with as much **** as possible.’”

Flipside aside, AngryJournalist.com is an insightful resource.

Look what he’s done

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne is mad. At Spectator boss Matthew d’Ancona.

So what got the ex-Sunday Telegraph editor’s goat?

d’Ancona‘s blue pencil, that’s what.

Seems Worsthorne reviewed the biography of Daily Telegraph editor Bill Deedes. Which appeared in Spectator not quite the way it was written.

Worsthorne described the change — there was only one, it would appear, but it was a critical comment about the Spectator proprietors — a “blatant piece of blue penciling” that “totally stands on its head what Bill was really like”.

Worsthorne has now gone and told on the Spectator to the Press Complaints Commission, reports Guardian Press Correspondent Stephen Brook.

Beware, all itchy-fingered eds.

After Osama, it is Obama

Academics are famous for being slow off the mark. But not this time.

Out already is a call for papers on ‘the Obama Effect’. From the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

The conference, scheduled October 23-25, invites papers on Senator Barack Obama‘s political career. To reach Dr Catherine R Squires, Cowles Chair for Journalism, Diversity & Equality, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Murphy Hall 111, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0418 by June 6.

The goal, writes organiser Squires, is “to showcase interdisciplinary approaches to the Obama Effect” to provide “a multi-faceted view of the past year’s campaign and its potential effects”.

Good luck, Squires. Sure good to see someone muscling in on Osama.

Resurrection

Here’s one reason why it is worth your while to bookmark The Atlantic Monthly:

This voice, of Martin Luther King Jr from August 1963, on the 40th anniversary of his assassination last week.

The famous Letter from Birmingham Jail is resurrected from the enormously rich archives of the magazine, founded in a Boston hotel on a bright April day in 1857 to “be the organ of no party or clique” but promote the “the American idea”.

Since January, The Atlantic is free online.

Read last column: Scapegoat Sabrina

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LET’S ADMIT IT, most of us think Sabrina Harman is a total freak.

In case the name doesn’t ring an immediate bell, Harman is the centrepiece of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the military policegirl who earned herself a court-martial and more by posing with a pile of corpses.

Since the media framed her pictures (pun very much intended), many have reported she was a scapegoat, but none so eloquently as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris in this New Yorker piece, Exposure: The woman behind the camera in Abu Ghraib.

Gourevitch and Morris present Harman as a “numbed” being, awkward in her prison role, who did what she did not for kicks but to preserve her sanity in a job that made terrible demands on her.

You get to see Harman in a different light, as a pizza-seller-reservist pulled into a situation she wasn’t trained for, someone who wanted to “substract” herself from the crimes she witnessed routinely by “repositioning … as an outsider, an observer and recorder, shaking her head”.

Insightful. But something tells me the public’s mind is already made up.

Courtesy, the Internet

Bad news for the American newspaper industry: adspending down by 10 per cent.

More bad news: print ads fell more than 11 percent, while online newspaper ad expenditures soared 19 per cent.

Take those together with Eric Alterman‘s indepth piece Out of Print and you get an idea of how bad the news really is.

But it isn’t epitah yet. As Arianna Huffington — she of the interesting experiment called Huffington Post, which taps into citizen journalism remarkably — puts it:

“People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous. Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

Times, Telegraph, you heard the lady.

PS: Try this related Poynter piece by Jonathan Dube, on how a radio station harnessed citizen’s media to make the best of the US presidential polls.

Not kidding

The Beeb’s future is the kids. And that’s straight from the horse’s mouth.

Ever since he learnt a quarter of the 15-to-24-year-olds in Britain do not consume any BBC, Beeb boss Mark Thompson has been determined to net them — even if it meant pouring it down their throats.

His all-out Internet plans are in that direction. Since that particular age group would rather fool around online, Thompson wants to make sure everything the BBC creates is available online.

And there are kids channels among the dozen-plus channels the BBC Worldwide intends to launch in the next year — which will have dedicated web sites, of course.

All of which is good for the kids but ‘bad’ for British newspapers. Seems the BBC’s ‘big digitial push’ is stealing traffic away from them.

Never mind, it’s for the kids. Besides, a little kick in the back never hurt nobody.

Adieu

The man who survived the killing fields of Cambodia succumbed to cancer at the age of 65.

NYT photojournalist Dith Pran was the subject of the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields.

He was captured by the Khmer Rouge after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, but lived to work for the NYT again, surviving four years of back-breaking labour and torture through — as Doughlas Martin writes — “nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation”.

Pran escaped to Thailand in 1979, after a 40-mile trek across an expanse with clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims — the killing fields, as he dubbed it.

He later moved to the US and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project.

Shut up, scribes

An item from dictatorial Belarus. As reported by Yuras Karmanau of the Associated Press:

Security agents detained at least 16 journalists and searched their houses and offices for material that libel President Alexander Lukashenko.

Not good (and shame on you Lukashenko), but a quick thought in the form of two questions.

Was that Lukashenko behaving like an authoritarian?

Or was he just being an in-power politician?

Happens quite often in ‘democratic’ societies too, if you ask me. A while ago I remember investigative reporter Duncan Campbell telling us how the MI5 took him for a long ride (literally) without quite checking if he was okay with it.

Worse is the Indian Tehelka incident (let’s keep the US out of this, lest we run out of space). After the web site published its Operation West End report, which exposed army anomolies and caused then defence minister George Fernandes to resign, remarkable was the harrasment the elected government of the world’s largest democracy unleashed — in relation, Lukashenko appears a mewing pussycat.

Let’s just say the press has as much freedom as the politicians allow, shall we?

Also read: And papa can’t do a thing

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WHAT DO BRITISH kids do when they are bored?

They socialise. Online.

So what do they do when they are not bored? 

They socialise. Online.

Here’s the dope: an Institute for Public Policy Research study — to be published next month but sneak-viewed by Guardian Communications Editor Richard Wray — shows children this side of the Atlantic spend more than 20 hours a week on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

So kids are in effect “raised online”, whatever that means.

Of course the kids know parents don’t like them partying out there, but, hey, how’re they going to stop ‘em?

Like one smarty pointed out – and this is interesting — parents and teachers know diddly-squat about the net and there are a zillion ways around the child locks and other tricks they try:

“We have restrictions at school but we can just get an administrator’s account and take them off.”

Parents these days, we tell you.

Gotcha! No, you didn’t! 

So we had the NYT-Mint spat, which, by the look of it, Mint won, no sweat.

For the uninitiated, it began with NYT’s Sunday Business Deputy Editor Patricia Kranz complaining to Poynter about a ‘discovery’ she and friends made.

Apparently, there is this website called livemint.com (online avatar of the Indian newspaper Mint, as she, um, discovered soon enough) happily lifting “numerous” stories from the NYT and International Herald Tribune — wasn’t that shameful and such a “flagrant case of mass copyright infringement”?

Would’ve been, but seems Kranz got it all wrong.

In his rebuttal, Mint Managing Editor Raju Narisetti said HT Media, Mint’s parent, has a syndication agreeement with the NYT and could Kranz please check her facts before she spake?

For good measure, Narisetti, who took media ethics “very seriously”, also got HT Media lawman Dinesh Mittal to issue a notice to NYT demanding it withdraw its allegations and update records.

Haven’t heard from Kranz since, but are the folks at NYT making an awful lot of mistakes these days?

Shh, let’s not talk about the February embarrasment…

The jolly war in Afghanistan

Seems there’s a good laugh on in Afghanistan – if you were to believe this ITV video blog.

But war is no fun – if you go by this well-made multimedia package from Reuters.

Paul Bradshaw’s critique of the two, War reporting: two online reports — spot the difference, is certainly worth a read. As he says, one’s a blog, another journalism — and the difference is quite evident.

One day the ITV lads will grow up. Who knows, they might even spot the difference.

For he knows not

Speaking of war and Easter and five years of Iraq, the Vicar of Putney – no relation to the one in Dibley, mind – has an interesting commentary in the Guardian, A funny kind of Christian.

In a nutshell, it is about Bush the Evangelist — and why he will not go to heaven.

While on the topic, here are a few suggestions — some quite offbeat — for your Iraq reading…

In the CJR series On the Ground, Paul McLeary contextualises Iraq and the stories that do not always get reported. The Enemy of My Enemy is the first in the series.

Another good resource, the perspectives of scribes who covered the war, from John F Burns to Anne Garrels to Ted Koppel, a kind of reporter’s notebook on NPR.

Juan Cole, writing in Salon, is critical of Bush in Five years of Iraq lies – and how.

Time presents a timeline of the Iraq, month by month. And Newsweek offers a look at the next five years.

The USA Today points to how the Iraq war has gone online. And in this Reuters analysis, Andrew Gray talks about the changes Iraq brought about in the US Army.
 

Collateral damage

Here’s a pointer to a forgotten war, also to a collateral damage we don’t normally take note of — all credit to South Asian Journalists Association’s Sugi for flagging this up.

It’s from Simon Gardner’s piece on the Sri Lankan war (yes, there is a war still on that side), Elephants fall victim to Sri Lanka war. And here’s the passage that makes it so extraordinary:

“Once he came with a gunshot wound to his stomach. We made a paste of chilli powder, pepper and turmeric and rubbed it on the wound,” Jayasinghe said. “Then he used his trunk to massage the paste in!”

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