The Dallas Morning News exposes bad chemical safety data 25 Aug 2013 | 07:47 pm

It’s not a sexy topic, but The Dallas Morning News does a fine job exposing serious flaws in national chemical safety databases. The lede: Even the best national data on chemical accidents is wrong ...

The Language Log scolds journalists for "approximate quotation" (again) 24 Aug 2013 | 07:12 am

Maureen Dowd’s misquote of the spouse of a New York City mayoral candidate gives the Language Log’s Mark Liberman another chance to take journalists to task for “approximate quotation,” which he says ...

‘Nate Silver’s genius isn’t math. It’s journalism.’ 25 Jul 2013 | 07:29 am

Lots of people can run the numbers. But Silver can use those numbers to tell readers an engaging, fast-paced and constantly changing story about subjects they care about. That’s a rare talent. via Wo...

The Pixel Painter: A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows ’95 24 Jul 2013 | 07:21 am

National Geographic: How Forensic Linguists Outed J.K. Rowling 22 Jul 2013 | 07:28 am

The Sunday Times consulted two computer scientists to help it determine that JK Rowling was the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling: With computers and sophisticated statistical analyses, researchers are ...

I’m a Modernist because I revised this post ‘overtly’ and ‘passionately’ 12 Jul 2013 | 06:39 am

Craig Fehrman of the Boston Globe summarizes the case made by “The Work of Revision,” a new book by Oxford lecturer Hannah Sullivan, who “argues that revision as we now understand it — where authors, ...

Does data need an emotion chip? 11 Jul 2013 | 08:13 am

One thing data can’t do is be outraged or amused or curious about something going on at the office. ~ Washington Post reporter John Sullivan, in a Poynter chat on “What journalists need to know about...

Will history pivot on big data? 8 Jul 2013 | 08:04 am

We tend to think of data as something you store in rows and columns in a database. But a reviewer of the book “Big Data” notes that photographs are data too, and an example of the emerging “age of all...

I’m still a newspaper journalist and I believe this 24 May 2013 | 07:48 am

One or two paragraphs of most stories are enough. via 24+ signs you’re truly an ex-newspaper journalist | Media, disrupted.

Jack Shafer: What was James Rosen thinking? 21 May 2013 | 10:13 pm

Even teenagers practice better tradecraft than this when deceiving parents. via What was James Rosen thinking? | Jack Shafer.