Leave it to The New York Times to fail to get the facts straight. Or, rather, to presume that there’s such a thing as an immutable fact and that its journalists have the rarified ability to relay facts without prejudice. No documentary filmmaker worth his or her salt would ever make such a claim, but […]

Freelance writer Amanda Hirsch, former editorial director of PBS Interactive, blogs about documentaries and the Web in her column, Outside the Frame. Read Part 1 of this series on how Americans are documenting their recession experiences online. This week, I set out to see how professional news websites are integrating user-generated content into their recession […]

Freelance writer Amanda Hirsch, former editorial director of PBS Interactive, blogs about documentaries and the Web in her column, Outside the Frame. Back in the Great Depression, newspapermen (and I do mean men) were the only ones documenting the economic crisis and its effects — unless you count the private diaries of private citizens. Today, […]

Photojournalist Pirkle Jones passed away on March 15, 2009 at the age of 95 in Mill Valley, California. The New York Times calls Jones “one of the most admired photographers of his generation.” One of the highlights of his career is a series of photographs that he and his wife took of Bay Area Black […]

Freelance writer Amanda Hirsch, former editorial director of PBS Interactive, blogs about documentaries and the Web in her weekly column, Outside the Frame. Amanda is attending South by Southwest this week. It’s cold here in Austin — unseasonably cold. They’ve got heat lamps at the outdoor parties and people are carrying coats and scarves with […]

Freelance writer Amanda Hirsch, former editorial director of PBS Interactive, blogs about documentaries and the Web in her weekly column, Outside the Frame. How do you capture the character of a place? For all the online city guides and Google Map mash-ups out there showing who’s doing what and where they’re doing it — angeldog […]

Freelance writer Amanda Hirsch, former editorial director of PBS Interactive, blogs about documentaries and the Web in her column, Outside the Frame, published every other Wednesday. “MediaStorm’s principal aim is to usher in the next generation of multimedia storytelling.” So announces the website for New York-based multimedia production company MediaStorm. Sound ambitious? Just a bit. […]

The results of our News Hunt for good journalism on the 2008 elections are in! From July 1 – 14, POV and PBS Engage joined forces with NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news site devoted to finding good journalism, to review current news stories about the 2008 elections with a focus on the voting process from […]

Election Day shows us that many stories about the American voting process and the need for election reform slip beneath the radar of mainstream news coverage. Now that we’re just a few short months away from Election Day 2008, we want to take a close look at how these issues are being covered today. For […]

To all those who rail against the media for overzealous reporting, taking advantage of those in crisis, or using underhanded methods to get a cheap scoop, meet your new hero, Alan Abel, whose lifelong pursuit has been to hang the media out to dry. Preying on mainstream media’s insatiable thirst for the lurid, the perverse, […]

This year, there are so many sites that feature political coverage that it can be almost as overwhelming to wade through the coverage as it is to figure out who really stands for what. Here are a few sites that do a nice job of rounding up audio and video — from news, interviews with […]

Gregory Warner is a talented independent radio producer who worked with POV’s Web department on two episodes of POV’s Borders: Environment and American I.D. Gregory explored the surge in popularity (and sales) that bottled water has achieved in the past decade with an eye toward improving tap water’s poor public image, and charted the great […]

Freelance photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair has won the 2007 UNICEF photo of the year award for her striking portrait of a 40-year-man and his 11-year-old bride in Afghanistan. Portrait of soon to be wed Faiz Mohammed, 40, and Ghulam Haider, 11, at her home in a rural village of Damarda in Ghor province © Stephanie Sinclair […]