Joel Mark Harris's Blog

It is still very common for journalists to go missing, or be killed, especially in dictatorships. In China, a journalist named Jia Jia criticised the leader of the communist government in an open letter. A couple of days ago he was traveling home from Beijing to Hong Kong when he disappeared. We cannot let journalists be intimidated by governments. And we cannot let our government be intimidated by other governments. China is a big trading partner and is vital to our economy but we need to

Do we really need journalism? 

Gone are the days of media wars. The old fashioned ones that used to play out between companies. But now must news outlets aren’t even worth fighting over. Some news outlets changes hands, shifting from mammoth organization to another. Consider this: just about 25 years ago 50 organizations owned 90% of the media in the United States. Today only 6 organizations own 90% of the media in the United States. Why should we care? Because it means the lack of choice. People are apathetic towards it

The journalism business has always been behind other industries in almost everything. Whether it’s technology, marketing or diversity. When it comes to diversity, journalism is even worse than Hollywood. Yes I said it. For an industry that needs so many different voices, they do a terrible job of including everyone – women, people of colour, immigrants, religion, sexual orientation, and different languages. In England, at the British Press Awards only 20 women will be recognized compared to 94

Pulitzer Prize journalist Steve Woodward says objective journalism is dying. That modern readers want opinions and they don’t want balance. But if people woke up, they would realize that there is no such thing as objectivity or balance—no matter how hard we try or say so.   Should we really try to strive for something that is impossible? Why not call a spade a spade. We all have different points of view that we inject into the narrative of the news story. It’s time we recognize that and move on.

I’ve just finished season 4 of House of Cards and it’s good to see journalists take such a prominent role in the storyline even if they don’t come out on top most of the time. I don’t want to spoil the plot but this time journalism punches back. . .

The Guardian published an article that reported a whistleblower organization recently criticized the United States Pentagon for its lack of accountability after accusations arose that people within the Department of Defence doctored intelligence relating to the war against ISIS terrorism. It is vitally important that the United States military, perhaps above any other institution, is open and honest with the public. The words ‘Top Secret’ does not give the Pentagon licence not to play fast and

The world is becoming more automated. The Wall Street Journal is even trying to automate the news. It’s got a program that reports on the stock price of companies and creates a news article from it. Although this might make things cheaper and faster for the newspaper, it’s not a long term solution. It’s not a very interesting read, lacks creativity – the hallmark of great writing – and if brevity is the goal why not just read the raw data? Automation can only go so far, especially in the news

Donald Trump is winning the media war, which means he is getting millions and millions of free advertisement from news networks around the world. He is effectively squeezing out his competition by making them irrelevant. The worst part is the media is letting him do it. The result? We all suffer.  Greatly.For the media, Trump is low hanging fruit; they don’t even need to try. When The Huffington Post write headlines like ‘Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist’ only plays right into