At Folha, its a White Christmas…

The front page of the main section on the Saturday before last seemed on the face of things very strange, showing someone with long hair looking like Jesus surrounded by a half dozen men and women on each side, appearing a lot like The Last Supper painted by Leonardo da Vinci.

The photograph was about Christmas when you dont say the birth of Christ is celebrated. The symbolism of the supper with the 12 apostles, to the contrary, is the farewell. A reader pointed out the serious conceptual error.

The front page, while …

Top Utah news story: Crandall mine tragedy…

Ah, dear readers, you were quick and opinionated in telling me the stories you believed most impacted Utahns in 2007.

One reader wrote: “You should add this one – “Big business completes hostile takeover of U.S. government, elected officials mere figureheads.”

Others sent similarly sly comments with their numbered choices:

“Instead of the stories you listed, you should have included these. ‘U.S. fails to renounce torture’; ‘U.S. government collapses, President not informed’; ‘Outing U.S. covert CIA agents no longer treason’; ‘U.S. news agencies AWOL, unlikely to return’; ‘U.S. Constitution gone missing’; ‘Global warming has …

Christmas inspires good stories…

Great stories are not always edifying nor do they wait for a happy ending; talking about one or more of them, they seduce more than cold, impersonal words

During the week in which Santa Claus redoubles his efforts to fill orders and not frustrate dreams, I evoke a flesh and blood hero shown last month: Riquelme, 5, saved an infant neighbor one year, 10 months old in a fire in Santa Catarina state. Dressed in a Spider-Man costume, the boy was playing when smoke appeared in the wooden house next door and, to …

Getting the story when others are attempting to control it…

I don’t think you could prescribe any corrective lenses that would allow news people and public information officers to see the world the same way.

I say that knowing that some former colleagues I hold in high esteem have become press secretaries, public information officers and communications directors in a metamorphosis sometimes described here as “going over to the dark side.”

I recently had occasion to explore the mysteries of the two world views in a long conversation with Michael Jarvis of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention.

He grew up in …

The V-Word…

What parts do the vernacular and dialects play in journalism? Words in quotes should be precisely what was said, but journalists have a licence to tidy up. The Guardian style guide, for example, says, “readers should be confident that words appearing in quotation marks accurately represent the actual words uttered by the speaker, though ums and ahems can be removed and bad grammar improved.” Phonetic spelling is not the norm and when it is used in quotations writers may face accusations of regional bias, or snobbery.

The paper began life as the Manchester Guardian in 1821 …

A public tragedy strikes home for Sun journalists…

A side effect of journalism on its practitioners is their stoic acceptance of the tragedies they often encounter. Reporters and editors aren’t alone in this, of course. Like police officers and emergency room doctors, journalists instinctively adopt attitudes of dispassionate professionalism in the face of human pain. But as with all human beings, that pain can break through the toughest of protective shields.

So it was on Dec. 6 when journalists coming to work at The Sun learned from their newsroom colleagues that the family of Steve Young, the newspaper’s deputy copy desk chief, had …

Words that betray…

“The New York Times,” one of the best newspapers on the planet, is accustomed to perpetuating the euphemism “harsh interrogation techniques” to describe torture of Islamic militants and terrorists by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Within this classification is “waterboarding” (drowning simulation) of prisoners, carried out by CIA employees. It is not about harshness or simulation but rather torture.

Folha reprints stories from the New York newspaper, and translation can’t be unfaithful to the original. It should, nevertheless, reflect about the reproduction of items that adulterate facts by calling them by their correct name. …

Einstein’s Wife: The relative motion of ‘facts’…

*This column was amended on Dec. 26 and Dec. 27, 2006. See Ombudsman’s Note at end.

In October 2003, a one-hour documentary film titled “Einstein’s Wife,” about the renowned physicist’s first wife, Mileva Maric, along with a companion Web site about the program, made their debut on PBS.

The film was produced by an Australian filmmaker, Melsa Films, in association with Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in this country, and the Australian Broadcasting Corp. The film’s chief writer and producer at Melsa is Geraldine Hilton. The Web site, developed by OPB, describes itself as reviewing “the core …

Longtime readers lament E-N’s decision to leave parts of Tex…

In the clearest local sign yet that the American newspaper industry is in trouble, the San Antonio Express-News last week began notifying readers in some 30 South and Central Texas counties that they’ll no longer be able to subscribe or to buy the paper whose masthead proclaims itself “The voice of South Texas since 1865.”

“Obviously, newspapers are transitioning,” Express-News President and Publisher Tom Stephenson acknowledged. “The core product is not attracting younger readers the way it once did. That’s leading to declines in circulation and revenue. Add in production costs and newsprint costs, …

Neutral? Only pH…

Nov. 25: (world news section)

Venezuelan media cover referendum badly

Dec. 1: (national news section)

Coverage of referendum is more impartial, study shows

Those who believe in journalistic neutrality should look at Folha’s valuable and involuntary contribution to exterminate that belief.

On Nov. 25, the newspaper ran in the world news section a study which monitored TV and radio in Venezuela in the campaign for the referendum on constitutional changes.

Six days later, the national news section ran the same story again by mistake in some copies of the newspaper. Academic research confirmed …