Sean Beherec

thedailywhat:

Breaking Bad Drinking Game of the Day: If you’re all caught up on Breaking Bad, you’ll know that this drinking game will have you passed out in a gutter about halfway through the half-season finale. ENJOY. 

[campuscompanion]

pulitzercenter:

Despite slipping from the headlines, in much of Haiti it is still the time of cholera.

futurejournalismproject:

The AP Plans to Use Robotic Cameras for Olympic Coverage

The Associated Press isn’t just sending photographers, photo editors and video journalists to the Olympics. They’re also booting up the robots.

Via the AP:

Remote-controlled robotic cameras at the swimming, weightlifting and diving venues will provide alternative angles, including under water, to supplement AP’s regular photo coverage. In addition to a selection of hand-placed remote cameras at a several other venues, such as those for gymnastics, track and field, AP photographers will use the latest Canon 1DX cameras and take advantage of new workflows and technology to move more photos faster than ever before.  

Being the remote operator would be a fun gig. — Michael

futurejournalismproject:

BREAKING: Advice is received that the Congress resolved upon independence the 4th of July; and, it is said, have declared war against Great Britain in form.

The first mention of the US declaration of independence in the British press occurred six weeks after the fact in the August 10-13 edition of the London Chronicle.

And that mention was just the little blurb that you see above.

Via Todd Andrlik, a collector of American Revolution era newspapers:

The London Gazette also published an August 10 to 13, 1776, issue, but it lacked any mention of the Declaration. As the official court organ, and perhaps to avoid royal embarrassment, the Gazette also refrained from printing the entire text of the Declaration while other “Mother Country” newspapers jumped at it, including the London Chronicle (Aug 17 – first in Europe), Edinburgh Advertiser (Aug 20), Edinburgh Evening Courant (Aug 21), Belfast News-Letter (Aug 27), etc.

Once upon a time the world’s news moved real slow.

Image: A brief in the London Chronicle informs the public that the US colonies declared their independence. Via Rag Linen.

futurejournalismproject:

Forty years ago, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 was published. At the time, The New York Times called it “the best account yet… of what it feels like to be out there in the middle of the American political process.”

An anniversary edition was recently released with a forward from Matt Taibbi that begins like so:

I doubt any book means more to a single professional sect than Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 means to American political journalists. It’s been read and reread by practically every living reporter in this country, and just as you’re likely to find a dog-eared paperback copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop somewhere in every foreign correspondent’s backpack, you can still spot the familiar red (it was red back then) cover of Fear and Loathing ’72 poking out of the duffel bags of the reporters sent to follow the likes of Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Barack Obama on the journalistic Siberia known as the Campaign Trail.

Decades after it was written, in fact, Fear and Loathing ’72 is still considered a kind of bible of political reporting. It’s given birth to a whole generation of clichés and literary memes, with many campaign reporters (including, unfortunately, me) finding themselves consciously or unconsciously making villainous Nixons, or Quislingian Muskies, or Christlike McGoverns out of each new quadrennial batch of presidential pretenders.

Even the process itself has evolved to keep pace with the narrative expectations for the campaign story we all have now because of Hunter and Fear and Loathing. The scenes in this book where Hunter shoots zingers at beered-up McGovern staffers at places like “a party on the roof of the Doral” might have just been stylized asides in the book, but on the real Campaign Trail they’ve become formalized parts of the messaging process, where both reporters and candidates constantly use these Thompsonian backdrops as vehicles to move their respective products.

Every campaign seems to have a hotshot reporter and a campaign manager who recreate and replay the roles of Hunter and Frank Mankiewicz (Karl Rove has played the part a few times), and if this or that campaign’s staffers don’t come down to the hotel bar often enough for the chummy late-night off-the-record bull sessions that became campaign legend because of this book, reporters will actually complain out loud, like the failure to follow the script is a character flaw of the candidate.

Slate, Fear and Loathing 40 Years Later.

Image: Chapter 1, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

futurejournalismproject:

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved

The Kentucky Derby runs tomorrow. As you prep yourself with refreshing adult beverage make sure to reread and share Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal article, and Ralph Steadman’s illustrations, on the event. 

ESPN’s Grantland republishes it — with light commentary — here.