Melissa Kim was the Production Editor for the Summer 2011 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism. The Must List: Craig Silverman
THE “MUST” LIST An exclusive, ongoing RRJ series featuring leading Canadian journalists and their top picks for pieces every journalist “must read,” “must watch” and “must listen” to before they die.
TODAY: journalist and author Craig Silverman
Craig Silverman is the digital journalism director at OpenFile.ca, as well as managing editor of PBS MediaShift. He also writes a weekly column for the Columbia Journalism Review. He has written two books: Regret the Error published in 2007, and Mafiaboy, a memoir which he co-wrote with the book’s subject Micahel Calcep published in 2009.
“This is the story of The New York Times, as written by one of the greatest non-fiction writers of all time, who also happened to have been—at one point—a reporter at The NY Times. I picked it because it’s a wonderful mish-mash of things. You have fantastic storytelling. You have the story of one of the greatest journalism institutions of all time. It’s all rolled up into one package and told by a legendary narrative, non-fiction journalist. It’s fascinating, but it tells a lot about the ways of how the media used to be.”
Jay Rosen and Dave Winer: Rebooting the News
“It’s a podcast run by two people, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer. Rosen is a professor of journalism at New York University and one of the leading thinkers in journalism — as far as I’m concerned —when it comes to citizen journalism, future models of journalism, and really what journalists should be doing and how we should be serving the profession and the public. Winer is a programmer but he’s also the guy who invented RSS. He was a very early blogger. Between the two of them, the combination is some really unique, original thinking about the world of news, journalism, journalists, computer programming, the internet and the network world. It’s something that puts a lot of important elements together in one place.”
“Obviously, I’m going to pick something that has to do with accuracy or fact-checking. Number one, it’s a film that doesn’t feel like you’re watching homework. It’s actually a film that is enjoyable and well done, but tells a lot about fact-checking, the failures of fact-checking and how these failures and weaknesses are easily exploited. It also communicates that fact-checking is not a foolproof process, no matter what you do. Ultimately, the responsibility comes on us, the journalists. We can’t outsource it to fact-checkers or to copy editors or to other people, and I think that’s a good message for journalists to come away with.”
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