Personal site of journalist, baker, and storyteller Tony Ganzer.
Part of a web series of bread baking and talk about the craft of journalism, this time with Rosemary Asiago. I talk about whether objectivity in journalism is a myth.
I hope you like it, and please subscribe on YouTube, and to my e-mail list.
It’s a silly mash-up, but one driven by serious impulses.
As a journalist by profession and vocation, I listen with dismay to how some demonize the monolithic ‘media’ with a carelessness that does a disservice to valid perspectives and gripes.
I’ve written before that journalists are servants of the people at our core, and listening, responding to, and engaging with the community is vital even if it sometimes takes great effort.
As an amateur bread baker, I like creating and providing food for others to enjoy. It can be a social act, both the baking process and the eating that follows. After college, I worked in a food co-op bakery to pay for gas in between reporting gigs — you could say the two things were entwined from the start.
[Read more of my thoughts in my book Kneading Journalism]
Continue reading “Baking and breaking bread in the ‘War on Media’”
Part of a web series of bread baking and talk about the craft of journalism, this time with Rosemary. I hope you like it, and please subscribe on YouTube, and to my e-mail list.
The first episode in a web series of bread baking and talk about the craft of journalism, this time with Salted French.I hope you like it, and please check out my book Kneading Journalism, subscribe on YouTube, and to my e-mail list.
***This is another video in a series of vlogs meant to help me work on video editing, and my amateur bread baking. It’s not perfect, but I hope I show some improvement over time. Thanks for being with me as I try to improve myself, and hopefully add some interesting content to the world***
Salted French Bread Recipe
You need:
6 cups flour (unbleached is better, bread flour is best, but use what you have!)
.75 oz (2.5 packets) active dry yeast
1.5 tsp salt
1.5 tsp sugar
2 cups warm water
1 Tbsp cornmeal
Journalists, at their core, are supposed to be representatives for their fellow citizens. They’re afforded a Willy Wonka-style ‘golden ticket’ to enter board rooms, factory floors, and the streets of our communities to show and help explain what the heck is going on.
The public expects journalists to use that access and special status to get the public information they need to understand our world better, and know where they might want to advocate, or protest, or investigate more.
This may seem obvious to say, so why say it? The on-going ‘War on Media’ is adding to the already crippling deficit of trust between journalists and some segments of society, and it doesn’t need to be that way.
Continue reading “A K-pop ‘ARMY’ might show us a way forward in the ‘War on Media’ (no, really)”
UPDATE: This story also won first place Radio or Podcast Religion Report of the Year from the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA)!! I am humbled and honored to have won this award, and to have been welcomed by the Hindu community in Trimbach to share their temple and puja with the world.
A bit of good news on this Friday evening: my story profiling the first stand-alone Hindu temple in Switzerland as won a third place National Headliner Award! The awards were announced today by the Press Club of Atlantic City.
As readers of this site might already know, my previous station was sold and turned into a commercial, local station, focusing its resources on sales instead of journalism, leaving me to rediscover my homeland. Despite this, our work produced before the sale–and my inevitable exodus from Switzerland–is still eligible for some awards. This temple story is a version of a WRS story I expanded for Deutsche Welle, which distributes some program offerings to US public radio stations…hence my eligibility in this US prize!
Horns and drums are used to purify the air in this newly inaugurated Hindu temple in Trimbach—about halfway between Zurich and Basel.
Listen to the story from Deutsche Welle
Awards are, of course, not the most important thing in life. But given that WRS as I knew it is no more, this recognition from my peers is a nice tribute to work done in my former life.
Twitter is inherently a social networking site for making short but unquestionably public statements about everything and anything. As you likely see in my Twitter feed to the left of this post, my Tweets are mostly about journalism, media, or international relations–my dominant fields of interest and study. My comments are ones that I would defend in person, because they are made in the public sphere. There is no expectation of privacy in Tweeting, unless done through the moderately helpful “Direct Message” system. Twitter might be compared to a bullhorn letting its users send brief thoughts into a noisy and confusing web space.
There is an increasing trend in journalism to aggregate Tweets by topic or user into “news stories.” Chief among the tools for this Twitter journalism is Storify, which organizes selected Tweets to form a narrative. This example from Canadian CTV news shows how it works…you list the Tweets to tell a story, and the journalist doesn’t necessarily need to talk to anyone directly. The Tweets are taking the place of interviews, in some cases. This is annoying, and a result of a race for posting “news” quicker in the digital age. Why talk to someone when you can just post their Tweets? Continue reading “Perils in aggregation journalism: public or ‘public’”