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USA Edition | Today Is Tuesday, May 21, 2013 |
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Welcome To Newsroom Magazine
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Thanks To You We're Growing Faster Than Ever Before
Chances are you've noticed that Newsroom Magazine is a very different publication.
We care about journalism -- and we're well aware many other organizations do it far better than we.
Our editorial standards, rules of custody, and skeptical editing for everything we produce, disseminate or expose to public viewing reflects a seriousness of purpose.
Six years after our founding, Newsroom Magazine continues to evolve the online publishing and preservation model we pioneered.
There is good news to share: Newsroom Magazine is is thriving.
And some less good news: Our limited resources, both journalistically and financially, are limiting our expansion of content.
Online News Preservation
In the six years since its founding, Newsroom Magazine has extended the field of news publishing into previously uncharted areas.
We take a long range view of news -- one that considers both timeliness and historical merit.
What we do, and how we do it, was not possible in the print media era -- for our content is both timely and timeless in the sense that we share the power of immediacy with all online media plus the perseverance of an encyclopedia.
Newsroom Magazine's publishing model goes beyond immediacy -- for unlike the newspaper era -- what we publish is permanently preserved. And tagged, indexed, and constantly updated by automated sitemap sharing with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Sogou, Ewatch, Alexa, Facebook, and others at home and far away.
All of our content, is meant to be preserved. Thanks to the capture and storage of our content at Google, including all updates and changes, and full collection archiving by the U.S. Internet Archives, everything we say, write, opine -- whether wise, foolish, or inconsequential-- is preserved.
Newsroom Magazine content remains forever online, searchable and accessible 24 hours a day worldwide.
What's Hot Is Rarely What Matters
What we publish today is rarely as timely as the more traditional publications and online newspapers. What we choose to publish, sometimes days or months after a story first breaks, or on a subject neglected by most commercial media, is chosen to reflect one aspect of an ongoing reality for long term preservation.
From a handful of English-only readers when we published our first article -- the 1958 Edward R. Murrow speech before the Radio Television Directors Association in Chicago -- we have grown and wizened about our responsibilities to our readers and our own limitations and shortfalls.
Our most read article so far this year, The Adventures Of Bernie In Wonderland, was published November 23rd, 2009. The article consists of the unexpurgated SEC interview of Harry Markopolos in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi swindle case. It is not very interesting reading and it is very long -- but we published it in the belief that what it revealed was important and unlikely to remain online in its original format.
Newsroom Magazine's Storehouse Grows Every Day
The number of publications who devote themselves to publishing credible, responsible and probative content for posterity has dwindled.
Today Newsroom Magazine publishes a storehouse of credible, probative and relevant content -- well over 5000 articles including commentaries, essays, definitions, photographs, stories, reviews, discussions, tutorials, and logical explanations.
Our readership is nearly three times was it was only last year. Few might come to our content for entertainment -- for our purpose is otherwise.
If You Publish, They Will Come
We are read on Capitol Hill, along K Street, and in the halls of government inside the beltway and around the world.
We are read daily on college campuses at home and abroad. We're visited from military ships at sea. We serve law-firms, major corporations, Wall Street the UK Parliament, state governments and cities with credible useful information.
Some of the world's most prestigious news organizations use Newsroom Magazine for fact-checking.
Government Information Unfiltered, Sometimes Imperfect
The amount of official news proffered each day by government, whether at home or abroad, is accelerating. Some of it newsworthy, most of it not.
Our job is to thoughtfully choose what's worthy of the attention of our readers.
About 1% of government issued news we receive each day qualifies as newsworthy. Only the most relevant, or reflective of government at its best, or at its worst, or evidence of overreach, or ineptitude makes it newsworthy.
We leave the issue of deciding which if any of these qualifications applies to what we publish up to the reader.
Formatted For People On The Go, Or On The Hunt
All of our government news content includes above the headline call out meant to convey the principal facts, action or information for those with little time to read a long document.
Our job is to carefully and skeptically choose relevant governmental content for our readers -- and to include the unexpurgated original source material, whose chain of custody we control.
Online Editorial Standards, Ethics And Purpose
Our commitment to time-honored journalistic standards and a clear statement about the ethics to which we agree to be held today and tomorrow, Newsroom Magazine began publication when the Internet was young -- 2006.
Our prime mission then, as now, is to publish non political ideas, definitions, essays and editorials.
To speak to the state of this honorable calling.
And to inform the public about those things, events and ideas that matter most to us all.
Today, tomorrow, forever.
Editorial Standards & Policies
| Browsing Bookstall Section | Organized In Date Order | [ 9 items ] | |||
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Raimund Goerler Alongside Painting Of OSU President William Oxley Thompson ( 1899-1925 )
In his new book, The Ohio State University — An Illustrated History, story-teller Goerler paints the historical foundation of his university in a series of engaging segments that draw focus on a single issue, personality or event that proved pivotal in the life of the institution. What’s gone in Goerler’s storyline are the details of process that give historical writing a bad name. In it’s place, Goerler tells his reader what mattered, who mattered, and the issues that transcended details of process to become deterministic to the big picture elements of his story.
Robert W. Butche
Columbus
Elevating History Beyond Factoids And Trivia Through Masterful Story-Telling
We are largely a nation of no history. Not because we haven’t made a great deal of history, but because, as a nation, we so frequently go out of our way to avoid knowing much about it. 21st century America is largely about immediacy, gratification and comfort. We revel in knowing that nearly everything ever known, published or said is little more than a mouse click away. Whether or not what we choose to consume is factual, reliable, probative or relevant seems to make little difference today. This was not always the case.
I’m lucky to know someone who matters. Someone who stands for something far beyond his own self interest. I know Raimund E. Goerler, one of our nation’s most respected academics in historical collections and preservation. He is also one of the best historical story-tellers to come out of American higher education.
Ask Rai Goerler and he’ll tell you that writing history is largely a work of love. He should know for he spent the last decade writing and re-writing a history of his adopted academic home — Ohio State. His book, The Ohio State University — An Illustrated History, was published today by the Ohio State University Press. It is the most interesting and best told institutional history I have ever read.
If you’ve never read non-linear history, you’re in for a surprise. Goerler gets it right by making it readable and blending his narrative with hundreds of relevant images that give face to people and depth to events.
History As Narrative
Published Today
The Ohio State University – An Illustrated History
By Raimund E. Goerler
Fidelity-to-fact is essential — but no more so than relevance, credibility, or probity of what is published as responsible content. But recording history is only one side of a troubling reality confronting our nation today — for the ignorance of history, and it’s effective absence in modern day curricula at both the high school and college level, have confounded a nation threatened by its inability to separate beliefs from knowledge.
Some believe that our national disaffection for history is largely due to how it is taught. Look at most any history book, or text book and what stands out are not the important ideas or events that have shaped us as a culture or nation but the dates of those events. Fact is, traditional views of historic writing and teaching are timeline driven.
Dates matter in a timeline driven historical work. The names of important events, or personalities, or places are what we test students about — as if the order of events, or their specific time of occurrence or order were always and only what mattered.
History writers and academic historians find solace in the details, order of events, and mind numbing citations about sources, provenance and learned views proffered as the literature. What satisfies one’s academic mindset and what informs the reader, however, are usually very different.
Looking Beyond Factoids
The Ohio State University - An Illustrated History
There is a school of thought among historians that seeks to break free of the long standing tradition where history is offered up as factoids and events strung along a timeline absent relevance or context. Order of events is only one way to approach historical story telling.
Another, sometimes described as non-linear history, largely discards the order of events in favor of examining the importance of ideas, or outcomes that may only be ascertained decades or generations later.
For students, timeline history studies are not unlike reading a telephone directory — the facts are many, but absent context, plot or actors. For academic purposes there shall always be a place for timeline history — for factoids and events are the substance by which human endeavor is recorded.
Nearly a decade ago, when I read Raimund Goerler’s draft of the first chapter of his non-linear history of the Ohio State University, I was captivated with his handling of the events and personalities that undergirded the conceptualization and founding of one of the nation’s most successful and influential Land Grant universities.
What at first has the feel of traditional historical writing, gave Goerler’s first draft the look and feel of excellent scholarship. He is, after all, a true historian for whom provenance and historical fidelity-to-fact give purpose to his life’s work. Some will find Rai’s Ph.D in American history reassuring in the sense that he is by academic bearing and training a long-term reporter-editor instructed in his profession and governed by standards and practices whose purpose is to serve truth.
Masterful Story Telling
What Rai Goerler’s considerable professional qualifications do not reveal is that he is a master story-teller and compelling writer.
In his new book story-teller Goerler paints the historical foundation of his university in a series of engaging segments that draw focus on a single issue, personality, group or event that proved pivotal in the life of the institution. What’s gone in Goerler’s storyline are the minutiae of process that give historical writing a bad name. In it’s place, Goerler tells his reader what mattered, who mattered, and the issues that transcended process to become deterministic to the big picture elements of his story.
The result is stunning. Even for those with little knowledge of, or interest in the origins of the Ohio State University, Goerler’s book offers insight into the American experience from the end of the Civil War to the 21st century.