Janet Malcolm On Learning To Be a Witness

From the New York Review of Books: Janet Malcolm writes about the assistance Sam Chwat gave her in preparing for her appearance in the famous retrial of Masson v. Malcolm. She says in part: 

The transformation had two parts. The first was the erasure of the New Yorker image of the writer as a person who does not go around showing off how great and special he or she is. No! A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing. At the first trial I had been scarcely aware of the jury. When Morgan questioned me, I responded to him alone. Sam Chwat immediately corrected my misconception of whom to address: the jury, only the jury. As Morgan had been using me to communicate to the jury, I would need to learn how to use him to do the same.

Link to the Supreme Court ruling here.  

More about the litigation in the selected bibliography below.

Kathy Roberts Forde, How Masson v. New Yorker Has Shaped the Legal Landscape of Narrative Journalism 10 Journal of Communication Law and Policy 101 (2010).

Kathy Roberts Forde, Literary Journalism on Trial (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).

Judith Haydel, Masson v. New Yorker Magazine (1991),

New York University Announces a New Database On the History of Undercover Reporting

From James Devitt, New York University:

NYU Launches History of Undercover Reporting Database
New York University has launched a database chronicling undercover journalism dating back to the 1800s. The archive, “Undercover Reporting,” includes an array of stories, ranging from the slave trade in 1850s to efforts to boycott Jewish-owned businesses in the U.S. in the late 1930s to treatment of soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the 21st century.
The database, www.undercoverreporting.org, is a joint endeavor of Professor Brooke Kroeger of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the university’s Division of Libraries, where the Digital Library Technology Services team developed the online platform that hosts the database, with consultation from the Libraries’ Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing and its Collections and Research Services.
“Much of this material has long been buried in microfilm in individual libraries and thus very difficult to retrieve,” said Kroeger, who conceived and directed the project. “Most digitized newspaper archives do not go back past the 1980s or 1990s and even for those that do, it's difficult to search without exact details of the piece you are seeking.”
The database is designed for scholars, student researchers, and journalists, who can search by writer, publication, story topic, or method (e.g., prison infiltrations, shadowing migrants, impersonation, etc.). It also includes critics’ reactions to these tactics—for instance, their response to the use of hidden cameras.
The database coincides with the publication of Kroeger’s Undercover Reporting: The Truth about Deception (Northwestern University Press, Aug. 31, 2012), which emerged from this research. In the book, Kroeger posits that this type of journalism is not separate from the profession’s conventional practices but, rather, embodies some of its most important tenets—the ability to extract significant information or to create indelible, real-time descriptions of hard-to-penetrate institutions or social situations that deserve the public’s attention.
“Researching the book changed my perception of the practice and its role in journalism history, making clear how early reporters were experimenting with the method--notably northern reporters working to expose the slave trade in the south in the years leading up to the Civil War,” explained Kroeger.

The project is supported by NYU’s Humanities Initiative and the university’s Faculty of Arts and Science.

For more on the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, go to
http://journalism.nyu.edu/; for more on NYU’s Division of Libraries, go to http://library.nyu.edu/; for more on the Division of Libraries Digital Library Technology Services, go to http://dlib.nyu.edu.

Swinish Behavior?

Robert Krulwich ponders law, journalism, ethics, and the three little pigs in this essay for National Public Radio. I would say he hams up it, but...