Reviews and Comments

Just opened the book, read a couple of sentences... No real progress yet.

I became interested in this book because of a video on YouTube where an antheist was reacting to a pastor (?) commenting on these "atheist commandments". Funny thing was that they were basing this commentary on a CNN article about the book instead of actually reading the book... Kind of typical.

So, I decided to go to the source itself.

OKay book... But possibly a bit too "inside" in a way. Abramson was the Editor in Chief at the NY Times for part of the period this book covers... So there's a bit of a conflict there. Not to mention that all of the publications that she chooses to cover are on the East coast.

Would have been better if she had decided to follow a different paper, say the L.A. Times instead of the NY Times.

Then there is a side of this story that is missed.... At one point Abramson addresses the differences between the first and second attempts by the Times to implement a paywall. While her opinion is okay, it's definitely not complete. She does identify the iPhone as one difference, there were definitely bigger ones... For example Amazon Prime, Netflix and Spotify all happened between the two attempts to paywall their content... Meaning that the second time having a subscription service was more accepted.

I think this book could have been improved by following the changes in technologies throughout the whole timeline. It would have brought a lot of the issues and changes into better focus.

So, as with a fwe other books that I have read recently, this one is a little dated. But, that only applies to the walk-through examples provided (the book uses an older version of Microsoft Excel when providing examples of checking and cleaning up some data).

The overall subject matter of the book: obtaining data, checking it's correct-ness, cleaning up problems, and overall handling of data is excellent. The processes described are excellent, they just need to be adapted to current application suites.

This book surprised me. It's over 10 years old, and I was afraid that a lot of informatIon and sources (especially the internet resources) would be out of date. However, checking some of them along the way, many of them still appear to be available. And of the few that were, there were easily located alternatives.

But, more than just being a directory of resources, the book actually teaches some more interesting things. Like finding "deep linked" resources that aren't easily found.

There were a few items that the author recommends that I am inclined to say are questionable. However, I can write that off to the author having written this book over ten years ago, where some information and sources have proven themselves to be less reliable now.

Overall a worthwhile book, even if a little dated in a few areas. Just be critical when it comes to some things, and experiment with a lot of others. And, don't forget to look for altenratives when necessary.

I get the feeling from reading this book that it used to be a top-notch refernce that was indispensible to many reporters. However, these days, I get the feeling that it is not nearly as useful as it could be.

The originl author was a legendary editor amongst the press. When he passed the book was passed to one of his disciples to revise. But since thn it is apparently being edited by some un-credited writer. And calling the work that has been done on it editing is really stretching the term.

The thing is, many of the samples of good writing are quite embarassing. They were good back in the 1970's or 1980's, but they are way out of keeping with the 202X's. And, the section on the internet is just plain embarassing... It reads like it was penned in the early 2000's and doesn't reflect the current state of resources available online.

There is still some very useful information in the book -- but I have the feeling that many potential journalists and writers will be put off by the staleness of the overall work.

Very concise introduction to the subject of journalism. There are some revelations about journalism and it's pactice throughout history. Hargreaves also does an excellent job covering the struggles of the industry over the past two decades. Basically the boot does exactly what is described by the title.