On October 7, the first I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence was awarded to John Walcott, now of McClatchy Newspapers. As the Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder, Mr. Walcott led a team of reporters including Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel who distinguished themselves for thoughtful, critical and skeptical news coverage of the lead-up to the war in Iraq.
The award ceremony served as an occasion for an assessment of the state of journalistic independence, and an attempt to derive the lessons of the recent past. The highlights of the ensuing discussion were presented by Dan Froomkin of the Nieman Watchdog in “The Lessons of our Failure,” October 17.
The I.F. Stone Award is administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University along with the Nieman Watchdog.
A rich archive devoted to the life and work of I.F. Stone may be found here.
Americans are paying too much for almost everything, because the United States has long treated its trucking industry as an artifact to be preserved rather than as an opportunity for innovation.
These ideas aim to advance the detailed policy solutions needed to foster public trust and implement fairness in the adoption of AI across diverse domains, from healthcare and government benefits to rural access, education, and worker protections.
The evidence is clear: algorithmic pay-setting is established in app-based work, and payroll/timekeeping failures show how software can produce systemic wage harm at scale
While a few states have taken steps to implement decision-making mechanisms for certain AI systems, too many leaders are simply accepting narratives about AI’s purported public benefit at face value – jumping to the “how” of AI implementation before thoroughly vetting potential systems and deciding whether they are appropriate to use at all.