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These two stories are a dip in a cool pool on a hot day
Nieman Lab doesn’t just cover journalism; we also cover POETRY and FILM! Or this week we covered them, anyway.
First up, Neel wrote about a “poetjournalism” initiative from MacArthur genius award-winner Aaron Dworkin, who hopes a cash prize and a wire service for “newspoems” will help the form take off. This story also includes not one but two!! original poems by Neel, so please check it out, and also please send us your newspoems. (Something about “third newsrooms,” perhaps?)
Then Andrew asked acclaimed director Errol Morris for his thoughts on the use of generative AI in documentaries. The free-ranging conversation includes some real mic-drop lines by Morris, the kind of thing I just want to excerpt endlessly; a few:
“People are so afraid of being tricked or manipulated that they feel if they impose a set of rules, somehow they don’t have to be afraid anymore. I would like to assure them that they still need to be afraid.”
“Although I sometimes joke about taking the piss out of epistemology, I don’t think anything really does take the piss out of epistemology.”
“I would say that all information is disinformation, but go on.”
“Our task is to get back to the real world, to the extent that it is recoverable.”
“Truth, I like to remind people — whether we’re talking about filmmaking, or film journalism, or journalism, whatever — it’s a quest.”
I loved both these pieces and the respite they provided from our current heat wave of a news cycle. I hope you’ll like them too.
— Laura Hazard Owen
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