Morning Conference: asking the right questions
How to ask better questions as a journalist, some changes to Substack — and the changes Twitter needs to make.
What the US press should have asked Joe Biden
Journalism is, basically, a profession built around asking really good questions, listening to the answers, and creating something interesting from them. Even the best opinion writing is derived from that.
And so, it's a constant source of frustration when journalists prove themselves unable to do it. I could rant, at length, about the poor quality of the questioning during the early UK government press conferences a year ago, as the pandemic started to bite.
However, I was stunned over the weekend when I saw on Twitter that not a single reporter asked US President Joe Biden about the pandemic.
Luckily, the insightful Zeynep Tufecki is here with a masterclass in constructing good questions they could have asked:
zeynep
As a paid-up member of the Tufecki fan club, this is fantastic news: she'll be teaching at the Columbia Journalism School. We need more thinkers like her influencing the way we do this.
