• A publicity photo from the fifth season of Downton Abbey made the rounds on the Internet for all the wrong reasons. The shot of stars Hugh Bonneville and Laura Carmichael featured an anachronistic plastic water bottle perched on a mantle. Producer ITV has since removed the shot from its press site, according to the BBC, and it’s also vanished from PBS’s pressroom.
“You had one job, guys. One job,” Buzzfeed wrote.
• Matter, the media-startup accelerator funded by the Knight Foundation and KQED and supported by Public Radio Exchange, is the subject of a new episode of TechCrunch’s web series “Incubated.” In the video, Matter CEO Corey Ford discusses the ongoing disruption of the media landscape, and Matter participants discuss how their interest in public media led them to the program.
• In a column last week, outgoing NPR Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos addressed the question of whether NPR reporters should disclose angles deliberately left unexplored in stories. “The puzzle is when and how hosts and reporters should tell us that a report is part of a series, or that it features one viewpoint, and that other views will come in other stories,” he wrote. “A corollary is when and how the journalists should tell us that claims in a report are incomplete.”
The post was spurred by complaints about a May story on the Affordable Care Act, which looked at a family reportedly having trouble finding obstetric care. Schumacher-Matos concluded that “an open admission of the limits of the reporting would have helped us in the audience understand the story for what it was — a single anecdotal insight into a very complex and politically controversial program.”
Supposedly, some people further doctored the pictures to show a photo of Prince William, Duchess Kate, and Prince George; someone talking into a cell phone, and a satellite dish outside the Downton mansion.