What we're reading this week

By Sara Fischer, CNN

The New York Times debuts its first “Times Documentary”

In April 2012, the New York Times published a five-part series of articles written by New York Times published reporter John Branch, illustrating the reality of the cultural pressures surrounding a girls' basketball team, Carroll Academy, a juvenile court-run school in Huntingdon, Tennessee. The sports editor of the New York Times received an overwhelming amount of public support for them team following the series being published. In response to the reaction, Branch revisited the team, the “Lady Jaguars,” to write two more articles, highlighting the community struggling with “high unemployment, teen pregnancy and rampant methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse.” The New York Times decided to turn Branch’s stories into a 17-minute documentary, the first “Times documentary”-branded video that the traditionally print-based publication has ever produced. The Huffington Post discusses the role of documentaries in telling a traditional print-story and how it changes the consumption of the story for its’ viewers.

Buzzfeed discovers the "Smartest Ever Ad Campaign to use National Flags"

Grande Reportagem, a Portuguese news magazine, hired a Lisbon-based ad agency called DraftFCB to create a simple yet effective print ad campaign that is geared to represent humanitarian struggles worldwide through the imagery of various country’s flags. For example, an image of the United States represents American’s knowledge (or lack there of) of the Iraq War. The blue space represents the number of Americans who do not know what the Iraq War is, in comparison the red space which represents those in favor of the War, and the white space, those opposed. While the statistical representations are not completely accurate, due to the rough-to-scale proportions of the flags images, they do a great job of informing the viewer of the general disparities in human conditions worldwide.

New York officials are investigating Bloomberg reporters' access to to consumers information

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office is investigating how much access Bloomberg LP news reporters may have had to the company’s customers. “The probe follows inquiries made in May by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury into Bloomberg customer data access,” The Wall Street Journal reports. The article also discusses the issue of reporters' knowledge about client activities in a wider context describing how the issue first came about in 2012 when “officials complained to Bloomberg about reporters' access to bankers and traders' whereabouts and log in data, which the firm felt was a violation of its employees' privacy."