"This joint project acts as a journalism endurance test for our teams, as they scour the web for the best content and update the page continuously from now until the end of the Games".
So too with the characters on "The Wire": Even raised to an art form, "the dramatic version of a journalism-school test" is simply incapable of creating a Dorothea Brooke, a Huckleberry Finn, an Emma Bovary, a Pierre Bezukhov, a Humbert Humbert – or, yes, a Tony Soprano.
At its most magisterial, the show felt like the dramatic version of a journalism-school test in which students close their eyes, open up a phone book to a random page, call whatever person their finger randomly landed on, and try to tell their life story in 500 words or less.
In the interests of very serious journalism, she agreed to test out Snapchat and Twitter, both of which she had heard about, but never used.
"Isn't advocacy on behalf of principles and the public the true test of journalism?
The idea, which they are calling "community-funded journalism," is now being tested in the San Francisco Bay area, where a new nonprofit, Spot Us, is using its Web site, spot.us, to solicit ideas for investigative articles and the money to pay for the reporting.
The test for good journalism, he said, should be not "whether you have opinions but if your reporting is reliable".
The team will frame a set of initial questions to test assumptions around journalism and mobile technology and advance research in this area.
"When I was 18," he said, "I took a test to do journalism courses at Central Saint Martins in London and I didn't get in, which, I think, was a good thing at the time".
With Trump all but certain to be the Republican nominee, all signs point towards a tense and extraordinarily racialised campaign – and one that will pose a severe test for American journalism, which has been as beset by the crisis of race as the society it claims to rigorously examine.
