Missing the Bus

NYTimes overly focuses on one pratfall facing young campaign reporters

By Erika Fry   Aug 31, 2011 at 04:54 PM

There was a silly story on the front page of the The New York Times Wednesday morning. With its title... More

AT&T’s Hubris

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 31, 2011 at 02:48 PM

The Justice Department is suing to stop AT&T's proposed acquisition of T-Mobile, which would have consolidated three-quarters of cellphone-plan market... More

Leonhardt’s Sharp Look at the Mind of the Fed

Why has debate at the central bank been so constrained?

By Greg Marx   Aug 31, 2011 at 02:15 PM

It’s a few days old now, but David Leonhardt had a great column in the Sunday Review section of The... More

Media Hurricane Hype?

Irene spurs debate about the quality of news coverage

By Curtis Brainard   Aug 31, 2011 at 10:00 AM

Anderson Cooper and a CNN crew covering Irene on Sunday, August 28. Photo by Sean Hemmerle. “An Epic Deluge,” read... More

Audit Notes: Boyd on Blackboard, Capitalism Lite, BofA Woes

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 30, 2011 at 07:53 PM

There aren't a whole lot of investigative journalists out there covering penny stocks and other small-cap companies. Roddy Boyd does,... More

After Irene: How a Hyperlocal Is Helping

In the Catskills, the Watershed Post is coordinating relief efforts

By Alysia Santo   Aug 30, 2011 at 03:07 PM

In the Catskills region of upstate New York, where flooding from Hurricane Irene wiped out entire towns, a hyperlocal site... More

WSJ Shoe Leather and Privacy Series Pays Off In Libya

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 30, 2011 at 01:16 PM

The Wall Street Journal gets a big scoop today on the ground in Libya, reporting that Western companies helped Qaddafi... More

Audit Notes: Stocks Fed, Stadium Economics, Dumb-Question Headlines

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 29, 2011 at 06:07 PM

Gretchen Morgenson had an interesting quote in her column yesterday riffing off Bloomberg's investigation into $1.2 trillion of Fed bailouts:... More

Editor’s Note

The best of “Second Read”; CJR’s new book

By Mike Hoyt   Aug 29, 2011 at 03:28 PM

Two redesigns ago, in 2004, the Columbia Journalism Review launched a back-of-the-book feature called Second Read that has proved immensely... More

Against Semantic Satiation

Some new words to learn after a wild week

By Merrill Perlman   Aug 29, 2011 at 02:06 PM

After a week in which the East suffered through earthquakes and a hurricane, we could all use a little entertainment.... More

The Facts Ma’am—Just the Facts

Rick Perry dodges Social Security questions, while CNBC explains

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 29, 2011 at 02:05 PM

Rick Perry zipped into Ottumwa, Iowa Saturday with a message about Social Security. Along with the usual jabs at the... More

Hurricane Wood

By Clint Hendler   Aug 29, 2011 at 09:41 AM

This weekend New Yorkers endured hours of high winds and heavy rains as Tropical Storm Irene crossed the islands and... More

China rescues 89 trafficked children, arrests 369

Headlines that editors probably wish they could take back

By The Editors   Aug 28, 2011 at 02:06 PM

Bison study plan to use sterilization, Jackson Hole (WY) Daily, 6/3/11 2 parrots sought in Long Beach birdnapping, Press Telegram... More

Going Strait

Narrowing down the difference between “strait” and “straight”

By Merrill Perlman   Aug 28, 2011 at 01:54 PM

When two words sound the same and have similar meanings, you know they’re going to merge eventually. But until they... More

News Frontier

The power of one

By Michael Meyer   Aug 28, 2011 at 01:49 PM

Entry barriers are low in the online news world. Cheap hosting and free templates have launched a million blogs, including... More

Hard Numbers

Some stats and figures on the news industry

By The Editors   Aug 28, 2011 at 01:38 PM

109number of segments CNN aired on the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal, July 4-13 71number of segments aired on MSNBC 30number... More

Haven Bound

A Q&A with Icelandic Parliamentarian, Birgitta Jónsdóttir

By Alysia Santo   Aug 28, 2011 at 01:30 PM

In 2008, Iceland was hit hard by the global financial crisis. Citizen outrage and political unrest followed, sparking a... More

Local (Wiki)Leaks

Finding local angles in the secret cables

By Dave Maass   Aug 28, 2011 at 01:23 PM

Like any digital-age enterprise reporter, I scan certain online databases as a matter of daily routine: local campaign-finance and... More

Notes From Our Online Readers

Readers recommend books to our summer reading list

By The Editors   Aug 28, 2011 at 12:42 PM

In mid-July, with temperatures rising and the entire CJR office dreaming of beach chairs and umbrella drinks, we asked our... More

Letters to the Editor

Readers respond to our July/August Issue

By The Editors   Aug 28, 2011 at 12:16 PM

PBS: Where’s the Beef? Elizabeth Jensen’s story “Big Bird to the Rescue?” (CJR, July/August) in your cover package about the... More

Opening Shot

Fostering an awareness of our commonalities, ten years after September 11th

By The Editors   Aug 28, 2011 at 11:54 AM

Four planes. One-hundred-and-two minutes of the towers smoking. Almost three thousand dead. Then, suddenly, it is ten years later,... More

Brief Encounters

Short reviews of books on newspaper publishers

By James Boylan   Aug 27, 2011 at 05:04 PM

The Magnificent Medills: The McCormick-Patterson Dynasty: America’s Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor By Megan McKinney... More

Audit Notes: Murdoch and American Politicians, UAW, Labor’s Bulletin Board Win

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 26, 2011 at 07:37 PM

Does Rupert Murdoch interfere with his news outlets? Does a bear, well, you know... The Los Angeles Times has an... More

A Good WSJ Scoop on AIG and Wall Street Research

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 26, 2011 at 06:51 PM

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting scoop out today, reporting that AIG CEO Robert Benmosche is leaning on his... More

WikiLeaks is at it Again

This time there’s an easy way to sift all those cables

By Alysia Santo   Aug 26, 2011 at 03:52 PM

WikiLeaks is back at it this week, releasing the largest batch of secret state department cables to date. Some 20,000... More

More On Why I’m Talking About Tim Cook’s Sexuality

By Felix Salmon   Aug 26, 2011 at 02:50 PM

Every so often I put a blog post up, start getting feedback on it, and realize I’ve got things horribly... More

Why Apple CEO Tim Cook’s Sexuality Is News

By Felix Salmon   Aug 26, 2011 at 02:29 PM

Tim Cook is now the most powerful gay man in the world. This is newsworthy, no? But you won’t find... More

Gamey Green Jobs Coverage

NYT, others hack off slices of Brookings-Battelle report

By Curtis Brainard   Aug 26, 2011 at 11:15 AM

On Tuesday, climate blogger Joseph Romm blasted a New York Times article about green jobs for ignoring “explosive” growth... More

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

What happened to TV news?

By Michael Meyer   Aug 26, 2011 at 06:00 AM

The marketing team behind Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), a biopic of Edward R. Murrow set largely amid the... More

Audit Notes: A Triple-B Chairman for a Triple-B Company, Stadium Welfare, Euro Crisis

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 25, 2011 at 08:04 PM

New York Daily News publisher and Boston Properties Chairman Mort Zuckerman takes to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street... More

And Then There Were Two

Oakland Tribune and other Bay Area newspapers to consolidate

By Alysia Santo   Aug 25, 2011 at 05:22 PM

Some forty journalists will lose their jobs in November, when the Bay Area News Group squeezes eleven community newspapers down... More

Fortune Inside the Pfizer Fiasco

A deeply reported piece on a management crisis at the giant drug company

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 25, 2011 at 04:40 PM

Fortune has a dandy read in this issue on an executive fiasco at Pfizer that led to the sacking of... More

More Unsettling Insights from Perry’s Eggheads

Politicians are learning more about how to work the media. Can the press push back?

By Greg Marx   Aug 25, 2011 at 01:39 PM

A Campaign Desk post the other day noted an interesting claim by Sasha Issenberg, the author of a new ebook... More

Audit Notes: Steve Jobs, WSJ on Hacking, NYPD As Domestic CIA

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 24, 2011 at 07:02 PM

Awful news just hit the tape that Steve Jobs's health has finally forced him to resign as CEO of Apple:... More

From Commenter to Contributor

On some blogs, taking the comment section seriously can mean hiring people from it

By Alysia Santo   Aug 24, 2011 at 04:30 PM

During a string of “boring, terrible” office jobs, Gabriel Delahaye started to regularly comment on Gawker’s articles. He wasn’t just... More

Revisiting the Man in the Middle

Health reform won’t help him

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 24, 2011 at 03:44 PM

As the Great Health Care Debate wound down, we visited Jeremy Devor, an engineering assistant in Salem, Illinois, a town... More

Capital One Tries to Buy Too Big to Fail Status

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 24, 2011 at 03:29 PM

Capital One is the thirteenth biggest bank in the country, with $200 billion in assets. It's on a buying spree... More

Happy Birthday, Wikipedia!

Ten years of Wikipedia and their neutral point of view policy

By Michael Schudson and Katherine Fink   Aug 24, 2011 at 03:21 PM

Wikipedia is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, to the surprise of skeptics who never thought a volunteer-written, open-access encyclopedia... More

Among the Mongers

Henry Mayhew and the pursuit of history, from the bottom up

By Jeffrey Greggs   Aug 24, 2011 at 02:44 PM

There is no place in any era more evocative of soot, steam, gruel, and misery than Victorian London. It... More

All the President’s Pundits

When the White House tries to shape, seduce, and spin, what’s a journalist to do?

By Paul Starobin   Aug 24, 2011 at 02:34 PM

On a Thursday evening this past May, Eliot Spitzer, hosting his now-cancelled CNN show, lobbed a chummy question to... More

Pirate Radio, Mayan Style

Indigenous stations want to come in from the cold

By Connor Boals   Aug 24, 2011 at 01:48 PM

When you get to Sumpango, in the central highlands of Guatemala, you won’t be able to find Radio Ixchel... More

Money Talks

Why do we never hear from the working class on op-ed pages?

By Erika Fry   Aug 24, 2011 at 12:39 PM

Last week, eighty-year-old billionaire Warren Buffett whipped up a media frenzy when, in an op-ed for The New York Times... More

Steve Brill’s Blinkered View of Education

By Felix Salmon   Aug 24, 2011 at 12:25 PM

If you don’t have the time or inclination to read Steve Brill’s book on education reform, then his bombastic op-ed... More

Audit Notes: Students Drop For-Profit Colleges, Foreclosures, Hospital Mergers (UPDATED)

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 23, 2011 at 08:39 PM

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting report on the much-deserved business woes hitting the for-profit college industry. Enrollment of... More

The Repatriation Tax Holiday and American Jobs

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 23, 2011 at 03:13 PM

The Washington Post is good to point out that some of the big American companies pushing the government for a... More

Covering the Fringe Candidates

How should the press decide which dissents to take seriously?

By Greg Marx   Aug 23, 2011 at 12:15 PM

Jon Huntsman’s campaign for president doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, so why does he retain his commanding lead in... More

Bloomberg News on the Fed’s Secret Mega-TARP

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 22, 2011 at 05:55 PM

Back when our late pal Mark Pittman and Bloomberg sued the Federal Reserve to force it to disclose secret details... More

CJR Holds a Town Hall in Missouri

Do the pols represent the voters?

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 22, 2011 at 03:25 PM

As Barack Obama’s bus cruised through the heartland last week, the media told us a fair amount about what the... More

Post Takes a Look at the ‘Texas Miracle’

By Greg Marx   Aug 22, 2011 at 01:41 PM

In The Washington Post over the weekend, Michael Fletcher did what CJR urged reporters to do last week: he noted... More

Oral History

Of spoken and written words

By Merrill Perlman   Aug 22, 2011 at 01:15 PM

It’s a crazy market, the investors were told by the columnist, and they had to protect themselves. So they shouldn’t... More

Unsettling Insights from Perry’s Eggheads

The Texas governor gets scientific on how to work the media

By Greg Marx   Aug 22, 2011 at 12:23 PM

At the New York Times site today, David Leonhardt has a very interesting Q-and-A with Sasha Issenberg, the former Boston... More

Hewlett-Packard and the M&A Scoop

By Felix Salmon   Aug 22, 2011 at 11:55 AM

The death of the M&A scoop is going to happen slowly, but frankly it should happen as quickly as... More

Audit Notes: Welcome to America, Supercookies, Leon Black’s Blowout

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 19, 2011 at 08:01 PM

It's a national embarrassment when students from places like China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine come to the United States for... More

Jon Stewart On Fox’s Reverse Class Warfare

Meantime, the Journal notes leading GOP candidates want to raise taxes… on the poor

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 19, 2011 at 03:48 PM

Yesterday, The Daily Show had one of Jon Stewart's greatest takedowns of Fox News—which is saying something. The jumping-off point... More

A Victim’s Tale

What it’s like to be on the receiving end of a press error

By Craig Silverman   Aug 19, 2011 at 12:00 PM

Last week was a terrible one for Jon Harris, a librarian at the North Canton Public Library in Ohio. On... More

Matt Taibbi vs. the SEC

Rolling Stone gets no credit from most of the press for a huge scoop

By Felix Salmon   Aug 19, 2011 at 10:58 AM

Matt Taibbi’s 5,000-word exposé of the SEC’s document-shredding is a magnificent piece of journalism, and is the first and last... More

Newsies (1992)

“Headlines don’t sell papes; newsies sell papes”

By Katia Bachko   Aug 19, 2011 at 10:06 AM

Before Christian Bale became Batman, he was Jack Kelly, a newspaper boy with a dream in his heart and calluses... More

Audit Notes: The Milken Memory Hole, The Ax Murder and the NotW, Yahoo

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 19, 2011 at 12:28 AM

Mother Jones's Nick Baumann catches the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press in some poor journalism. A businessman gives... More

News Corp. Buries a Whistleblower

A case study in Rupert Murdoch’s corporate culture

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 18, 2011 at 05:07 PM

What happens when a low-level Rupert Murdoch employee blows the whistle on criminal wrongdoing? He gets harassed and destroyed by... More

HuffPost and Patch Look for Primary Power Brokers

New initiative to measure GOP conversation, outside the Beltway

By Greg Marx   Aug 18, 2011 at 04:36 PM

Early last month, CJR published an interview with Hans Noel, a Georgetown University political scientist and co-author of The Party... More

The Provo Papers

Utah TV reporter tracks down two million-dollar Romney donors

By Erika Fry   Aug 18, 2011 at 02:46 PM

A couple weeks ago, NBC News’s national investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff broke a story—“a bombshell-of-a-scoop” termed Mother Jones; a political... More

Campaigning Between Covers

Why do presidential wannabes write books?

By Erika Fry   Aug 17, 2011 at 05:26 PM

In 1935, James Harold Wallis wrote in The Politician: His habits, outcries and protective coloring: Only a very shrewd politician... More

A Wall Street Journal Error Undermines a Story’s Premise

But even after a correction, its readers almost surely don’t know that

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 17, 2011 at 03:38 PM

Here's a good example of how corrections can fail to fix misimpressions created by the original error. In this case,... More

Covering Rick Perry: “Exciting!”

By Liz Cox Barrett   Aug 17, 2011 at 03:30 PM

Three out of five MSNBC talking heads agree (the other two at the table didn't weigh in): they’d rather cover... More

The Back Story on Medicare’s Wild Spending

The narrative unfolds, bit by bit

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 17, 2011 at 02:55 PM

It’s no secret Medicare spending is on a wild ride northward. The politicians--Dems and Republicans alike--tell us that every day.... More

Web First, Print Later

Why some digital news startups are branching into print

By Alysia Santo   Aug 17, 2011 at 10:33 AM

When Knight Foundation executive John Bracken said that “Print is the new vinyl” this weekend, the point of his comparison... More

You Made Your Tweet…

By Liz Cox Barrett   Aug 17, 2011 at 10:07 AM

...now wear it. From a wearable technology workshop somewhere inside Microsoft's headquarters comes: The Printing Dress (h/t, joonbug). This black... More

A State-Backed Miracle

As Perry pushes Texas boom, the press shouldn’t forget one reason behind it

By Greg Marx   Aug 17, 2011 at 10:04 AM

With Rick Perry now officially in the presidential race, there’s a spate of coverage and commentary about how much credit... More

Audit Notes: Banker’s Good FHA Work, FBI’s Small Fry, Michael Barone

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 16, 2011 at 08:20 PM

The American Banker's Jeff Horwitz has another excellent report on the Federal Housing Administration and its former commissioner David Stevens,... More

How to Get Young People Interested in Global News

Why we should emphasize journalism’s role in sparking innovation

By Justin D. Martin   Aug 16, 2011 at 03:14 PM

For some time newsmakers and educators have stressed things like “civic duty” and being a “global citizen” in trying to... More

Damning New Evidence in the News Corp. Hacking Scandal

Payments to a convict began one month after a letter reminded execs he’d kept his mouth shut

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 16, 2011 at 03:13 PM

You know, it's a serious problem when you can't trust a word said by one of the very biggest owner... More

Audit Notes: One Termer, HAMP Dwindles, The Crisis Narrative Shift

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 15, 2011 at 08:15 PM

These two graphs from an NYT story this weekend pretty much show why Barack Obama is going to be a... More

The Free Press Probes Fannie and Freddie

The giant bailout recipients are dumping inventory in Detroit and pushing foreclosures over modifications

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 15, 2011 at 05:55 PM

A Detroit Free Press investigation raises some interesting questions about why government-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are pushing foreclosures... More

One Word or Two?

An altogether random list to use every day

By Merrill Perlman   Aug 15, 2011 at 04:59 PM

English insists on having variations of words, like “every day/everyday” or “any time/any time,” where two words are scrunched together... More

The Russian Reporters Who Helped Topple the USSR

Remembering a brief, shining, twenty-year-old moment

By Ann Cooper   Aug 15, 2011 at 04:37 PM

Twenty years ago, on the evening of August 19, 1991, some of the most brazen and important acts of modern-day... More

Why the NYT Paywall Isn’t Like the FT’s

By Felix Salmon   Aug 15, 2011 at 02:32 PM

Fred Wilson has nice things to say about my analysis of the NYT paywall—thanks, Fred!—but it’s worth teasing out one... More

How the NYT Paywall Is Working

By Felix Salmon   Aug 15, 2011 at 02:22 PM

When I wrote about the success of the NYT paywall last month, I got a lot of pushback in... More

Romney and His Corporate Man

A frivolous take from NPR

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 15, 2011 at 12:44 PM

It’s hard to say what was the point of NPR’s coverage of Mitt Romney’s visit to the Iowa State Fair.... More

Feces, Fascists, and Michael Lewis

A flop from the best writer in financial journalism

By Felix Salmon   Aug 15, 2011 at 10:55 AM

Kevin Drum doesn’t think much of Michael Lewis’s latest European dispatch for Vanity Fair — and neither do I. There’s... More

Richmond Times-Dispatch Ad Pull(ed)out

By Liz Cox Barrett   Aug 15, 2011 at 09:12 AM

Granted, I'm not fluent in advertising jargon, but it looks to me like this “special advertising pullout” in the Richmond... More

Iowan Silos

In debate analysis, journalists should use locals for more than just color

By Erika Fry   Aug 12, 2011 at 04:56 PM

There was a debate last night out in Iowa, hosted by Fox News and The Washington Examiner. And sure enough,... More

Lessons from the Seattle PostGlobe

For start-ups, a love of journalism is not enough

By Alysia Santo   Aug 12, 2011 at 04:21 PM

When, in 2009, Hearst announced that it had decided to close the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the newspaper’s staffers were beset... More

Audit Notes: JPMorgan’s Denuded County, Recession Watch, Reporting Rumors

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 12, 2011 at 04:14 PM

Bloomberg News revisits JPMorgan Chase's screwing of Jefferson County, Alabama, as the county debates whether to file for bankruptcy because... More

The WSJ Advances the Foreign-Exchange Gouging Story

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 12, 2011 at 02:10 PM

The Wall Street Journal has a good investigation that advances its series of stories looking at how banks, and particularly... More

Schmidle in Secret

New Yorker keeps mum on fact-checking process for bin Laden piece

By Craig Silverman   Aug 12, 2011 at 12:39 PM

Amid the discussion and debate about the sourcing and accuracy of Nicholas Schmidle’s lengthy retelling of the Bin Laden raid... More

Ace in the Hole (1951)

What a sixty-year-old noir can tell us about the Murdoch hacking scandal

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 12, 2011 at 11:15 AM

I’ve got Murdoch on the brain, but I couldn’t help thinking about the News of the World scandal while watching... More

Audit Notes: Picturing the Turmoil, WSJ vs. SmartMoney, Long Crisis

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 11, 2011 at 06:40 PM

Lots of people are linking the Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog in the midst of the market turmoil... More

Borders’ Newsstand Blues

Store closings spell trouble for niche magazine titles

By Alysia Santo   Aug 11, 2011 at 06:01 PM

Just like plenty of other Borders shoppers, Kevin Walter has been getting messages in his inbox from the bankrupt book... More

Debunking the Myth of an Independent President

LA Times op-ed spotlights partisanship’s place

By Greg Marx   Aug 11, 2011 at 04:03 PM

Because it’s only a matter of time before another pundit delivers a half-baked column fantasizing about an independent presidential candidate,... More

Building Haiti’s Post-Quake Media

Postcard from Port au Prince

By William Wheeler   Aug 11, 2011 at 03:08 PM

While I was reporting in Haiti last year, over the course of a few months, the Port-au-Prince guesthouse where I... More

A Hospital Story Not to Write

Doing the digging for real news

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 11, 2011 at 01:43 PM

My Association of Health Care Journalists colleague Charlie Ornstein likes to say that stories about hospital ribbon-cuttings, wings named for... More

SmartMoney Makes a Hash of the Downgrade

Says borrowers face higher rates, despite sinking Treasury yields

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 10, 2011 at 06:17 PM

Speaking of the Journal overhyping the S&P downgrade of U.S. Treasurys, its sister magazine SmartMoney has a doozy of a... More

The Journal Hypes the Downgrade

A three-day-old story gets the overkill treatment

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 10, 2011 at 02:44 PM

That Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S. from AAA to AA+ is a big story no doubt. But The Wall... More

Searching for D.B. Cooper

Geoffrey Gray joins the hunt for the vanishing bandit

By Jordan Michael Smith   Aug 10, 2011 at 02:22 PM

Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper| By Geoffrey Gray | Crown | 302 pages, $25.00 In the winter of 1971,... More

Straw Dogs

Why the press can’t quit Ames, Iowa

By Erika Fry   Aug 10, 2011 at 01:07 PM

Iowa has never been much of a tourist destination. The state’s main attractions are fictions (Riverside, Iowa: The Birthplace of... More

Journalism vs. Activism in Indonesia

Reporters divided over advocacy on the environment beat

By Veby Mega Indah   Aug 10, 2011 at 12:00 PM

JAKARTA, INDONESIA—When I ask Indonesian bureaucrats about the latest proclamations from some group concerned about the environment, I often get... More

Audit Notes: Murdoch’s Board, Hedge Funds Selling

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 9, 2011 at 07:35 PM

How awful is News Corporation's corporate governance (among other things)? Bloomberg News on Viet Dinh, the guy who wrote the... More

A Tale of Two Paywalls

One goes up, the other comes down

By Alysia Santo   Aug 9, 2011 at 05:41 PM

In Honolulu, the Civil Beat, a subscription-based online news site, has been drawing a line in the white hot Hawaiian... More

The Long Crisis

The current tumult had its origins in the housing bust and Crash of 2008

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 9, 2011 at 04:54 PM

The Wall Street Journal's new Money & Investing chief, Francesco Guerrera, has an awfully narrow perspective about "Why This Crisis... More

Pres. Obama at Dover

By Liz Cox Barrett   Aug 9, 2011 at 02:49 PM

President Obama canceled a scheduled event in Virginia today and, "assuming the grimmest role of his job," as the Associated... More

Populism on the Potomac

Is anyone in DC reporting for the people?

By The Editors   Aug 9, 2011 at 02:38 PM

On Sunday, Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton presented a plan for the paper he's charged with watching. His stirring proposal?... More

Would a Populist Washington Post Be Popular?

Ombudsman’s stirring plan relies on readers who may not be there.

By Greg Marx   Aug 9, 2011 at 01:39 PM

In his latest column, Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton offers a paradigmatic version of the earnest media critic’s exhortation. Being... More

Market Mess

Troubles pile up for the financial system and the economy

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 8, 2011 at 08:18 PM

What happened in the markets today? Good luck figuring that out (you can't, really). Let's just say it's some combination... More

Still Seeing Stars after Thirty Years

A venerable afternoon paper is gone, but not forgotten

By Cristine Russell   Aug 8, 2011 at 04:45 PM

Given the handwringing about the fate of newspapers (and the federal government) today, it is worth a moment’s reflection on... More

By the Numbers: New Yorker’s Bachmann Profile

By Liz Cox Barrett   Aug 8, 2011 at 03:45 PM

The following is a list of words you will encounter (and number of times) in Ryan Lizza’s fascinating, detail-packed New... More

Blaming the Audience: Almost Always a Bad Idea

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 8, 2011 at 01:57 PM

Marketplace's Heidi N. Moore lays into a listener for getting upset about Wall Street wanting to cut her entitlements. In... More

Really?

Literally speaking

By Merrill Perlman   Aug 8, 2011 at 01:35 PM

Here’s a cover letter cited in a column about what not to write when applying for a job: “I am... More

Is Tim Pawlenty For Real?

The StarTribune suggests maybe he isn’t

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 8, 2011 at 01:03 PM

The Minneapolis StarTribune’s piece on presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty is the kind of story voters can expect to see at... More

Audit Notes: Decline and Fall, Inflation Falls Again, Stress Indicators

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 5, 2011 at 08:18 PM

Your Decline and Fall Moment of the Day comes from Standard & Poor's, the credit-ratings firm that was a core... More

Hanging by the Telephone

A NYTimes account is mum on Strauss-Kahn accuser’s phone call

By Erika Fry   Aug 5, 2011 at 11:12 AM

On Monday, The New York Times had an exclusive for its subscribers: an e-mail promising, as its title read, “The... More

Audit Notes: Panic in the Markets

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 4, 2011 at 08:03 PM

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 512 points today, some 4.3 percent, as panic takes hold in global markets. The... More

Obama’s Wrong on Independents

And reporters shouldn’t be saying he’s right

By Greg Marx   Aug 4, 2011 at 02:44 PM

I found a fair bit to like in Politico’s latest conversation-driver, a long article by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen... More

Excellent Reporting on the Revolving Door By American Banker

Paper’s FOIA request shows a former FHA commish palling around with his future employer

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 4, 2011 at 01:46 PM

American Banker has a terrific story on the revolving door, digging into the records of former Federal Housing Authority commissioner... More

Playing It Safe the McCaskill Way

David Gregory’s lame interview

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 4, 2011 at 11:48 AM

I guess it’s too much to hope that the Sunday morning news shows could ever rise above the typical blather... More

LifeStraw Coverage Divided

Carbon-credit, health angles illustrate global priorities

By Rachel Cernansky   Aug 4, 2011 at 11:30 AM

Kakamega, Kenya—International coverage of a campaign to provide water filters financed by the sale of carbon credits to nearly a... More

Audit Notes: Some Recovery, Tom Watson Profiled, Debt Myths

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 3, 2011 at 07:48 PM

Calculated Risk gives us four indicators the National Bureau of Economic Research uses to call and date recessions and recoveries.... More

WSJ Fronts Amazon’s Tax Avoidance Strategy

Color-coded maps tell employees which states are safe, bad, and neutral

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 3, 2011 at 06:38 PM

It's nice to see The Wall Street Journal take a page-one look at Amazon's aggressive tax avoidance, something I've written... More

The NY Times’s New Top Editor in D.C.

A conversation with incoming Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt

By Greg Marx   Aug 3, 2011 at 09:44 AM

With Jill Abramson about to take the reins as executive editor of The New York Times, one of the paper’s... More

The Wall Street Journal: Murdochification Watch

The paper runs a thinly sourced, and quickly denied, scoop on non-News Corp. bribes

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 2, 2011 at 10:06 PM

Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, unsurprisingly, hasn't done a whole lot of digging on the News Corp. hacking scandal. Or... More

Pack of Gum, PAC of Candidate

WaPo on frequent political impulse spenders

By Liz Cox Barrett   Aug 2, 2011 at 03:25 PM

What “phenomenon” will the Washington Post’s T.W. Farnam find next within the rows and columns of politicians’ campaign finance reports?... More

Despite Debt Ceiling Deal, Wishy-Washy Stock Market Stories

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 2, 2011 at 03:14 PM

The House approved the debt-ceiling/spending cuts deal after markets closed yesterday, and the Senate passed it today. The Dow is... More

The Deficit Deal Defined

Is Medicare really safe?

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 2, 2011 at 01:34 PM

Presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett chatted with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC yesterday as part of a sales job for the deficit... More

Audit Notes: The Murdoch Lobby at Work, Davies in America, Audit Radio

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 2, 2011 at 12:42 AM

Roger Cohen, author of one of the worst Murdoch apologies of the hacking scandal, heads to David Cameron and Rebekah... More

The Deficit Disconnect

The long-run deficit problem is a health care problem. Why doesn’t the debate reflect that?

By Greg Marx   Aug 1, 2011 at 03:20 PM

With a debt ceiling agreement apparently at hand, Matthew Yglesias makes an important point that I haven’t seen in the... More

Follow a 99er Through the Press As the Money Runs Out

The long jobs crisis, with no end in sight, should prompt us to revisit older stories

By Ryan Chittum   Aug 1, 2011 at 01:32 PM

Now that it's certain that our leaders have gone all in on austerity, despite a 9.2 percent unemployment rate and... More

Paul Krugman on Journalistic Balance

The missing voices

By Trudy Lieberman   Aug 1, 2011 at 01:28 PM

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman addressed the cult of balance in the debt debate Friday when he wrote: News... More

Mapping Violence Against Journalists in Afghanistan

By Erika Fry   Aug 1, 2011 at 01:13 PM

Last week, Ahmed Omed Khpulwak, a 25-year old stringer for the BBC, was killed in a suicide bomb attack in... More

The Personals

When to use ‘who’ and ‘that’

By Merrill Perlman   Aug 1, 2011 at 12:11 PM

“We’re the people that are going to say, ‘No,’ to Washington, D.C., taxing and spending,” U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX),... More