May 2012

ESPN’s interchangeable women

To the Bristol brass, it’s the network, not the talent, that makes the star

By Robert Weintraub May 6, 2013 at 03:51 PM

In recent months, ESPN has taken a distinctly Bill Belichick-ian approach to its on-air talent, in particular its female announcers.... More

CPJ’s Impunity Index updates

Iraq tops the list of countries where murders of journalists have gone unsolved

By Sara Morrison May 6, 2013 at 03:30 PM

The Committee to Protect Journalists updated its Impunity Index last week. The Index calculates the number of unsolved murders of... More

Letter perfect

Why English is so hard

By Merrill Perlman May 6, 2013 at 03:00 PM

The cashier at the fancy foods store was from Bosnia. "I have so much hard time with English," she said.... More

Busted bet: AP reveals sweepstakes industry’s cash-o-matic in North Carolina

Reporters discuss a series of scoops uncovering possible campaign-finance violations

By Corey Hutchins May 6, 2013 at 11:00 AM

COLUMBIA, SC -- Last Wednesday, the newly-appointed State Board of Elections in North Carolina convened for the first time. Following... More

And that’s the way it was: May 6, 1937

The Hindenburg disaster

By Sang Ngo May 6, 2013 at 06:49 AM

On this day in 1937, the German passenger zeppelin Hindenburg caught fire, crashed, and burned down to nothing but its... More

Finding James Foley

GlobalPost tracked down its missing reporter in Syria—now to bring him home

By Curtis Brainard May 3, 2013 at 06:00 PM

After 162 days with no information about his whereabouts, GlobalPost announced Friday that James Foley, an American journalist who went... More

Inside the Indonesian Newsroom:
the good, the bad, the hopeful

A survey provides a new snapshot

By Lawrence Pintak May 3, 2013 at 02:52 PM

Indonesia remains a nation in flux. So, too, its journalism. Fifteen years after the country's long-time strongman and president,... More

Must-reads of the week

Stuffed Banana with Dreadlocks Edition

By The Editors May 3, 2013 at 02:50 PM

Culled from CJR’s frequently updated “Must-reads from around the Web,” our staff recommendations for the best pieces of journalism (and... More

Planet 401(k): Tom Friedman’s bleak vision

Elites are debating the shape of our future. It’s time for some mainstream reporting to deepen the discussion

By Trudy Lieberman May 3, 2013 at 11:09 AM

It's pretty clear by now that elite media, in their news columns and opinion pages, have had a big... More

The corrupt City culture behind the Libor scandal

The Wall Street Journal’s excellent investigation digs up the dirt

By Ryan Chittum May 3, 2013 at 06:50 AM

In the real word, big conspiracies are hard to maintain. People talk. Disagreements develop. Word tends to get out. But... More

Will Wall Street’s cop go after dark money?

The campaign for the SEC to force disclosure of corporate political spending, explained.

By Sasha Chavkin May 3, 2013 at 06:50 AM

During the 2012 elections--and ever since--coverage of campaign finance has focused heavily on the role of "dark money": the unlimited... More

How not to report on a transgender victim

Cemia Acoff identified as a woman in life and should have been in death, too

By Jennifer Vanasco May 3, 2013 at 06:50 AM

Sometime between the end of March and the end of April, an Ohio transgender woman was brutally murdered--she was stabbed... More

And that’s the way it was: May 3, 1978

The first piece of email spam is sent

By Sang Ngo May 3, 2013 at 06:49 AM

On an evil day, 35 years ago today, a sinister pair of hands typed and sent out the first ever... More

Keeping it chronic

Local coverage explores ways to keep ‘super-users’ out of the hospital, driving costs down and outcomes up

By Sibyl Shalo Wilmont May 2, 2013 at 03:10 PM

The emergency department (ED) is not only the most inappropriate and expensive place to deliver primary healthcare, it's a gateway... More

Reinventing Audubon

Mark Jannot to craft new content, communications strategy

By Curtis Brainard May 2, 2013 at 03:00 PM

There's new vigor at the 108-year-old National Audubon Society, a nonprofit environmental group focused on birds, which is in the... More

The systemic plight of labor

A revealing Thomas Friedman column on 401(k)s

By Felix Salmon May 2, 2013 at 11:59 AM

It's May Day, and Henry Blodget is celebrating -- if that's the right word -- with three charts, of... More

Covering somebody who’s suing you

The WSJ sticks it to Sheldon Adelson by keeping a reporter on the beat

By Ryan Chittum May 2, 2013 at 11:22 AM

Francine McKenna asked a good question on Twitter the other day about Wall Street Journal coverage of Sheldon Adelson's Las... More

Digital Public Library of America wants to lend copyrighted works

The DPLA launched last month offering access to public-domain materials, but founders want to expand its purview

By Sarah Laskow May 2, 2013 at 11:00 AM

Last month, the Digital Public Library of America introduced its discovery portal to the Internet. It invited users in, to... More

Those immobile newspaper companies

Only 22 percent of a big sample even offer mobile products

By Dean Starkman May 2, 2013 at 11:00 AM

One of the truisms of digital journalism, and one that happens to be true, is that mobile is a big... More

Branded but ‘independent’ media

The pros and cons of trying to do real journalism at a non-media company

By Ann Friedman May 2, 2013 at 06:50 AM

Jessica Bennett worked for seven years at journalistic stalwarts like The Boston Globe, the Village Voice, and Newsweek. But after... More

And that’s the way it was: May 2, 1885

Good Housekeeping magazine is first published

By Sang Ngo May 2, 2013 at 06:49 AM

Founded in 1885 by Clark W. Bryan, Good Housekeeping was purchased in 1911 by the Heart Corporation, which still owns... More

Local reporting at its grandest

When the weather warms up, oddities emerge

By Kira Goldenberg May 1, 2013 at 04:00 PM

The local news in Florida is likely full of "truth is stranger than fiction" tales all year round because it's... More

Untangling Obamacare: Rate shock!?

Understanding the direction of insurance premiums is not easy, let alone explaining it. But…

By Trudy Lieberman May 1, 2013 at 02:28 PM

Covering Obamacare poses big challenges for journalists, from piercing government spin and deciphering GOP rhetoric to unraveling and simplifying... More

Opening Shot

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

I'm not you, babe When Thatcher passed away, some tweeters who opposed her politics celebrated using the hashtag #nowthatchersdead.... More

Empty calories

To feed young minds, let’s add some nutrition to social media

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

(Illustration by Daniel Chang) If you've spent time with anyone under 25 recently, you will have noticed that they... More

Letters to the editor

Readers respond to our March/April issue

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Editor in chief's note 'The journalism community deserves diversity, but why aren't we getting it?" asked Farai Chideya, moderator of... More

An ink-stained stretch

Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?

By Ryan Chittum May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Betting man Kushner bought the Register cheap and is investing in it heavily, including one of the biggest hiring... More

Sticking with the truth

How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism

By Curtis Brainard May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

The damage done A study by Andrew Wakefield, right, helped fuel media attention to the vaccine-autism story, until Brian... More

On the job

Tight shots

By Michael Kamber May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Ground war Following a raid in Ramadi in 2006, a US soldier watches over an Iraqi man who collapsed... More

More of Jessica Lum’s work

Jessica Lum’s life and career were cut short, but she left a lot behind

By Sara Morrison May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Jessica Lum's life and career were cut short, but she left a lot behind. Here's a sampling of some of... More

‘See you on the other side’

Meet Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend what little time she had practicing journalism

By Sara Morrison May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Her time Jessica Lum was a journalist for the new century, an empathic reporter who told timeless stories with... More

The back page

A feature writer at the erstwhile International Herald Tribune remembers the glory days, when presses were on the premises and the paper left ink on your hands

By Jeffrey Robinson May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Bonjour, cherie, get me rewrite On a good night, as deadline neared in the bullpen on the rue de... More

Streams of consciousness

Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?

By Ben Adler May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

(Daniel Chang) My first encounters with journalism were the same as most American males: through the sports pages. Sometime... More

Hard numbers

Pew, that’s a lotta research!

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

72 percent of all US adults who say the most common way they hear about news from family and friends... More

Old news

The journalism business has evolving for years, if not quite as cataclysmically as it is now. Ben Adler is a 31-year-old freelance writer; his father, Jerry Adler, 63, had a long, distinguished career at Newsweek. Here are highlights of a recent Gchat about their media consumption.

By Ben Adler and Jerry Adler May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

(Daniel Chang) Ben: Tell me about your media diet when you were young. Jerry: As a kid, I read the... More

Cause and affect

DoSomething.org’s surveys of teens suggest that the voters of tomorrow do actually care about current affairs

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

(Data courtesy of DoSomething.org) Who says kids are apathetic and don't care about the news? Well, kids do--but their... More

That’s incredible

How students at one California high school are learning to discern what is (and isn’t) news

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

"A lot of students believe all news is created equal," says Alan Miller of the News Literacy Project, which helps... More

Open Bar

The Gandamack

By Sabra Ayres May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Sabra Ayres Gandamack Lodge Kabul, Afghanistan Although the bar's official name is the Hare and Hound Watering Hole, most... More

Language Corner

Plum loco

By Merrill Perlman May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

The witness, according to the news story, said the robbers were "plum crazy." Not unless they were robbing a green... More

Sree Tips

Social-media etiquette for journalists

By Sree Sreenivasan May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Q: There seem to be new social media platforms released every week. How do you decide which ones, if any,... More

The Buzz

They’re back!

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

After 17 years underground, a brood of cicadas is emerging from the soil this spring, from the Carolinas to... More

The Conversation

Sports section 2.0

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

After two years as deputy editor, Jason Stallman took over in January as The New York Times sports editor... More

Strange but true

More tales from the beat

By Marla Jo Fisher May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Lea Thompson, Dateline NBC We once conducted an entire interview in Dallas using a "bra cam." We were exposing a... More

What’s in my … rolling briefcase

Micheline Maynard

By Melissa Richards May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Micheline Maynard is something of a renaissance woman. The former New York Times Detroit bureau chief covers the auto industry,... More

Darts & Laurels

The Phoenix’s ashes, Weil’s catch, the WSJ’s ‘experts,’ etc.

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Laurel to In These Times, for exposing how, in the face of tough economic times, state legislatures are slashing budgets... More

Future shock

Predictions from the past

By Burt Dragin May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Visionaries The World's city room in the 20th century. (Library of Congress) In 1923, The World, Joseph Pulitzer's raucous... More

The Lower Case

Headlines that editors probably wish they could take back

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

--Daily News Record (Harrisonburg, VA), 3/2/13 --The Denver Post (Harrisonburg, VA), 2/12/13 --The Athens (NY) Messenger, 2/22/13 --Orange County... More

Home truths

For the essayist Albert Murray, the South was a state of mind

By James Marcus May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

There is nothing quite so liberating for a journalist as failing to carry out an assignment. I'm not talking... More

Turn on, log in, opt out?

Morozov, Lanier, and others consider the future of the Internet

By Lauren Kirchner May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

At a tech conference in Lake Tahoe three years ago, Eric Schmidt gave a talk that included a startling statistic.... More

It doesn’t add up

A science writer questions the conventional wisdom of US-born STEM workers

By Beryl Lieff Benderly May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Homegrown President Obama, seen here visiting at technical college in North Carolina, supports bringing more foreign STEM workers to... More

The natural

Red Smith made it look easy, even when it wasn’t

By Terence Smith May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

"Give us this day our daily plinth," my father, Red Smith, and his pal, Joe Palmer, the racing columnist,... More

‘Minority’ rules

In case you missed it: a recap of our Newseum panel on race, class, and social mobility

By The Editors May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Wise wordsFrom left, Raquel Cepeda, Jeff Yang, Gene Policinski, and Richard Prince fielded questions from moderator Farai Chideya. For... More

Brief encounters

Short reviews of Fighting for the Press and America 1933

By James Boylan May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles | By James C. Goodale |... More

That’s incredible

How kids get their news

By Angela Stern May 1, 2013 at 12:00 AM

Not uncommonly, as a teenager in today's society, I spend a great deal of time every day on my cell... More

The Advocate vs. the Times-Picayune

A New Orleans businessman fires up the newspaper war with the Newhouses

By Ryan Chittum Apr 30, 2013 at 11:59 PM

The Louisiana newspaper war just got a lot more interesting. It's been a poorly kept secret in New Orleans media... More

The importance of counting stories

Schiffrin and Fagan quantify weaknesses in coverage of the stimulus

By Dean Starkman Apr 30, 2013 at 03:10 PM

One of the cold, hard facts of media punditry is that no one can read everything—or should be expected... More

Honey, I shrank the IRS

The administration wants more money for tax-law enforcement. Let’s ask why

By David Cay Johnston Apr 30, 2013 at 02:52 PM

Last week, we pointed to a piece of news that we have yet to read or hear from most... More

Room for two

New Yorker, Grantland go head to head on Iditarod coverage

By Robert Weintraub Apr 30, 2013 at 02:50 PM

Certainly a thousand-mile race across the vast empty expanse of the Alaskan wilderness has room for two massive, longform articles... More

Covering ‘The American Presidency’

Fiction vs. reality in coverage of the White House

By Brendan Nyhan Apr 30, 2013 at 11:00 AM

In Hollywood and the accounts of many of the nation's leading journalists, events in Washington revolve around the president, who... More

Participial con-fusion

When possession is the law

By Merrill Perlman Apr 30, 2013 at 06:50 AM

WARNING: Grammar lesson ahead. If you ever knew what a "participle" was, you may have forgotten. Same with the word... More

In the Egypt Independent’s closure, an end of a beginning

The paper was a symbol of Egypt’s new freedom of the press, which appears to be diminishing

By Vivian Salama Apr 30, 2013 at 06:50 AM

Like many things in Egypt these days, the fight to save the Egypt Independent from termination went viral almost instantly.... More

And that’s the way it was: April 30, 1993

“WorldWideWeb” software enters the public domain

By Sarah Laskow Apr 30, 2013 at 06:50 AM

In 1993, computer users all over the world were still working out how best to share information over the Internet.... More

Journo Tweets

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Woman’s work - The twisted reality of an Italian freelancer in Syria

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Elizabeth Warren, the antidote to CNBC - The senator schools the talking heads on bank regulation

Art Laffer + PR blitz = press failure - The media types up the retail lobby’s propaganda

Reuters’s global warming about-face - A survey shows the newswire ran 50 percent fewer stories on climate change after hiring a “skeptic”

A Big Mac miss by The Huffington Post (115)

Reuters's global warming about-face (40)

John Stossel's poor logic on minimum wages and jobs (15)

Sympathy for the Walmart flack (9)

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Tweets by @CJR

Barack Obama: ‘those old times aren’t coming back’

“It used to be there were local newspapers everywhere. If you wanted to be a journalist, you could really make a good living working for your hometown paper”

The Guardian’s editor opens up on Reddit

Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, answered questions in an Ask Me Anything

The (almost) lost speech of Justice Anthony Kennedy

How his insightful remarks about the Constitution inadvertently make the case for a Supreme Court “media pool”

Fox News sues TVEyes for copyright infringement

Says subscription service sells access to its content without permission nor compensation

Beijing subway at rush hour

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