Brent Cunningham : Author Archive : CJR

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The Kicker

Who you calling ‘working-class’?
May 8, 2012 10:36 AM
Attention all political reporters and editors. If you don’t know about the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State, in Ohio, I urge you to bookmark its blog (Working-Class Perspectives) and check it frequently as the primary campaign unfolds. Below... Continue reading
The Kicker

Thank you, Mr. Trillin …
May 7, 2012 11:53 AM
Easily the smartest thing connected with The New York Times Magazine’s tedious essay contest on the ethics of eating meat came not within the confines of the contest itself, but in Public Editor Art Brisbane’s column about the... Continue reading
The Kicker

NYT’s hockey series gets Dart Award
May 4, 2012 10:16 AM
The NYT’s series on the life and death of hockey enforcer Derek Boogaard won a Dart Award last night (WNYC’s excellent “Living 9/11” documentary also won). John Branch and company’s multimedia report, which was published in December, was... Continue reading
Currents

Acronyms You Should Know
March 21, 2012 06:00 AM
Even as interest in all things food-related skyrockets, space devoted to serious food issues continues to lose out to the gastroporn of hot restaurants and hotter chefs. So last year, a group of fed-up food writers launched... Continue reading
Feature

Sustained Outrage
November 28, 2011 10:00 AM
Since he began reporting full-time, in 1991, Ken Ward Jr. has embodied the credo of Ned Chilton III, The Charleston Gazette’s late publisher, that the “hallmark of crusading journalism is sustained outrage.” In his twenty years covering... Continue reading
Darts and Laurels

Darts and Laurels
November 2, 2011 09:00 AM
An accounting of fifty years’ worth of Darts is hardly a balm for an industry careening through a wrenching transition. It is a concentrated dose of every journalistic sin imaginable, and some that defy imagination: plagiarism, laziness, racism, sexism, homophobia,... Continue reading
The Kicker

Damning With Absurd Praise
September 19, 2011 10:15 AM
Check out the comments in Adweek by Gannett’s new chief marketing officer about the company’s flagship newspaper, USA Today. Maryam Banikarim says that the paper was “never trying to compete with The New York Times or The Wall Street... Continue reading
Page Views

Call Northside 777 (1948)
September 9, 2011 11:34 AM
In an early scene of the 1948 film Call Northside 777, Jimmy Stewart, who plays a reporter at the Chicago Times, interviews a scrubwoman who placed a classified ad (how quaint!) in the paper offering a $5,000 reward for information... Continue reading
Behind the News

Q & A: CJR Cover Artist Tomer Hanuka
May 18, 2010 09:59 AM
Developing a cover illustration can be a simultaneously maddening and infinitely satisfying experience. You must divine the central idea of your cover story, explain it to the artist, and wait anxiously to see what the alchemy of that process... Continue reading
Behind the News

Food Fighter
May 4, 2010 08:00 AM
In 2004, Tom Philpott quit his job as a financial journalist in New York City and moved with his girlfriend and her sister to take over their father’s farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Today, Maverick Farms... Continue reading
Campaign Desk

A Compulsion To Know
April 21, 2010 10:58 AM
On the occasion of Mark Leibovich's New York Times Magazine profile of Politico's Mike Allen, CJR is happy to offer you this take on Allen as originally published in our July/August 2000 issue. Like Leibovich's effort, it shows... Continue reading
The Kicker

Tunku’s Silly Lists
February 18, 2010 02:12 PM
Tunku Varadarajan’s lists in The Daily Beast of the top twenty-five “most influential journalists” on the right and on the left say a lot about what’s wrong with journalism today. For starters, there are very few actual... Continue reading
Behind the News

Head Cases
January 5, 2010 08:00 AM
In 2007 The New York Times hired Alan Schwarz largely on the basis of his initial freelance reporting for the paper on the problem of head injuries in professional football. Since then, Schwarz’s persistent coverage has helped make the issue—which... Continue reading
Short Takes

All Together Now (I)
October 6, 2009 08:44 PM
Not long ago, Kevin Murphy was simply the president of the Berks County Community Foundation in Reading, Pennsylvania, a city of about 80,000 an hour northwest of Philadelphia. Like most community foundations, Murphy’s manages a range of charitable funds for... Continue reading
Feature

Take a Stand
September 29, 2009 08:00 AM
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as the press faced criticism for failing to use the catastrophe to initiate a national conversation about race (or class, or infrastructure, etc.), Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN/U.S., defended his network’s coverage... Continue reading
The Kicker

Fairness Doctrine, Anyone?
August 3, 2009 09:38 AM
I realize it has been a long, long time since this mindset at our TV networks could reasonably be considered surprising--or even, really, disturbing. It just is. And yet, how sad. Here is CBS's senior VP Paul Friedman complaining... Continue reading
The Kicker

A Story About Poor People!
May 22, 2009 01:47 PM
Kudos to DeNeen Brown and The Washington Post for this piece in Monday's paper on the hidden costs of poverty. What makes it so worthwhile--and rare--is that it is written largely from the perspective of the poor, rather than... Continue reading
The Kicker

L.A. Youth In Trouble
May 7, 2009 03:13 PM
From the annals of worthy causes: the diminishing fortunes of the Los Angeles Times have hit L.A. Youth, a twenty-one-year-old nonprofit newspaper by and for teens. As The Associated Press reported recently, the Times, which is owned by... Continue reading
The Kicker

You Want Me To What?
March 3, 2009 11:28 AM
Referee factual disputes? Ask questions and weigh evidence and try to determine whether the allegations are true or not? Why would I want to do that? Such is the dilemma at the heart of a piece in the... Continue reading
Feature

Re-thinking Objectivity
July 11, 2003 04:38 PM
In his March 6 press conference, in which he laid out his reasons for the coming war, President Bush mentioned al Qaeda or the attacks of September 11 fourteen times in fifty-two minutes. No one challenged him on it,... Continue reading

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