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Articles by Douglas McCollam | Email the Author

Sulzberger at the Barricades

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is racing to transform the embattled New York Times for the digital age. Is he up to the job?

Corporate annual meetings are generally drowsy affairs—a pep talk by management, some PowerPoint graphics, a little predetermined voting, all topped... More

Somewhere East of Eden

Why the St. Pete Times model can’t save newspapers

The temple housing Nelson Poynter’s holy relics of journalism is located outside of downtown St. Petersburg, on a sunny chunk... More

Norman Pearlstine, Company Man

An editor revisits his role in Plamegate

Norman Pearlstine was not a happy camper. It was spring 2005, and for almost a year the editor-in-chief of Time... More

On the Rocks

Douglas McCollam on John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World

Annals of the Former World By John McPhee Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1998 I first encountered the writer John McPhee... More

The Shame Game

“To Catch a Predator” is propping up NBC’s Dateline, but at what cost?

It was just before 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon last November when a contingent of police gathered outside the... More

Not So Fast, Mr. Fitzgerald

As a rule, reporters prefer to cover court cases, not argue them. So it was disturbing to see portions of... More

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In cold type

When Truman Capote set out to profile Marlon Brando for The New Yorker in 1957, he knew just how to set his traps

One morning in January, 1957, Josh Logan, the veteran Broadway producer and Hollywood director, came down from his room into... More

Up and Down on the Bayou

A snapshot of The Times-Picayune five years after Katrina

In the spring of 2006, about seven months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and a swath of the Gulf... More

A Distant Echo

What Father Coughlin tells us about Glenn Beck

Throughout the initial year of President Obama’s term, there has been much consternation over the administration’s “war” with the conservative... More

A Man in Full

Four years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans broadcaster Garland Robinette is still fighting mad

It was the birds that tipped him off. Two days before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, while the storm was... More

In the Tank

Did the press help elect Barack Obama?

First, allow me to confess my sins. For the last eleven years, I have made my living practicing the dark... More

What was James Rosen thinking?

How much of Rosen’s trouble is of his own making?

The new ‘Snow Fall’

Cat Fall: A modern tragedy

The cartography of bullshit

Max Fisher and the problem with foreign-affairs blogging

Welcome to Google Island

“I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here”

This is water

David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon commencement speech as a short film

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Who Owns What

The Business of Digital Journalism

A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Study Guides

Questions and exercises for journalism students.