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Articles by Joshua Foust | Email the Author
LeT’s Not Jump the Gun
Guessing is great, but the pundits’ certainty is worrisome
By Joshua Foust Dec 2, 2008 at 07:00 AM
Last week’s attacks in Mumbai were, in a word, horrific. As happens after every crisis, the pundits and analysts swarm... More
The Unbearable Lightness of Kabul
Lots of bombs go off in Afghanistan, but the media only seem to report the ones that hit internationals
By Joshua Foust Dec 1, 2008 at 12:56 PM
Late last week, a car bomb exploded near the American embassy in Kabul, killing at least four civilians. The bombing... More
Phantom Militias
Don’t believe everything you read about Pakistan’s tribal conflicts
By Joshua Foust Nov 3, 2008 at 03:44 PM
Verifiable stories out of northwestern Pakistan are difficult to come by: the entire region exists in what Rosanne Klass once... More
Take Me to the Other Side
Reporting from inside the Taliban is an old story
By Joshua Foust Oct 22, 2008 at 02:03 PM
Nir Rosen’s blockbuster article in Rolling Stone on his “embed” with the Taliban in the Ghazni province of Afghanistan is... More
Why We Fight
All the talk of abandoning Afghanistan to its fate ignores history
By Joshua Foust Oct 14, 2008 at 01:05 PM
Many in the press have begun to declare the war in Afghanistan either unwinnable (off the words of one outspoken... More
All Poppies Must Die
There’s more to counternarcotics than just killing plants
By Joshua Foust Oct 6, 2008 at 01:01 PM
Did you know the one thing missing from Southern Afghanistan was an increased focus on eradicating poppies? After a whopping... More
Did We Just Invade Pakistan?
The history of the Afghan-Pakistan border has lessons for today
By Joshua Foust Sep 26, 2008 at 01:03 PM
Over the last few years, the war along the Afghan-Pakistan border has progressed from scattered bombing incidents to almost daily... More
The Battle of Ashgabat
Reporters jump on false “Islamic militants” angle
By Joshua Foust Sep 19, 2008 at 12:31 PM
Just before midnight of Friday September 12th, the police in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, began an all-night shootout with... More
The Birth (and Death) of a Meme
Embedded reporters don’t always get the full story
By Joshua Foust Sep 10, 2008 at 01:54 PM
Sometime last fall, a new story began making its way out of Afghanistan: the country’s roads are being paved, and... More
Citizen Propagandists
Cutting through the noise on Russia-Georgia is harder than you think
By Joshua Foust Sep 2, 2008 at 11:49 AM
Ethan Zuckerman, the co-founder of the citizens’ media project Global Voices, notes an interesting angle to the Russo-Georgian Conflict: Part... More
Coming Clean About Casualties
The U.S. military in Afghanistan needs to acknowledge what it doesn’t know
By Joshua Foust Aug 29, 2008 at 01:23 PM
One of the challenges the U.S.-led coalition faces in the war in Afghanistan is controlling the narrative surrounding its actions.... More
Getting Russia v. Georgia Right
What we don’t know can hurt us
By Joshua Foust Aug 22, 2008 at 10:00 AM
The first few days of any conflict exist in the darkest version of what soldiers call “the fog of war.”... More
Echo Chamber
How blogging failed the war in Georgia
By Joshua Foust Aug 19, 2008 at 11:52 AM
Elite bloggers often portray their analytical and news-gathering skills as equal or (more often) superior to those of professional journalists.... More
Tracking a Meme
Reality vs. spin in the war in Afghanistan
By Joshua Foust Oct 21, 2010 at 11:47 AM
If you opened the New York Times yesterday, you probably saw Carlotta Gall’s big story on the military offensive in... More
What Really Happened in Takhar?
Who you trust for news on Afghanistan depends on your politics
By Joshua Foust Sep 3, 2010 at 10:58 AM
There was an air strike this week in Takhar, a province wedged between Badakhshan and Baghlan in northeastern Afghanistan. The... More
The Assange Leaks
What’s new about the WikiLeaks data?
By Joshua Foust Jul 26, 2010 at 03:18 PM
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has compared his organization’s latest leak of almost 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to... 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
#Realtalk: This is the best moment to be in journalism - The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay
Streams of consciousness - Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
Sticking with the truth - How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism
An ink-stained stretch - Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?
What to do if you find a baby bird
Expert advice
Inside Google’s secret lab
We might deplore the practice, but posting pictures of our food online is a way to bring everyone to the table
How the ‘World’s 50 Best’ list changed the way elite restaurants do business
“Every time the restaurant switched up its format, it got plenty of accompanying media coverage that let judges know they needed to return to see what was going on”
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
