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Audit notes: Buffett on newspapers, Times-Picayune, SEC lets Lehman go
A vow to invest in newspapers and protect them from interference
By Ryan Chittum May 24, 2012 at 05:59 PM
This is the most hopeful thing I've read about the business of newspapers in a long, long time: I'll quote... More
Audit notes: No more daily in New Orleans, McClatchy, private equity
The NYT reports the Times-Picayune will print two or three times a week
By Ryan Chittum May 24, 2012 at 12:21 AM
If ever a town needed a newspaper, it's New Orleans. But David Carr reports that Newhouse is preparing big layoffs... More
Facebook fiasco
The well connected made out while retail investors got hosed
By Ryan Chittum May 23, 2012 at 01:04 PM
We're starting to get a better picture of what happened with Facebook on Friday and in the run-up to its... More
Audit notes: Facebook disclosure, Facebook value, soft corruption
By Ryan Chittum May 22, 2012 at 05:58 PM
Business Insider's Henry Blodget, who knows a thing or two about analyst/IPO scandals, writes that Facebook and/or its bankers could... More
Audit Notes: Facebook IPO edition
By Ryan Chittum May 21, 2012 at 05:03 PM
I'm happy to say I was wrong (and Felix was right) in guessing that retail investors would jump into Facebook... More
The Chicago Tribune lights up the flame-retardant industry
An outstanding investigation show how chemical companies preserve a toxic cash cow
By Ryan Chittum May 21, 2012 at 11:07 AM
A tremendous Chicago Tribune investigation into flame-retardant chemical manufacturers shows how they push their poisons on an unsuspecting public despite... More
A game of telephone fools the Times
And the newspaper-of-record short-arms the correction
By Ryan Chittum May 18, 2012 at 03:00 PM
The New York Times posts a nasty correction on its Sunday op-ed by William Deresiewicz, who asserted that a study... More
Audit notes: Questions for JPMorgan, hindsight journalism, Ticketmaster
Jesse Eisinger asks what and when Dimon & Co. knew about the bank’s big loss
By Ryan Chittum May 17, 2012 at 06:11 PM
ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger, in his NYT DealBook column, writes about what the press and the authorities should be asking about... More
The Facebook frenzy
Retail investors prepare to jump on a richly valued IPO
By Ryan Chittum May 17, 2012 at 11:00 AM
The Wall Street Journal's page-one Facebook IPO story does a good job of capturing some uncomfortable parallels to the dot.com... More
What’s the right price for ebooks? (updated)
It’s probably not 99 cents
By Ryan Chittum May 16, 2012 at 11:00 AM
Author Chuck Windig, GigaOm's Mathew Ingram, and TechDirt's Mike Masnick all took on the question of ebook pricing recently, arguing... More
Audit notes: Commercialization, GM and Facebook, Saverin’s taxes
By Ryan Chittum May 15, 2012 at 11:15 PM
Conor Friedersdorf makes a nice catch on Tom Friedman's Sunday column bemoaning the commercialization of seemingly all aspects of American... More
The business press embarrasses Jamie Dimon
London Whale, sighted one month ago, knocks billions off JPMorgan’s worth
By Ryan Chittum May 14, 2012 at 11:04 AM
In what FT Alphaville called "the most excruciating bank conference call we’ve ever heard," press favorite Jamie Dimon announced last... More
Audit notes: Chesapeake woes, the Untaxable, Reuters on HSBC
By Ryan Chittum May 11, 2012 at 07:34 PM
The hits keep coming at Chesapeake Energy. Today, it's The Wall Street Journal's turn. It reports on page one that... More
The Washington Post Co.’s Self-Destructive Course
Dividends, share buybacks, and an anti-paywall stance help bleed the paper dry
By Ryan Chittum May 11, 2012 at 06:10 AM
The Washington Post Company‘s dismal quarterly earnings release last week was received with something of a shrug—more of the same.... More
Audit notes: WSJ dings austerity, Weisenthal, The Global Mail
By Ryan Chittum May 10, 2012 at 07:58 PM
If you're looking to get up to speed on what happened with the euro and Greece, you could do a... More
Audit notes: Blodget’s anonymous Zuck fans, Ongo no-go, social news apps
New York cover story dispenses with named sources
By Ryan Chittum May 10, 2012 at 02:12 AM
Here's the sourcing in Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget's New York cover story on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: "a colleague... More
Clearly, Quartz wants to help elites go optimize themselves
The Atlantic’s new business site enters a crowded field catering to the 0.1 percent
By Ryan Chittum May 10, 2012 at 12:58 AM
The Atlantic's big new business-journalism project is off to an inauspicious start. First there's the name: Quartz, which is different,... More
Audit Notes: Murdoch’s Influence, Reuters’s Chesapeake drumbeat
A sweeping indictment of the corruption of British politics by News Corp.
By Ryan Chittum May 9, 2012 at 06:10 AM
The News Corp. scandal is so massive and so sprawling that it's just about impossible to bring all the pieces... More
Audit notes: News Corp.’s board, Lehman’s hubris, Awards and Slideshows
David Carr eyes Rupert Murdoch’s crony-filled board of directors
By Ryan Chittum May 8, 2012 at 12:55 AM
David Carr takes a look at the News Corporation board of directors, which is as stacked with the CEO's cronies... More
The housing market at an inflection point
The Journal explains why bidding wars are starting to bubble up again
By Ryan Chittum May 7, 2012 at 07:00 AM
After seven or so years of bearishness on housing, I decided a few weeks back that the market was probably... More
#Realtalk: This isn’t another ‘golden age’ for print - But it is one for media
Social media in smaller markets - How three social media managers deal with smaller markets and more local coverage.
A rally for laid-off Sun-Times photogs - A protest Thursday morning drew about 150 picketers to the newspaper’s headquarters
Reporting, or illegal hacking - Scripps reporters are accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Exchange Watch: California Dreaming - Low healthcare premiums on the West Coast were trumpeted as a big, good-news Obamacare story. But: “Compared to what?”
One of the great reporters of his generation died Tuesday at 33. The stories he wrote, and the ones he didn’t live to write
Michael Hastings: my friend and his enemies
Hastings was fearless and shook things up - especially with his McChrystal expose. The haters in the media couldn’t forgive him
Journalism is about finding flaws and magnifying them, and surely someone who would spill massive loads of state secrets must contain a few broken parts, right?
Call it the Politico rhetorical crutch
The inside-the-beltway publication’s go-to phrase
Rachel Maddow’s tribute to Michael Hastings
“Michael was angry … he was angry about things that weren’t right in the world. He was angry with war and with loss, and that drove his reporting.”
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.




















