Cover Story
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April 16, 2012 05:15 PM
Six degrees of aggregation
How The Huffington Post ate the Internet
Of the many and conflicting stories about how The Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations...
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March 12, 2012 06:00 AM
The Constant Gardener
My two years tending AOL's hyperlocal experiment
My employment with Patch started with a handshake and a promise that I would be called with a job offer in the next few days. I had met with Patch’s editor in chief, Brian Farnham, at the company’s New York headquarters. This was in late October 2009, just a few months after AOL acquired the nascent hyperlocal platform for $7...
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January 9, 2012 06:00 AM
A Narrowed Gaze
How the business press forgot the rest of us
Steve Lipin didn’t fit the profile of a transformative media figure when he took over the mergers-and-acquisitions beat for The Wall Street Journal in 1995. His look was studious, his manner remarkably affable and low key, given the stress of his new job. His rise had not been particularly meteoric.
He had started in 1985 at...
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September 12, 2011 12:00 PM
The Scandal Beat
Does the press’s obsession with rule-breaking get in the way of real reform of college sports?
In December, Ohio State University suspended five of its football players for violating the rules governing intercollegiate athletics by exchanging their Buckeye memorabilia for various forms of payment, including the handiwork of a local Columbus tattoo parlor. Over the next few months, the digging of media outlets near and far pried...
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July 11, 2011 06:00 AM
News for the World
A proposal for a globalized era: an American World Service
I would be surprised if in future decades, people did not say that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was the period in which the shape of the modern world was determined, and that two primary forces did most of the shaping: the spread of capitalism and free market economies, and the invention...
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July 7, 2011 06:00 AM
Big Bird to the Rescue?
Public television remains largely indifferent to calls to boost serious news coverage
Representative Earl Blumenauer stood before a microphone outside the Capitol building in February to make a passionate plea for continued federal funding of public broadcasting. The Oregon Democrat argued that news, specifically community news, is “not commercially viable. The public needs to be there.”
But in making his case, the bow-tied Congressman stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a life-sized, fuzzy-suited Arthur,...
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July 5, 2011 02:00 PM
The Future of Public Television
Can Public Television News Step Up?
Television has long been our most popular news medium, the format that unites us and brings the world to our living rooms each night. Public television news is cherished by many in America, even though—resource-starved, politically beaten, and reportorially unambitious—it has always danced a step behind.
In the following pieces, we try to envision what public television could be,...
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July 5, 2011 02:00 PM
Signal and Noise
Trying to follow global news in America, a newcomer finds that something is missing
If you wished to see a vivid illustration of how the broadcast news media in the US are perceived in 2011, you could do worse than watch President Obama tell jokes.
At the White House correspondents’ dinner he delivered a left and a right, so to speak. First, he played his “official birth video,” a clip from Disney’s...
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May 5, 2011 08:30 AM
Breathing Room
Toward a new Arab media
Before there was Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or even Al Jazeera, there was Hama, Syria. It was 1982 and an anti-government protest was put down with ferocious violence. The Syrian government simply destroyed whole sections of the city, leaving at least ten thousand people dead. But the slaughter went unreported in that closed society. Those of us trying...
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May 5, 2011 08:30 AM
English Lesson
The moment has arrived for Al Jazeera English, except in the US
[This is a sidebar article to the May/June 2011 cover story, "Breathing Room: Toward a new Arab media," which you can read here.]
Back in November 2008, I skewered Al Jazeera English’s live coverage of election night in the US in an article for CJR.org. “It was a bit like watching a local college TV...
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March 8, 2011 06:00 AM
Tested
Covering schools in the age of micro-measurement
Eleven New York City education reporters were huddling on e-mail last October 20, musing over ways to collectively pry a schedule of school closings out of a stubborn press office, when the chatter stopped cold. Word had filtered into their message bins that the city was about to release a set of spreadsheets showing performance scores...
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January 6, 2011 08:00 AM
Crossfire in Kandahar
Afghanistan’s new journalists navigate an ambiguous war
One hot night in September, less than a week after Afghanistan’s parliamentary election, soldiers from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force arrived at the Kandahar home of Mohammad Nader. Nader, a cameraman for the Qatar-based satellite channel Al Jazeera, was sleeping shirtless on the floor near his front door. The door stood ajar so a breeze could blow in. He...
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October 29, 2010 03:12 PM
Reboot
An open letter to the FCC about a media policy for the digital age
Editor's Note: On June 9, 2011, the FCC's Future of Media Project released a report on the state of local accountability journalism and the governmental policies that foster or inhibit that journalism. In the November/December 2010 issue of CJR, Steve Coll penned this open letter to the report's lead author, Steven Waldman.
Steven WaldmanFuture of...
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September 14, 2010 06:00 AM
The Hamster Wheel
Why running as fast as we can is getting us nowhere
“Newsrooms have shrunk by 25% in three years.” —Project for Excellence in Journalism, “State of the News Media 2010”
“A large majority (75%) of editors said their story counts . . . had either increased or remained the same during the past three years.” —PEJ, “The Changing Newsroom,” July 2008
“We’re all wire service reporters now.” —Theresa Agovino, Crain’s New...
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit notes: Buffett on newspapers, Times-Picayune, SEC lets Lehman go A vow to invest in newspapers and protect them from interference
- 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
The Observatory Science
- Reparative journalism Reporter sinks a controversial paper on “ex-gay” therapy
- The western frontier KQED Quest, Pacific Standard keep their eyes on the other coast
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Herald’s Caputo dives deep on diverging polls Do other news organizations undermine their credibility when they don’t do the same?
- Many stations don’t factcheck super PAC ads: survey Conference highlights difference in attitudes between industry, watchdog groups
Behind the News The Media
Blog
The Kicker last updated: Thu 11:20 AM
- The Times-Picayune cuts staff and print runs
- Broadcasters sue to keep political ad buy data offline
- The Pulitzer Prize luncheon, storified
- A game of telephone fools the Times
- What Warren Buffett sees in local newspapers
