Currents
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November 10, 2008 09:00 AM
Let’s Talk About Sex(ism)
How the media handled gender during the campaign
It’s by now understood that sexism, in some form, lodged itself into the gears of this election cycle from the very start. We saw it with Hillary Clinton, who endured the press’s inane scrutiny of her demeanor and appearance, her “cackle” and her “cankles.” And we saw it again with Sarah Palin, whose looks prompted a different sort of “bodily...
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November 09, 2008 11:02 AM
A Little Something for Your Trouble
Buyout packages at papers around the country
Since January 2007, as the shrinking of our newsrooms continued apace, some 2,700 journalists accepted buyouts and moved on. Here is a list of the financial terms of a sampling of those buyouts.
Bradenton Herald (Florida)
Payment: Two weeks of pay for every year of service; maximum of twenty-six weeks’ pay
Health care: Health care subsidized for three...
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November 08, 2008 10:44 AM
Ties That Blind
Following the funding trail in health and medical reporting
For nearly thirty years, the editors of medical journals have relied on public disclosure of researchers’ conflicts of interest to alert readers to the possibility of bias in published studies, especially when they are funded by the medical industry. It has been well documented in medical literature that the outcomes of industry-funded research tend to favor the sponsors’ commercial needs.
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October 30, 2008 09:15 AM
Louts Out
How to police message boards and comments
In January, someone who goes by the name “crosswave” logged onto the reader forums at nydailynews.com and posted a comment about sports columnist Filip Bondy. “Eff you Filip Bondy,” the post read, “You should be banished back to covering ghetto futbol in Newark.” In March, another sports columnist, Terence Moore of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was labeled “racist” by a handful...
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October 30, 2008 09:00 AM
Blame It On Aécio
A journalism student's video documentary took on the issue of governmental press manipulation in Brazil.
In 1985, press censorship was officially banned in Brazil, following the overthrow of a dictatorship that had for decades crippled journalistic freedom. Since then, Brazilian journalists have investigated government corruption and unearthed environmental and social stories with a zeal that made the nation’s watchdog press appear robust. In 2006, Marcelo Baêta, then a graduate student in journalism, changed that impression...
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September 18, 2008 01:00 PM
About Those Anonymice
A research project evaluates how closely NYT reporters adhere to the paper's anonymous sourcing policy
Last fall, when Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, spoke to Professor Richard Wald's Critical Issues in Journalism class at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, he presented the idea of a research project to evaluate how closely reporters adhere to the newspaper's anonymous-sources policy.
Drawing on his experience as a former D.C. bureau chief of...
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: Hiltzik on Lehman, Regulator Bonuses, iPad Ads
- Another New York Judge Embarrasses the SEC
The Observatory Science
- When the Well Runs Dry Is Duke Energy’s support for a new SciTech section a problem?
- Reviving Science Coverage in the Carolinas Weekly newspaper section, community-journalism project deliver fresh content


