Darts and Laurels RSS
Thu, 1 May 2008
Dart to the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Triblocal.com
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By Posted at 09:00 AM
Dart to the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Triblocal.com for shoveling dodgy online content into print. In April 2007, the Tribune Company launched Triblocal.com, a Chicago Tribune-affiliated suburban news site with a small reporting staff and a big appetite for user-produced articles. As Chicago Reader media critic Michael Miner later reported, the site published many glowing articles about Mark Pera, a... Read More
Tue, 22 Jan 2008
Laurel to the editorial staff of Stars and Stripes
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By Posted at 09:00 AM
Laurel to the editorial staff of Stars and Stripes for uncovering a murky financial relationship between its paper and the Pentagon’s public-relations machine, and a Dart to the publishing staff for signing off on the arrangement.
First, some background. Stars and Stripes is an odd animal. Despite serving a military audience and receiving about half of its budget from the... Read More
Wed, 26 Dec 2007
Laurel to The Principia Pilot
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By Posted at 09:00 AM
Laurel to The Principia Pilot for truth-telling under difficult circumstances. When rumors began to circulate that CEO Stuart Jenkins, who oversees Principia College, had been given a big pay raise, editor Caitlin Carpenter began digging. She soon found out that not only were the rumors true, but two trustees had resigned in protest. The resulting January 2007 piece was a... Read More
Tue, 9 Oct 2007
Dart to The Oregonian
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By Posted at 12:00 AM
Dart to The Oregonian for rolling over an obvious mathematical mistake, and thereby opening up otherwise admirable reporting to attack. When the paper researched the history of all-terrain vehicles, it found something startling: though manufacturers had made a deal with government regulators in 1988 not to produce ATVs with less lateral stability than those already on the market, the government... Read More
Thu, 19 Jul 2007
Darts & Laurels
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By Posted at 08:30 AM
Laurel to the countless gatherers, makers, and consumers of news who over the years have brought to this column, along with their nominations, a shared regard for journalistic ideals and a spirit-lifting faith in the perfectibility of the craft. Meanwhile, for the editor who for more than three decades has appraised those nominations and put a small sampling of... Read More
Tue, 12 Jun 2007
Darts & Laurels
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By Posted at 11:30 AM
Laurel to the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists, for refusing to tie the knot without a proper pre-nup. Last August, in apparent recognition of the ever-intensifying relationship between journalism and public relations, the SPJ’s president, Christine Tatum, appeared at a national ethics committee meeting at the annual convention and pressed the committee to give its blessing... Read More
Thu, 1 Mar 2007
Darts & Laurels
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By Posted at 08:30 AM
Dart to the Lowell, Massachusetts, Sun, for beclouded judgment. For its December 27 issue, the paper produced a special commemorative section celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Marty Meehan, its hometown congressman—fifty-six besotted pages of gushing articles about the “life and legacy” of the saintly lawmaker, illustrated with more than five dozen photos and adorned with some sixty congratulatory ads... Read More
Mon, 1 Jan 2007
Darts & Laurels
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By Posted at 08:30 AM
Dart to the Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard, for thumbing its nose at the news. Knocking down still further the ad-edit wall has been a series of ads for gamma knife surgery at Sacred Heart Medical Center. The ad on Sunday, October 29, for example, which appeared on page A3, is dominated by a large photo of a partially closed fist,... Read More
Wed, 1 Nov 2006
Darts & Laurels
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By Posted at 08:30 AM
Dart to the Palo Alto Daily News, for blindly toeing the local line. “Everybody,” as was noted on Slate’s August 11 roundup of “Today’s Papers,” “leads with the big, foiled terror plot in which twenty-four British men, mostly of Pakistani descent, were arrested and are suspected of plotting to bomb multiple airliners with liquid explosives.” Everybody, that is,... Read More
