Editorial
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May 9, 2012 07:00 AM
Aggregated assault
Whose work is it, anyway? A plea for standards.
“There’s nothing new under the sun.” Thus spake my high-school teacher, then nearing retirement, and if I remembered nothing else (besides his rampaging eyebrows and alarming amounts of nostril hair), I would not forget this. His point, at the time somewhat dispiriting, was that ideas are continually repackaged and re-presented. All these years later, surveying the (sometimes acid)...
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May 1, 2012 06:00 AM
Editor in Chief’s Note
CJR's 50th birthday party continues
Perhaps the best thing about turning 50 is that people tend to toss you more than one party. Christie Hefner, chair of CJR’s half-century celebration, has been pulling out all the stops. The latest, on April 11, was hosted by Thomson Reuters in its Times Square aerie (we actually looked down on the ball that drops each New Year’s). Reuters’s...
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March 9, 2012 06:00 AM
Editor in Chief’s Note
Congrats and goodbye to deputy editor Clint Hendler, and a call for photos of journalists on the job
Although ’tis the season to look ahead, it’s time to say thank you to someone whose name is disappearing from the masthead after this issue: Clint Hendler, who began at CJR fresh out of J-School and over the next five years proceeded to make himself generally indispensable. For example, he actually reread all 50 years of the magazine in order...
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March 7, 2012 06:00 AM
Show us the Money
Broadcasters and the FCC need to get political ad data online
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision unleashed a torrent of campaign spending, the impact of which we are witnessing firsthand as the GOP primary unfolds, media market by media market. Candidates and their advocates set records for broadcast ad buys in both South Carolina and Florida. And Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political ad expenditures,...
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January 12, 2012 06:00 AM
In the Dark
The campaign to weaken campaign-finance disclosure laws
Journalists are big believers in the First Amendment; its legal force undergirds the fearless journalism that democracy requires. But now comes a perversion of that amendment, an effort to turn it against another tool that enables democracy-sustaining journalism: the laws that require political donors to make their names known, and that empower vital reporting on money, power,...
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January 5, 2012 06:00 AM
Executive Editor’s Note
Welcome Cyndi Stivers, our new editor in chief
This is the first issue of the Columbia Journalism Review’s second half century, and already you’ll find a significant change aimed squarely at that unwritten future. Near the top of the masthead on page 2 is the name Cyndi Stivers, our new editor in chief, who started on December 1, and whom I’d like to publicly welcome here.
Cyndi...
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November 22, 2011 09:00 AM
Chairman’s Note
As I write this, every day seems to yield a new story about something called Occupy Wall Street. I have no idea how long Wall Street will be occupied, but it occurs to me that this fiftieth-anniversary issue of the Columbia Journalism Review celebrates something we might call Occupy Journalism. Like Occupy Wall Street, CJR is in the protest business....
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November 22, 2011 09:00 AM
Editor’s Note
This is a handsome issue, no? Two entities are responsible for that. The first is Point Five Design, our art consultant, comprised of Alissa Levin, Ben Levine, and Nathan Eames. Their classy and intelligent sensibility has graced our magazine and website since 2007. Point Five helps us turn ideas into images when illustrations are needed, and they always seem to...
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Fall 1961
Why a Review of Journalism?
The arguments for a critical journal far outweigh the hazards
What journalism needs, it has been said time and again, is more and better criticism. There have been abundant proposals for professional study panels, for institutes with squads of researchers, for critical journals. Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism has decided to attempt such a journal. Two considerations brought about the decision: First, the need, magnified...
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November 1, 2011 01:53 PM
The Complications of our Age
What we want is a journalism to match them
When the idea of a publication to be called the Columbia Journalism Review first came up, our founding editor tells us, some journalists and journalism professors were deeply opposed to the idea of turning the weapon of criticism on journalism itself. Doesn’t the craft require support rather than criticism? Doesn’t it have enemies enough?
Such questions...
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September 15, 2011 06:00 AM
Size Matters
News Corp.’s corruption would matter less if it weren’t so big
In the August 8 issue of New York magazine, the columnist Frank Rich suggests this takeaway from the News Corp. phone-hacking and bribery scandal: “An otherwise archetypal media colossus . . . is controlled by a family . . . that countenances the intimidation and silencing of politicians, regulators, competitors, journalists, and even ordinary citizens to maximize its profits and...
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August 29, 2011 03:28 PM
Editor’s Note
The best of "Second Read"; CJR's new book
Two redesigns ago, in 2004, the Columbia Journalism Review launched a back-of-the-book feature called Second Read that has proved immensely successful. The idea was to ask journalists to look back at books that moved and shaped them. For our very first Second Read, the historian Rick Perlstein reread a favorite of his, the late Paul Cowan’s book, The Tribes of...
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July 28, 2011 06:00 AM
The Kitchen-Table Connection
How to find—and serve—readers beyond Washington
Toward the end of last year, The Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery advised her readers that “a surprisingly broad consensus is forming around the actions required to stabilize borrowing and ease fears of a European-style debt crisis in the United States.” That consensus, she reported, had formed around a package of options for cutting the deficit, which included...
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July 5, 2011 04:52 PM
Editor’s Note
CJR's Joel Meares wins a Mirror Award; goodbye to our 2010-2011 fellows
Prizes—oh, how we love ‘em! CJR’s Joel Meares has taken home our latest: a win in the Best Profile/Digital Media category of the Mirror Awards, given by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications to honor the year’s best media reporting. Meares won his trophy for a profile of Liz Benjamin, “the frizzy-haired muckraker of New York’s statehouse.” His...
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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
