Essay
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January 23, 2009 12:00 PM
In the Tank
Did the press help elect Barack Obama?
First, allow me to confess my sins. For the last eleven years, I have made my living practicing the dark art of journalism, and while perhaps not a full-fledged member of that nefarious institution known as the msm, my byline has on occasion been spotted on the pages of such well-known offenders as The New York Times, The Washington Post,...
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January 06, 2009 09:00 AM
Back to the Future
How sports writing can recapture its relevance
In the 1920s, The New Yorker published a piece that declared sports a “trivial enterprise” involving “second-rate people and their second-rate dreams and emotions.” The magazine went on to concede, however, that “the quality of writing in the sports pages is, in the large, much superior—wittier, more emotional, more dramatic, and more accurate—to the quality of writing that flows through...
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November 18, 2008 11:22 AM
Music Lessons
What journalists could learn from Kid Rock, Lil Wayne, and Bon Iver
He takes the stage clad in a black turtleneck. his famous line is, “Green is the new red, white, and blue.” Tonight, and other nights, he is paid tens of thousands of dollars to perform. He spent a year touring America, adding China for good measure. When he returns home, he lands in an 11,400-square-foot house.
He’s not a...
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November 16, 2008 10:41 AM
Pushback
Fed-up newsrooms want a voice in their future
When her Contra Costa Times colleagues compared her union organizing efforts to those of Norma Rae, Sara Steffens rented the 1979 Martin Ritt film—and was disconcerted to discover that the feisty textile worker immortalized by Sally Field lost her job. “I remember thinking, ‘I hope that doesn’t mean I’m going to lose my job,’ ” Steffens said late last summer.
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November 11, 2008 12:20 PM
False Readings
How the Gross Domestic Product leads us astray
It is 7:30 a.m. in washington and a bevy of reporters files into the Department of Commerce, which is kitty-corner from the Treasury. They take their seats, and the door is locked behind them. For the next hour, no one can go in or out. An official from the Bureau of Economic Analysis distributes the latest GDP estimates—that’s Gross...
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October 28, 2008 09:00 AM
Hope I Die . . .
Will the Chicago Reader finally grow up? Should it?
At the turn of the century, John Cusack came home to Chicago to shoot a movie called High Fidelity. In it, he played a sad-sack hipster hiding out from adulthood in his used record shop, Championship Vinyl. Toward the end of the film, a young woman walks into the store and introduces herself as Caroline Fortis, a music reviewer...
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October 14, 2008 10:27 AM
Parliament’s Peanut Gallery
The wit and wisdom of Britain’s sketch writers
Whenever Simon Hoggart writes about Michael Fabricant, he makes note of the honorable gentleman from Lichfield’s hair. “How many My Little Ponies, we asked, were slaughtered to make such a creation?” reads one of his countless dispatches. That 2003 piece, in fact, was devoted entirely to Fabricant’s mane (or lack of it) and its uncanny ability to change color,...
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September 30, 2008 09:00 AM
After the Accident
A reporter’s road back to life and work
Five years ago this month, new york city sanitation workers made a gruesome discovery. While emptying garbage cans in the streets of Harlem, they spotted a tiny arm sticking out of the heap of rubbish in the back of their truck. The arm belonged to a dead baby girl, so new to the world her umbilical cord was still...
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September 18, 2008 09:00 AM
The Bigger Tent
Forget Who is a journalist; the important question is, What is journalism?
In the late 1990s, the staff at the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York took note of an exciting new trend in China. With traditional Chinese media under tight state censorship, people with something critical to say about their government had seized on the Internet as a new platform to publish their views. Their actions were not unlike the...
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September 16, 2008 10:43 AM
Boiler Room
The business press is missing the crooked heart of the credit crisis
“Mr. Howard made it clear to the mortgage broker that he could not read or write, but his loan application erroneously claimed he had had 16 years of education.” —Center for Responsible Lending report, “IndyMac: What Went Wrong?” June 30, 2008
Continue reading“That was your homework—to watch Boiler Room.”—Lisa Taylor, Ameriquest loan agent, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, February 4,...
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September 04, 2008 10:00 AM
Blind Spot
Seeing Iraq through Uncle Sam’s eyes
Over the last five years, as I’ve consumed one dispatch after another from journalists embedded with U.S. soldiers in Iraq, I’ve wondered how accurate a picture of events such reports provide. Given the stark dangers journalists face in Iraq, embedding clearly offers a valuable means of getting around the country and seeing the troops in action—but at what cost?...
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July 29, 2008 09:00 AM
Politics With Drawl
Our double standard for the southern twang
On the March 4, 2007, commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, an animated Hillary Clinton spoke from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church, borrowing lines from a James Cleveland hymn. “Ah don’t feel noways tahred!” the senator declared, her drawl booming out to the crowd. The same day found Barack Obama y’alling to his own Selma audience:...
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July 24, 2008 09:00 AM
Flickring Out
What will become of photojournalism in an age of bytes and amateurs?
Clichés are sometimes true. Here’s one—photographers don’t like to give speeches. At a recent event, photographer Antonin Kratochvil screened slideshows of his work: American soldiers coolly observing the Iraqi distressed and dead; Lebanese militant youths standing restlessly near decaying walls; American evangelicals speaking in tongues. The photographer then clambered onstage, ruddy and scarf-wrapped (“The Bedoins wear them!”) for his...
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July 22, 2008 09:00 AM
The Lives of Others
What does it mean to "tell someone's story"?
On March 22, America’s Most Wanted told my story. I wasn’t the fugitive, or the victim, and it shouldn’t have been my story. It should have been Tyeisha’s. But as the producer from amw told me, “Girls die in ditches every day. The reason Tyeisha stands out is because she was profiled in Seventeen magazine.” I met Tyeisha Martin at...
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Desks
The Audit Business
The Observatory Science
- Saving Corwin’s Creatures MSNBC wades into new territory with environmental documentary 100 Heartbeats
- Trains, Planes, and Carbon Offsets Times keeps a needed eye on green premiums
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Greg Craig and Transparency
- Not For All the News in China, Part I Former NYT Shanghai bureau chief Howard French on the coverage of Obama’s trip to Asia