Feature
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Going to great lengths
After two years as the hot new thing, the e-singles market is getting serious—and crowded
From the beginning, The Atavist was a small startup with a lot of big playmates. A pioneer in the e-singles space, the Brooklyn-based company became an instant media darling, and when Amazon launched Kindle Singles in January 2011—widely considered the moment when e-singles emerged as a salable product—The Atavist was behind two of its most-celebrated inaugural titles.
A little...
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November 1, 2012 12:00 AM
Lost and found
In 1967, an ambitious young reporter broke a promise to a troubled source and inadvertently made her famous. Forty-three years later, he set out to find her and apologize.
On October 27, 1967, senior editors gathered for the Thursday story conference to see how things were shaping up for the coming issue of Newsweek. A scrim of cigarette smoke hung over the room. Foreign had the Vietcong ambush that nearly wiped out a US Army company north of Saigon; Nation, the 100,000 peaceniks noisily besieging the Pentagon. Back-of-the-book...
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September 20, 2012 11:55 AM
Alternative ending
Bruce R. Brugmann, one of the last of the alt-weekly lions, is calling it quits. Sort of.
Bruce B. Brugmann is a stubborn guy who sticks to his point of view, even as the world he helped build is disappearing. Fitting then to sit with him late in June in the cavernous warehouse offices of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, the alt-weekly Brugmann founded 45 years ago, as he railed against opponents past and present while...
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September 18, 2012 11:00 AM
The oys of October
A longtime Boston Red Sox fan asks, Why does hometown coverage of the troubled team sound so damn gleeful?
“I don’t even go outside anymore,” David Ortiz, the slimmed-down slugger for the Boston Red Sox, was telling an admirer before batting practice on a midsummer road trip in Oakland. “These days, everybody has a video camera. I go from the hotel, to the bus, to the field, and then straight back to the hotel. I lead a boring...
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September 13, 2012 11:24 AM
No habla Español
The new Latino media universe is young, political, and all-American
Lalo Alcaraz has always embraced the word pocho. It refers to Mexican-Americans who have lost their Mexican culture and speak English, and it’s what relatives occasionally called Alcaraz when he was growing up in San Diego. He has leveraged it ever since. In the 1990s, Alcaraz and a friend founded POCHO Magazine, which led to pocho.com. Both projects used...
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September 4, 2012 12:26 AM
The boy in the bubble
Ezra Klein rewrites the role of Washington wunderkind
He’s impossibly young, infuriatingly accomplished, and impressively wonky. In a town full of journalistic flop sweat, he glides instead of glistens, handsome enough to make the ladies turn their heads, and affable enough that their boyfriends compete for his attentions, too. Like ripples around a stone, influential circles appear seemingly wherever he dips his toe. Washington insiders seek his...
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August 2, 2012 11:15 AM
Cell coverage
How a convicted murderer found his true calling as a jailhouse reporter and prisoners' rights crusader
Paul Wright began his journalism career behind bars. When he was 21, Wright killed a man in Federal Way, WA, during a botched hold-up; the cocaine dealer he went to rob reached for a gun, and Wright fired first. He claimed self-defense, but was convicted of first-degree felony murder in 1987. Rather than languish, Wright began studying the law,...
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July 31, 2012 11:05 AM
Piecemeal existence
For today’s young freelancers, what will traffic bear?
In 2009, an editor for a new website called The Faster Times, which sought to be “an edgier Huffington Post,” emailed to ask if I was interested in a part-time job. I didn’t know it was possible to be edgier than HuffPo, but their payment scheme was certainly more innovative. Whereas HuffPo paid staff reporters the old-fashioned way, with a...
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July 26, 2012 11:00 AM
Copywrong
How well do you know fair use?
Are the following scenarios responsible, or wrong?
• Prithi did a beautiful arts feature on the history of a musical for radio. She never had to worry about all the illustrative music clips she used, because the service has a blanket license. But now she can’t podcast it; the license agreement doesn’t extend that far.
• As a newspaper...
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July 25, 2012 11:25 AM
Unfair use?
How a documentary filmmaker was (temporarily) foiled by the copyright cops
It began with an invitation to present at a TEDX event in Grand Rapids, MI. I wanted to share with the TED audience the complex relationship between “creationism” and “curationism”—or, more simply, the way creators are also organizers of ideas and content. It seemed pretty simple. On stage in Grand Rapids, I told the story of being both a...
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July 17, 2012 11:00 AM
Networks schmetworks
The race is on to recast the newscast
While the big three networks struggle to adapt to the world of mobile, on-demand delivery, a number of experiments are under way that seek to redefine the form and delivery of Web-based video journalism, and in the process to reinvent the newscast for the 21st century.
Some major print outlets are among the most committed of these video...
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July 16, 2012 11:10 AM
Weighing anchors
The nightly newscasts are retooling to suit their stars, and it’s working—for now
Five days before Christmas, on the night Congress deadlocked on payroll tax rates and unemployment benefits affecting more than 160 million Americans, the first story on World News, the flagship evening broadcast of ABC News, was about a blizzard. “Wicked weather” had people in the east “bracing for a storm that could threaten holiday travel plans for millions.” The CBS...
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July 9, 2012 11:00 AM
Something fishy?
John Solomon had grand plans for the digital future of the Center for Public Integrity. But there was always a catch...
When John Solomon took over as executive editor of The Washington Times in 2008, the conservative daily had long been propped up on subsidies from the Unification Church and its self-proclaimed messiah, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. But Solomon believed he had hit on a formula that would bring in an abundance of profits: Invest in deep reporting, then...
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May 14, 2012 06:50 AM
Postage due
The USPS is running out of money. Where does that leave magazines?
Early on a February morning, in a glass-walled conference room high up in the Hearst Tower in Manhattan, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe spoke in a careful, reassuring tone. “We can do this; I know that we can do this,” he told the audience, which included representatives from magazine-industry heavyweights like Condé Nast, Hearst, and Time Inc. “Hang in there with...
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