Feature
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March 04, 2010 08:00 AM
NPR Amps Up
Can Vivian Schiller build a journalism juggernaut?
If I were writing this story for All Things Considered, I might open with some audio: the sound of applause. The clapping would come from hundreds of employees gathered for an all-staff meeting at National Public Radio’s downtown Washington headquarters in December, as they acknowledged the tenor being set by Vivian Schiller in her first year as NPR’s president...
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March 01, 2010 10:32 AM
Tangled Web
A CJR survey finds that magazines are allowing their Web sites to erode journalistic standards
An article about a new CJR survey of practices at magazine Web sites that was published in the March/April issue of the magazine appears here. Click here to view the full report, containing complete results and a description of the survey methodology.
Speaking as a card-carrying member of the old media, it...
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February 04, 2010 06:00 AM
A Passion for Print
Why newspapers are thriving in Kenya
Not long ago, I was party to a minor squabble between two guards who work at the apartment complex where I live here in Nairobi. One of them had asked soon after I moved in two years ago whether she could have my newspapers when I’d finished with them, and I’d said yes. But recently, another guard had come...
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February 02, 2010 08:00 AM
Everyone Eats …
But that doesn’t make you a restaurant critic
When I arrived in New York City fresh out of graduate school in 1977, the city’s food scene couldn’t have been more different than it is today. Even calling it a scene would have been absurd: the farmers-market movement had barely begun, few liquor stores sold anything like an international selection of wines, and only a handful of restaurants...
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January 28, 2010 12:00 AM
Less Is Not More
Why do newspapers alienate their most loyal readers?
When my son’s first college roommate turned out to be from Chicago, I was delighted. His family had long subscribed to the Chicago Tribune, where I worked. I thought it gave us an immediate connection. Less than two months later, they unsubscribed. This was shortly after a drastic redesign at the paper in September 2008. The roommate’s family said...
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January 26, 2010 12:00 AM
Moscow’s New Rules
Islands of press freedom in a country of control
Late last summer, Ilya Barabanov, a young Russian editor, posted a laconic message on his Web site under the heading, “A Long Story.” A couple of weeks earlier, Russia’s Constitutional Court had ruled, unsurprisingly, that Barabanov’s wife and former colleague, Natalia Morar, could not re-enter the country. “In all honesty, I don’t know and won’t try to predict when...
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January 21, 2010 08:00 AM
A Thousand Cuts
As long as the monopoly money rolled in, who noticed?
Spencer Ackerman, who reports on national security issues for The Washington Independent and blogs about the same—and does both at a consistently high level of quality, which is not a simple task—last year posted an item on his blog, Attackerman, explaining how to deconstruct a typical piece by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. He said Hersh...
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January 19, 2010 08:00 AM
Time the Conquerer
Three newspapers in thirty-nine minutes. Uh, oh.
I sat through plenty of official focus groups in my years as a Washington Post assistant managing editor, watching people on the other side of a one-way mirror read and comment on my newspaper. The sessions were often excruciating, as participants eagerly picked apart our carefully calibrated content.
Now that I am no longer a part of “my newspaper,”...
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January 12, 2010 08:00 AM
Lou and Me
‘We work at a newspaper, a real newspaper’
Late into another sleepless Chicago night, I drag a blue-blooded widow and a balding curmudgeon under the covers with me, hoping they can help restore my faith. Mrs. Pynchon and Lou Grant are old friends of mine and I am happy to see them. But I make them whisper into my ear so we don’t disturb my wife. A...
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January 11, 2010 06:24 PM
Banned in Britain
Across the pond, new perils—and possibilities—for press freedom
The documents are ugly and embarrassing. In e-mails riddled with terms like “gasoline slops” and “caustic washing,” officials with Trafigura, a major global commodities trading firm, described plans to clean and re-sell contaminated oil from Mexico and deposit the wastes in Africa, since they were too toxic for regulators in Europe or the U.S. In one 2005 e-mail discussing...
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January 08, 2010 06:08 PM
Seeds of Change?
Why we need independent data on genetically modified crops
Some time early this year a group called the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications will issue a report, and a ritual of sorts will ensue. The report will probably say, as it has for the past dozen years, that more countries are growing more genetically engineered crops on more acres. Then, on cue, watchdog groups, most...
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January 07, 2010 06:15 PM
Picture This
Notes from a life behind the lens
John Costello began work as a photojournalist at fifteen, bicycling to his first assignment at the McKean County Miner in northwest Pennsylvania. He has been a staff photographer for five newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he spent twenty-five years, and where, at age fifty-six, he was downsized this past summer. This is adapted from a memo he sent around...
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December 08, 2009 02:30 PM
The Rise of True Fiction
Some of the best new films and books live between genres
Staff Sergeant Will James fiddles with the bomb like an IT tech on methamphetamine. He works quickly despite his seventy-pound bomb suit and, as he labors on one IED, discovers five more hidden nearby in the sandy dirt of an Iraqi road. Later, on another mission, he and his explosives team fail to find a way to separate a...
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December 08, 2009 11:30 AM
Myths of Mexico
The media's simplistic depiction of the 'drug war'
In 1891, my great-great-uncle, Catarino Garza, attempted to overthrow the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Díaz, by launching an armed revolution from my family’s south Texas ranch. One year into his campaign, Garza agreed to an interview with The New York Times to explain the reasons behind his insurrection. “The impression prevails that I and my followers are simply an organized...
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: Strong Leder, Online Ads, CNBC Deathmatch
- Blogs Beat the Press on the Lehman Brothers Scandal
The Observatory Science
- Reviving Science Coverage in the Carolinas Weekly newspaper section, community-journalism project deliver fresh content
- Monitor-ing the Environment The CSM cancels green blog in favor of a broader approach
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Audit D.C. Notes: NYT Does Well at (Trade) School; WaPo on Earmarks, Squeezed in Ypsilanti, Etc.
- Is the Past Prologue? The pedigree of Alan Simpson
