Feature
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October 12, 2009 09:50 PM
How ‘Subprime’ Crushed ‘Predatory’
And what it says about language, the business press, and how we think about the economic crisis
What is the root cause of the financial crisis? “Lousy loans,” says Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel. We agree. And we like the phrase, especially because it provides a nice counterweight to that other double-L phrase, “liar loans,” which tends to blame the borrower. Warren’s phrase is a casual one, of course, but in some...
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October 06, 2009 09:05 PM
A Luddite’s Virtual Book Tour
Get on Facebook, make a video, e-blast everyone you know
Just before my latest book, Home Girl, came out in June 2008, the Random House promotion team invited me in to discuss strategy. There, in an office reassuringly lined with blockbusters, we covered the usual terrain. Did I have contacts at television networks? Know any reviewers at the Los Angeles Times? We went over a list of who might blurb....
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October 06, 2009 09:04 PM
Great Expectations
An Investigative News Network is born. Now what?
Call it the Pocantico Declaration. Back on July 1, the leaders of twenty muckraking nonprofit news organizations concluded a three-day meeting and produced a document that ended with this proud, hopeful sentence: “We have hereby established, for the first time ever, an Investigative News Network of nonprofit news publishers throughout the United States of America.”
That final sentence meant...
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September 29, 2009 08:00 AM
Take a Stand
How journalism can regain its relevance
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as the press faced criticism for failing to use the catastrophe to initiate a national conversation about race (or class, or infrastructure, etc.), Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN/U.S., defended his network’s coverage to Eric Deggans, the press critic at the St. Petersburg Times: “We go in looking for stories,” he said, “not...
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September 24, 2009 12:00 AM
The New Energy Beat
It's global as well as local, environmental as well as financial. Can embattled newsrooms see the big picture?
On a Monday morning in January, less than a week after his inauguration, President Barack Obama signed two memoranda designed to improve automobile fuel efficiency. “These are extraordinary times,” Obama told an audience gathered in the White House’s East Room, that call “for swift and extraordinary action. At a time of such great challenge for America, no single issue...
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September 09, 2009 11:25 AM
Drudge Has Lost His Touch
Technology, the competition, and the times have passed him
If you visited the Drudge Report on July 1, you’d be forgiven for thinking that nothing had changed. A BILLION THANKS FOR MAKING JUNE 2009—TOP JUNE IN DRUDGE REPORT’S 14 YEAR HISTORY!? PAGE HIT 675,406,735 VIEWS FROM 129,922,878 VISITS . . . TRAFFIC ROSE 21% FOR MONTH OVER YEAR AGO blared the headline on the right of the home page....
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July 24, 2009 08:30 AM
Expensive Gifts
What does free culture cost?
One evening in February 2009, the artist Shepard Fairey spoke at the New York Public Library. He was discussing his famous silkscreen poster Hope, which bore Barack Obama’s face, shadowed by swirling red and blue patterns. At the event, Fairey sat with legs akimbo, artfully slouched before the gilded, packed room, still retaining his old skate-punk persona. Speaking in a...
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July 23, 2009 08:00 AM
What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?
How to think about news in the link economy
The buzz inside Google is overwhelmingly positive about what the company does and how we will all benefit from the results—including the embattled denizens of newspapers and magazines who increasingly see Google as an enabler of their demise. Barely a decade ago, Google received its first $25 million investment, based on search technology developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page,...
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July 22, 2009 08:00 AM
Open for Business
If you want readers to buy news, what exactly will you sell? The case for a free/paid hybrid.
In the dark winter and spring of 2009, as dispatches from the news business grew ever more grim, as Jim Romenesko’s posts took on the feel of casualty reports, newsrooms across the land began to feel like the Emerald City when the Wicked Witch soars overhead, trailing smoke and sending everyone scurrying not for cover, but for an answer, to...
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July 21, 2009 08:00 AM
Build the Wall
Most readers won’t pay for news, but if we move quickly, maybe enough of them will. One man’s bold blueprint.
To all of the bystanders reading this, pardon us. The true audience for this essay narrows necessarily to a pair of notables who have it in their power to save high-end journalism—two newspaper executives who can rescue an imploding industry and thereby achieve an essential civic good for the nation. It’s down to them. The rest of the print journalism...
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July 20, 2009 08:00 AM
Leap of Faith
Inside the movement to build an audience of citizens
What inspired you to become a journalist?
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I always liked writing, and I was also into photography. And I knew that the way I grew up was different from the way I was told I grew up—I wanted to figure out what the difference was. Also, I couldn’t imagine working behind a desk from nine to five each day,... -
July 17, 2009 04:13 PM
A Man in Full
Four years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans broadcaster Garland Robinette is still fighting mad
It was the birds that tipped him off. Two days before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, while the storm was still out at sea and its path remained uncertain, Garland Robinette was coming out of his neighborhood coffeehouse when he noticed something strange. A large palm across the street, normally home to a flock of green parrots so noisy that...
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July 16, 2009 02:50 PM
One of Us
A soldier chooses journalism, but his old boss won’t let go
On what I thought was my last day in the Army in May 2007, my battalion commander gave me some parting words of discouragement. “I just want you to understand that you’re leaving the most respected profession in America for one of the least,” he said. It was his final attempt to dissuade me from pursuing a career in journalism....
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July 15, 2009 08:00 AM
Groundhog Day
Why this year’s health-care debate sounds like the one in 1993
Last fall, soon after Barack Obama was elected president, Sheila Burke was waiting to discuss Obama’s campaign promises, via Webcast, with students specializing in health reporting at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. Burke, a health-policy expert who now teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School, laid a spreadsheet on the table and whispered to another guest. “See,”...
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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
