Feature
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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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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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December 07, 2009 03:54 PM
‘A Minor Regional Prophet’
Paul Hemphill wrote the stories he was meant to write
Paul Hemphill, the first published writer I ever knew, died in Atlanta last summer of lung cancer at the age of seventy-three. The news was not unexpected. Paul had smoked a pack of Camels every day for most of his years, and he had been in failing health for several months. Still, his death brought me to my knees.
In...
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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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Desks
The Audit Business
- New Financial Sheriff in Town, Part III Times highlights SEC’s latest crackdown—on an Estonian brokerage
- Audit Notes: Bloomberg Backs the Buck; WSJ on Future State Taxes; Big Money vs. Student Loansharks; Mortgage Banker Schadenfreude, etc.
The Observatory Science
- “Waves in a Shallow Pan” Has climate coverage in the MSM lost its authority?
- Dumb Blonde Story Sunday Times botches the science in piece on the “princess effect”
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Unforced Error at Salon “O’Keefe’s race problem” story goes astray on key detail
- Is Health Reform Dead or Alive? Wanted: a newsmaker to give us the word
