tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1 2009-01-30T22:21:32Z Movable Type 3.2 tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18712 2009-01-29T14:00:00Z 2009-01-30T19:09:50Z

The old TV series Lou Grant offers a salve of newspaper nostalgia

Steven Kurutz These are brutal times for the newspaper industry. Widespread buyouts, shuttered bureaus, diminished ambitions—in many cases, not even the physical size of the paper has been spared. May I suggest a balm for newsprint devotees? Watch some old episodes of Lou Grant, the late-seventies TV series about life at a newspaper, which has never been released on DVD but is... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18713 2009-01-29T13:45:00Z 2009-01-30T16:39:43Z

Send tips and comments to dartsandlaurels@cjr.org

Katia Bachko Dart to the Cleveland Plain Dealer for failing to stick by its story. Last October, investigative reporter Bob Paynter, at the urging of Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg, produced “Justice Blinded: Race, Drugs and Our Legal System,” a series of articles that, through rigorous quantitative and qualitative analyses, illustrated that in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, blacks arrested on first-time, drug-related violations “were 66... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18700 2009-01-29T13:30:00Z 2009-01-30T16:39:43Z

Can arts critics survive the poison pill of consumerism?

David Hajdu I saw the future through a two-way mirror in November 1990. I had just started a new job as a senior editor at Entertainment Weekly, a magazine then less than a year old, and I was sitting in a darkened room with nine or ten other members of the staff, watching a focus group. Page by page, an amiable, den-motherly... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18701 2009-01-28T15:56:01Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

Campaign reporters catch up on their reading

Jane Kim After two harried years on the trail, an endless stream of hotel rooms, fast food bolted on the fly, the same speeches day after day after day, journalists finally had time to curl up with a good book—or several good books. We asked a few campaign reporters what they chose to unwind with: Candy Crowley (CNN): You Are Not a... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18698 2009-01-28T15:36:38Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

A new online environment and energy energy site is tainted with conflicts of interest among its anchors and executives

Mariah Blake In many ways, CleanSkies.tv, an online outfit offering “energy and environmental news, information, discussion, and commentary,” resembles other TV news operations. It has offices in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Oklahoma City, a multimillion-dollar budget, and twenty-five journalists on staff, some of them big-name television personalities. Clean Skies Sunday, for instance, is hosted by former CBS Morning News anchor Susan McGinnis... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18697 2009-01-28T15:23:25Z 2009-01-29T02:56:53Z

The world’s largest democracy finally has an FOI law—so why have journalists been slow to embrace it?

Ralph Frammolino In October, community activists from around India gathered at the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi to celebrate the third anniversary of the country’s Right to Information Act and assess the progress made under the landmark law. One speaker told how the law had produced a measure of belated justice after the 2002 riots between Hindus and Muslims... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18635 2009-01-27T14:30:00Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

Why Shimon Peres sat down with David Shankbone

Adam Rose One morning in December 2007, a law-school dropout named David Shankbone sat on a couch in Shimon Peres’s office in Jerusalem. He’d been invited into the Israeli president’s inner sanctum for an exclusive interview with the elder statesman. Peres reclined on a velvet chair next to Shankbone, nibbling cookies while he talked in his soporific baritone about the future of... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18674 2009-01-27T14:00:00Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

A new anthology about men (and women) behaving very badly

Wendell Jamieson True Crime: An American Anthology Harold Schechter, editor The Library of America 788 pages, $40 The teenage girl gave birth in a Delaware hotel room; she and her boyfriend would later claim that the infant was stillborn. But the coroner said the baby suffered blunt trauma to the head. This was 1996. The young mother and father,... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18673 2009-01-27T13:30:00Z 2009-01-29T02:55:36Z

In an era of global shortages and biofuel debates, the food beat gets serious

Georgina Gustin This past fall, I drove from St. Louis to Osage County, in central Missouri, to meet a hog farmer named Russ Kremer. As I pulled into the driveway of the white farmhouse where he was raised, Kremer ambled out in his rubber boots, offering me a hearty handshake. We got into his silver Chevy truck, a circa-1992 model caked with... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18663 2009-01-26T17:03:06Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

"Soft-peddling" a faulty homonym

Merrill Perlman Now that Barack Obama is president, one columnist wanted to know, weren’t the late-night comedians, who had taken so many potshots at George Bush, “now soft-peddling ridicule of their golden boy?” That’s a hard sell, because the correct phrase is “soft-pedaling.” There is, though, a kind of twisted logic that could lead one to believe that “soft-peddle” is correct. To... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18642 2009-01-26T14:30:00Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

Financial journalists saw some trees but not the forest. Now what?

Martha M. Hamilton One day in June 2005, my colleague Nell Henderson and I hiked over to the Bond Market Association to get ourselves educated on collateralized debt obligations and related products. I was editing The Washington Post’s Wall Street coverage, and Nell was covering the Federal Reserve, and we both had a feeling this might be a corner of the market in... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18640 2009-01-26T14:00:00Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

Does journalism keep government honest?

Michael Schudson & Danielle Haas For a profession that lives by the cynical adage, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” journalism has been surprisingly lax in verifying one of its central claims—that it keeps government honest. But is it true? Two economists, who went looking for proof, found little hard evidence—good or bad—of the effects of the press on democracy. So... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18643 2009-01-26T13:30:00Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

A chaotic portrait of Rupert Murdoch and his discontents

David Nasaw The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch By Michael Wolff Broadway 446 pages, $29.95 Michael Wolff’s prose style is sui generis. Unique. Which we know. Sort of. His prose is so hard-edged he uses Fuck You as an adjective. He breaks every rule, and with gusto. With sentences that consist of one-word... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18634 2009-01-23T17:00:00Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

Did the press help elect Barack Obama?

Douglas McCollam 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,... tag:www.cjr.org,2009://1.18639 2009-01-23T16:49:13Z 2009-01-28T23:36:34Z

Short reviews of books about art on the New York Times’s Op-Ed page, the short life of The Chicagoan, and hoaxes in the news.

James Boylan All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page By Jerelle Kraus Columbia University Press 260 pages, $34.95 On September 21, 1970, The New York Times unveiled a new kind of page called the “op-ed,” displacing the obituaries that had long been printed opposite the editorials. This novel forum was open...