tag:www.cjr.org,2011-09-12://4 2012-05-25T00:56:12Z Columbia Journalism Review: Strong Press, Strong Democracy Movable Type Pro 4.34-en tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30232 2012-05-25T10:50:00Z 2012-05-25T00:56:12Z

Not going the distance

The Editors Much ado… On March 21, The Orange County Register published a blog post, based on the sworn affidavit of a process server, alleging that Julio Perez, a California state Assembly candidate, did not live where he said, or within the district he was running to represent. Reporter Brian Joseph packed his story with details and links to testimony. But tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30252 2012-05-24T15:35:00Z 2012-05-24T15:35:57Z

Freedom of expression is not freedom of the press

Michael Schudson and Katherine Fink http://www.cjr.org Paul Starr’s short essay, “An Unexpected Crisis: The News Media in Postindustrial Democracies” in the International Journal of Press/Politics (2012), is recommended reading, especially the second paragraph. That’s where Starr, the Princeton sociologist, Pulitzer-winning historian, and the author of the far-reaching Creation of the Media (2005), cuts through tons of clutter about the impact of the digital revolution on media tag:www.cjr.org,2010://4.30248 2012-05-23T10:50:00Z 2012-05-22T22:42:43Z

Fixated on Kapuscinski’s flaws, a new biography misses the point

Ted Conover Celebrated for his reportage about world-changing events and leaders of his day—the Iranian Revolution, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia—the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski has remained in the headlines since his death in 2007 largely due to questions about his veracity: How accurate was his reporting? How truthfully did he describe his own life? Were tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30468 2012-05-22T10:50:00Z 2012-05-22T11:05:24Z

A word used too often, or not enough

Merrill Perlman “President Obama said Wednesday he would go to Europe.” Is Wednesday the day he is going to Europe? Or the day he announced his travel plans? A little word can make that sentence clearer: “that.” But its placement can make a difference, too: “President Obama said that on Wednesday he would go to Europe” means he is leaving for Europe tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30247 2012-05-21T10:50:00Z 2012-05-20T21:01:42Z

America’s tough-on-crime policies didn’t work. Now what?

Alan Prendergast Over the course of eight days in 1978, a 15-year-old terror named Willie Bosket managed to satisfy his curiosity about what it felt like to kill someone. He did this by purchasing a .22 handgun from his mother’s boyfriend, paid for with funds obtained from robbing sleeping passengers in New York City’s subway system, and shooting his next two robbery tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30268 2012-05-18T10:50:00Z 2012-05-17T19:16:28Z

User Experience (UX) Designer

Jay Woodruff Susan Rits is a User Experience (UX) Designer who worked at Time Warner, Fox, and Google. She is founder and CEO of Zazum, based in San Francisco. Jay Woodruff interviewed her in March. Give us your Tweetable definition of a UX Designer. UX designers live to wipe out tech rage—we make using software a pleasure. How’d you get into tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30261 2012-05-17T10:50:00Z 2012-05-17T18:36:16Z

Retracting "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory"

The Editors 888,000 downloads of “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” the January 6 This American Life episode based on Mike Daisey’s one-man play that chronicled his travels to the Foxconn factory in China where Apple products are manufactured 750,000 typical number of downloads for a TAL episode 73,000 Google searches for “Mike Daisey” in the week following the original TAL broadcast tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30439 2012-05-16T10:50:00Z 2012-05-16T04:21:32Z

A catalog of dialogues

Merrill Perlman “Catalogue” can also be spelled “catalog.” “Dialogue” can also be spelled “dialog.” But “monologue” is rarely spelled “monolog.” The Americans are at it again. The combining form “logue” is French, descended from Latin, and it indicates an engagement of some sort, a discourse, if you will, between people or things. People browse “catalog(ue)s” to “discuss” what items to buy; a tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30271 2012-05-16T10:50:00Z 2012-05-16T11:11:45Z

RealRural

The Editors In March 2011, Lisa M. Hamilton, a writer and photographer, began a series of road trips around rural California. She had a grant from the Creative Work Fund—a San Francisco-based foundation that supports collaboration between artists and nonprofits—to tell stories that would help bridge the cultural divide between the rural and urban parts of the state. Initially she wanted tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30249 2012-05-15T10:50:00Z 2012-05-15T11:38:54Z

Why hacks like Andrew Keen really fear the social Web

Maureen Tkacik Long before Facebook or Foursquare, men like the late management consultant Martin Jay Levitt were connoisseurs of social networks. At the beginning of each new gig Levitt would have a client’s human resources director create detailed diagrams mapping the relationships between all employees, accounting for gossip, date of hire and pay, even details of his sex life, if any were tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30240 2012-05-14T10:50:00Z 2012-05-13T23:15:39Z

The USPS is running out of money. Where does that leave magazines?

Lauren Kirchner 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 tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30256 2012-05-11T10:50:00Z 2012-05-10T20:54:30Z

Dean Takahashi from GamesBeat unpacks

Tyler Orsburn It’s fitting that veteran tech journalist Dean Takahashi, who grew up a self-described “arcade rat,” weaned on classics like Pong and Galaga, has become one of the country’s most prominent writers about the video game industry. He opened his “nice, big REI bag” for Tyler Orsburn to prove a bit of hard-earned journalistic wisdom: “You gotta have backups.” To tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30246 2012-05-10T10:50:00Z 2012-05-09T21:04:50Z

The Double Helix’s warts-and-all portrayal of scientific pursuits shook up the formal world of science writing

Jonathan Weiner W hen The Double Helix appeared in the winter of 1968, I reviewed it for The Laureate, the literary magazine at Classical High School, in Providence, Rhode Island. I was a freshman. It was my first effort as a science writer, and now, after four decades, I feel lucky to have started there. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of tag:www.cjr.org,2012://4.30407 2012-05-09T16:00:28Z 2012-05-09T16:09:57Z

Noun? Verb? Yes. Adjective? Well ...

Merrill Perlman The journalism professor was not having much “fun” explaining things to her feature-writing students: “I know so fun is wrong but I can’t tell them why,” she wrote. “So happy is right, but so fun should have ‘much’ as the sandwich filling.” If you ask practically anybody under 35 whether “so fun” is acceptable English, you will probably be told tag:www.cjr.org,2010://4.30259 2012-05-09T11:00:00Z 2012-05-13T20:05:49Z

Readers weigh in on Ron Howell's "The New York Times Goes to the Dogs"

The Editors In a March piece, Ron Howell wrote about the increase in stories about dogs in The New York Times since Jill Abramson, author of The Puppy Diaries, became executive editor. Here are some of the comments: I think you’ll find that it’s not just the NYT that’s become obsessed with dog stories. Media all over the country have recently decided