News Meeting
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June 23, 2009 03:41 PM
After Rohde
When is it okay to withhold a news story?
In the days since we learned about New York Times reporter David Rohde’s escape from Taliban captivity, it’s also come out that at least forty news organizations knew of Rohde’s kidnapping. Well, make it forty-one. Some senior CJR staffers knew about about the situation and we kept it quiet, too. Times executive editor Bill Keller
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June 16, 2009 02:31 PM
Iran in Crisis, Media in Motion
How should the media be covering the events in Iran?
The Western world is hungry for news about the aftermath of Iran’s disputed presidential election. But reporters on the ground in Tehran are severely limited by government restrictions on their movement and access.
Some news outlets are holding out for in-depth stories from their international correspondents. Others, feeling the pressure of time, are turning to...
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June 09, 2009 12:44 PM
Online Outing
What are the ethics of revealing a blogger's identity?
On Saturday, National Review Online contributor Ed Whelan revealed the identity of pseudonymous Obsidian Wings blogger “publius” as John F. Blevins, a recently minted professor at the South Texas College of Law. The two bloggers had argued before about issues relating to Obama’s nomination of Harold Koh, and most recently, those relating to the nomination of Sonia...
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June 02, 2009 02:24 PM
Value Proposition
What do you find valuable in your local news outlets?
A few weeks ago, the media economics professor Robert G. Picard argued that, in order to justify themselves and their profession, journalists need to create more economic value in their everyday work. ("If the news business is to survive," he wrote, "we must find ways to alter journalism's practice and skills to create new economic value.") Last week,...
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May 26, 2009 02:26 PM
Beach Reading
What book would you recommend that journalists read this summer?
With the Memorial Day weekend just past, it's official: summer is upon us. And the season of picnics and parades and baseball games is also one for settling back—on the beach, in the park, or in an air-conditioned room—with a good book.
We asked at the end of last year which books you'd want to give as...
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May 19, 2009 02:27 PM
Dowd’s Deed
How should high-profile columnists process and relay information?
You’ve heard the buzz about Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column for The New York Times, the one in which she reproduced, apparently unintentionally, a sentence—about forty words—from a blog post by Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall. Most people seem to want to
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make the word "plagiarism" go away, including Marshall himself, who responded... -
May 12, 2009 01:17 PM
Yoo’s on First
Is John Yoo's columnist status an asset or an insult to democracy?
Today brings a firestorm about the Philadelphia Inquirer's signing of John Yoo—the jurist responsible for authoring the Bush administration's just-released "torture memos," as well as for crafting the legal justification for that administration's massive expansion of executive power—to be a regular columnist at the paper. (Yoo has been writing Inquirer columns on a freelance basis since 2005.)
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May 05, 2009 01:47 PM
The Eternal Intern-al Debate
Are internships fair? Were they ever?
Intern season is here, reminding us of the perennial ethical hazards attached to this rite of journalistic passage. Unpaid internships have always been problematic, considering the advantage given to those with resources and connections, but they were also a reliable pathway to paid employment in the media business. Today, the promise of landing a job after a successful internship or...
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April 28, 2009 12:13 PM
The Hundred-Day Stretch
Is there value in marking this presidential milestone?
It’s been hard to miss the steady drumbeat counting down to Obama’s 100th day in office. Yesterday we wrote that while the benchmark itself “is completely arbitrary,” minus the historical significance, the media could still wring some substantial coverage out of the event. Do you agree with that assessment? Is the 100-day marker a meaningless media Continue reading
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April 21, 2009 01:05 PM
Prize Fighter
What would your fantasy journalism award look like?
The Pulitzer Prizes may be among the most prestigious of journalism awards, but they are by no means the only ones. There are prizes honoring visual journalism, copy editing, ethics in journalism, student journalism, and many, many more. (The Construction Writers Association, for example, administers yearly awards for feature writing, special reports, and editorials about, yes,...
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April 14, 2009 01:26 PM
Ad Nauseam
What do you think about online ads?
In a post yesterday, Nieman Journalism Lab’s Martin Langeveld crunched the numbers underscoring the general assumption that “the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.” In fact, Langeveld found,
All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the...
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April 07, 2009 01:02 PM
Public Speaking
What would you say to the Newspaper Association of America?
Today, the Newspaper Association of America closes out its annual conference with a keynote speech from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In advance of Schmidt’s address, others have been speculating about what they would say if given the chance to address the assembled news executives.
At BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis pulled no punches in a post titled “The speech...
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March 31, 2009 12:59 PM
Say Uncle (Sam)
What would government tax subsidies mean for journalism?
In the current issue of The Nation, John Nichols and Robert McChesney make an argument for government intervention in American journalism's economic model. "The old corporate media system choked on its own excess," they write. "We should not seek to restore or re-create it. We have to move forward to a system that creates a journalism far superior...
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March 24, 2009 12:58 PM
Peer Presser
What's the point of all these presidential press conferences?
If you tune in to MSNBC today, you might see a black-and-white ticker occasionally pop up in the corner of your screen, counting down to tonight's primetime PRESIDENTIAL NEWS CONFERENCE. (Get excited, America: it's now only seven hours, eleven minutes, and thirty-seven seconds away!)
The Obama administration has continued the practice of holding live, televised conferences: Robert Gibbs meets...
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Amplifying the Drumbeat on the “Overdraft Protection” Racket The issue picks up momentum in the financial press
- Journal: Wall Street Pay Could Set Records
The Observatory Science
- Some Optimism for the Future of Science Journalism And especially for international collaboration
- NSF “Underwriting” Coverage… And other controversies from the World Conference of Science Journalists
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- More PitneyGate Fallout? Press focused on who asked questions at Obama town hall
- The Economy Today: School’s Out With Money Tight, Classes Are Slashed