News Meeting
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December 13, 2011 12:44 PM
Winter Reading Club
What are some books that journalists should read this winter?
Every year around this time, we ask our readers to recommend some books that journalists might enjoy reading during the holiday season and the subsequent months. After all, the prospect of new reading material makes sitting inside for the next four months under blankets and sun lamps sound much more appealing. Any genre goes, so what do you recommend, and...
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September 13, 2011 03:21 PM
Standout 9/11 Coverage
In the sea of anniversary coverage, where to look?
In the tremendous swell of tenth anniversary of 9/11 news coverage and commentary—in print, broadcast, online, on Twitter—what has stood to you, for better or worse?
For Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, it was a recent story about the people who jumped or fell from the Twin Towers that morning ten years ago. The piece, Marshall wrote on Sunday,...
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August 9, 2011 02:38 PM
Populism on the Potomac
Is anyone in DC reporting for the people?
On Sunday, Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton presented a plan for the paper he's charged with watching.
His stirring proposal? The Post should redefine its audience and write hard-hitting work that serves the needs of the majority of Americans who live and work outside the Beltway, but whose lives are subject to Washington's politicians and their whims.
As Greg Marx...
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July 20, 2011 02:11 PM
Summer Reading Club
Recommend a book for a journalist this summer
The days are long, the dogs are panting, and the sun is still prime for shining on the pages of a good summer read. So whether your reading preferences involve snuggling your feet into the hot sand or nestling in next to your air conditioner, the time is upon us to ask our readers once again: What summer reading do...
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July 12, 2011 05:14 PM
Huffington Post and “Over-Aggregation”
Where do we draw the line between aggregation and plagiarism?
AdAge media columnist Simon Dumenco recently posed a good question to the online news community: “What constitutes unfair -- unethical -- aggregation?”
The question came up after Dumenco noticed that a Huffington Post writer had cribbed the central idea and supporting factual information from Dumenco’s earlier piece, "Poor Steve Jobs Had to Go Head to Head With Weinergate in...
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June 28, 2011 02:53 PM
What Should Chris Wallace Have Asked?
“Flake”-free questions for Michele Bachmann
It came about fourteen minutes into Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace’s sixteen-minute interview with presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann. It came after questions (and, to Wallace’s credit, follow-up questions, albeit of varying productivity) about government spending and health care and same-sex marriage and several of Bachmann’s GOP opponents.
“Finally,” said Wallace:
[L]et's talk about Michele Bachmann because --...
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June 22, 2011 12:50 PM
Summer Movie Club
What movie would you recommend to a journalist this summer?
Whether blasted in a blessedly air-conditioned megaplex, or projected on a roof-deck after dark, movies make a summer. The forthcoming July/August issue of our magazine features reviews of the recent The Bang Bang Club, a fictional portrayal of the real group of war photographers working in South Africa in the nineties, and the documentary Page One: Inside The New York...
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June 14, 2011 05:05 PM
On Sock Puppets and Best Practices
How far should news outlets go to verify bloggers’ identities?
After some impressive detective work by several journalists, it was revealed early this week that Amina Arraf, the supposed author of blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” was a fictional character created by a forty-year-old straight man in Scotland.
Tom MacMaster, a sometime fantasy novelist, had created an elaborate online life for Amina over several years—recently garnering the most...
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June 8, 2011 01:55 PM
What Should Jill Do?
Offer your advice for The New York Times's incoming executive editor
Bill Keller will officially step down from his post as executive editor of The New York Times on Labor Day, the same day Jill Abramson will move into journalism’s most coveted and most complicated role. Already, profilers and commentators are dissecting Keller’s time—read our Clint Hendler’s thoughts here—and musing over what the Abramson era will bring. Only one thing can...
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May 31, 2011 04:58 PM
Campaign Strategies
How should the media determine the sort of coverage a candidate deserves?
In one of the posts on Herman Cain's candidacy discussed on Campaign Desk Tuesday, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight calls for more discussion about the quadrennial issue of how much coverage the press should devote to different presidential candidates:
This is a question, however, that needs to be discussed more openly. What are the appropriate criteria by which the press should...
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May 24, 2011 12:49 PM
Words We Shouldn’t Say
Name some clichéd terms that news sources should avoid
Last Friday New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren posted a list of “words we don’t say” to the magazine’s 6th Floor blog. The list was a leftover from former New York editor Kurt Andersen—he had left it tacked to the office bulletin board back in 1997—and contains words and phrases he felt were hackneyed, over-used, or, in Lindgren’s words,...
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May 17, 2011 12:44 PM
Graduation Time
What should we tell journalism’s next generation?
It’s graduation season and journalism schools across the country are spitting out classes of elated and exhausted journalists into the big bad media market. At ceremonies from UC Irvine to NYU, commencement speakers—most of whom rose up through very different worlds than that which exists today—are calming the next generation’s fears and stoking their fires. There was Wolf Blitzer at...
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May 10, 2011 01:09 PM
Which News Sites Are Best at Engaging their Readers?
And which ones are only interested in fly-by clicks?
In the conclusion to the report published on CJR today, “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” co-authors Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves offer a number of recommendations to news organizations grappling with the economics of producing news in the digital age. One of their first suggestions is that outlets need to...
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May 3, 2011 03:52 PM
Where Did You Get Your bin Laden News?
And now, where do you go for analysis?
Sometimes the news is so big you just have to have the details right away, and the death of Osama bin Laden is a case in point. With a story like this, we’ll be hungry for the details for days, including reporting on some complicated questions. (Did torture help find him, or not? What did Pakistan’s military really know about...
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