Today, September 14, is Super Tuesday, of a sort, with primary elections occuring in seven states and Washington, D.C. Today essentially markes the end of a primary season notable for upset voters, upset victories, and upset stomachs among political insiders annoyed that the electorate isn’t following the preordained script.With elections around the corner, we’d like to know: What has been particularly good or bad about the midterm coverage you’ve seen so far, and what would you like to change about that coverage between now and November?
News Meeting
10:08 AM - September 14, 2010
Primary Grades
How can the midterm coverage improve between now and November?
‘See you on the other side’ - Meet Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend what little time she had practicing journalism
#Realtalk: This is the best moment to be in journalism - The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay
Streams of consciousness - Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
Sticking with the truth - How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism
An ink-stained stretch - Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?
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Expert advice
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How the ‘World’s 50 Best’ list changed the way elite restaurants do business
“Every time the restaurant switched up its format, it got plenty of accompanying media coverage that let judges know they needed to return to see what was going on”
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
I'd like to see less inside-baseball, Beltway-to-Boston navel-gazing. More use of actual numbers, from polling, from 2008 election results. Less 'ideological' analysis - most voters vote their self-interest, left or right. But some acknowledgment - this will be tough, I know - of the legitimacy of complaints against liberal policies and liberal tactics by generally centrist and non-partisan voters and citizens. After all, a quick smackdown by voters of newly-elected Democratic presidents is not exactly new - it has happened within two to four years of every election of a Democrat to the White House since 1964. More interviews with voters rather than interviews with journalists or politicos. The story-du-annee has been the 'Tea Partiers', but I seldom see them actually interviewed in a non-confrontational way, the way liberal activists are interviewed.
This sounds partisan, but the political press really does suffer from a deficiency of people who are not urban and not culturally liberal, and this kind of skews their ability to not only predict outcomes, but to explain them in a predictive manner. I don't mind the GOP getting tough coverage, as in the current rush to nail John Boehner. What is missing is tough coverage of the Democrats by the same standards, as in the lack of press which would explain the GOP's success in campaigning against Nancy Pelosi, the voice of the rich, but stagnating Bay Area. You would never know that most of the affluent Congressional districts in this country are liberal Democratic districts. Political reporting is still stuck in the 1960s.
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Sun 19 Sep 2010 at 09:38 AM
Cover more voters who voted for Obama, are somewhat concerned by what he's done or not done, but would tie themselves to a railroad track rather than vote for the GOP, let alone Tea Party. Instead of making it all about the horserace, really look at the merits of the different parties/candidates.
#2 Posted by Elizabeth, CJR on Wed 22 Sep 2010 at 04:53 PM