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Opening Shot

  1. November 1, 2012 12:00 AM

    Opening Shot

    A picture is worth a thousand meanings

    By The Editors

    In October, Columbia J-School joined with BagNewsNotes, an almost decade-old site devoted to analyzing media images, for a discussion about visual coverage of the presidential race. Photojournalists, scholars, and audience members “read” a selection of news photos from this year, including the one above. The idea was to tease out layers of meaning in the images, to explore the...

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  2. September 4, 2012 12:29 AM

    Opening Shot

    Drawing attention to the decline in local accountability reporting

    By The Editors

    The current media revolution has brought many encouraging changes, but also a worrisome decline in accountability reporting, especially at the local level. Take it from Steven Waldman, who authored the 2011 FCC report “The Information Needs of Communities,” about the future of public-interest reporting in the digital age.

    Now Waldman is trying to draw attention to the issue and...

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  3. July 6, 2012 06:51 AM

    Opening Shot

    What New Orleans is losing

    By The Editors

    I n the years since the Times-Picayune and the city of New Orleans endured the trauma of Hurricane Katrina, it has seemed that the T-P might avoid the downward spiral of regional papers across the country—and that the oft-mentioned special relationship between this proud but troubled city and its newspaper would endure. Last year, the T-P had one of the...

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  4. May 2, 2012 06:00 AM

    Opening Shot

    The Instagram campaign

    By The Editors

    Every presidential campaign produces its share of iconic images, but never before have we been able to see trail life in so many shades, vintages, and fetishistic detail. For that, thank Instagram, the free photography app—just snatched up by Facebook for $1 billion. It empowers anyone with a smartphone to snap Polaroid-size photos and make them pretty, instantly, with...

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  5. March 1, 2012 03:27 PM

    Opening Shot

    Pinterest is the media's newest BFF

    By The Editors

    “What is Pinterest and why should I care?” asked a recent blog post on TheAtlantic.com. In case you’ve managed to elude the digital onslaught on this topic, you can see from the screenshot above that it’s a kind of scrapbooking social network, allowing users to grab images they like and “pin” them to their personal pinboards on Pinterest.com. TechCrunch,...

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  6. January 6, 2012 06:00 AM

    Opening Shot

    Show us how the game is rigged

    By The Editors

    On November 26, 2011, The New York Times published an investigation of Ronald Lauder’s aggressive use of strategies available to the superrich to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. It was the kind of story that makes people angry, and something the nation needs more of from its press. As the presidential race unfolds, and competing...

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  7. November 28, 2011 06:00 AM

    Opening Shot

    Here's to another fifty

    By The Editors

    C JR’s debut was mostly greeted with “bouquets,” though a few readers, our second issue noted, “reacted with unblemished hostility.” You can’t please everyone, especially in this job. Still, we are alive. Pop a cork and consider the times—some too recent to admit—we flirted with death. Toast our many reanimators, who emerged when cjr needed them. And boy, have we...

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  8. August 28, 2011 11:54 AM

    Opening Shot

    Fostering an awareness of our commonalities, ten years after September 11th

    By The Editors

    Four planes. One-hundred-and-two minutes of the towers smoking. Almost three thousand dead. Then, suddenly, it is ten years later, and we are still coming to terms with the events of September 11, 2001, while our country is more divided than it has been for years. Bin Laden is dead, but the specter of terrorism remains; our memories of...

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  9. July 5, 2011 11:32 AM

    Opening Shot

    Jill Abramson, the first woman at the helm of The New York Times

    By The Editors

    “OMG. It’s official, women run the world,” wrote Dennis M. Madison, a New York Times reader who posted a comment on the newspaper’s June 2 web story announcing that Jill Abramson would be its next executive editor, the first woman at its helm. His giddy hyperbole feels right. Despite intense financial pressure, the Times remains at the pinnacle of...

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  10. May 1, 2011 02:13 PM

    Opening Shot

    Attacks on reporters and photographers in the Arab world threaten journalism everywhere

    By The Editors

    Is journalism worth dying for? Murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s editor used those words as the title of a posthumously published collection of Politkovskaya’s articles. The question was meant to refer to the danger faced by reporters in repressive regimes like Russia. But it has taken on new relevance for journalists covering the series of revolutions in Arab countries. Reporters...

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  11. February 23, 2011 04:05 PM

    Opening Shot

    Al Jazeera showed global media how to cover an uprising

    By The Editors

    >Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite news network, showed global media how to cover a people’s uprising—by getting right into the thick of things and keeping the cameras running, both witnessing and propelling events. Perched on a telephone booth in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on January 31, the TV in the photo above was one of many positioned so that the crowds...

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  12. January 8, 2011 06:22 PM

    Opening Shot

    Notes on 2010, the year of WikiLeaks

    By The Editors

    It began in April with the release of a video showing Apache helicopter pilots killing civilians, including two Reuters employees, after apparently mistaking cameras for weapons, and ended in December with five of the world’s most respected print outlets publishing valuable reporting based on a trove of 260,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. This Year of WikiLeaks roiled the news equation and...

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