Thursday, May 23, 2013. Last Update: Wed 6:05 PM EST

Press Room

The Columbia Journalism Review’s staff and writers are available for interviews on current issues in the world of journalism. For more information, please contact Brendan Fitzgerald at media@cjr.org or (212) 851-0443. You may also contact CJR’s editorial staffers directly at editors@cjr.org or (212) 854-1881.

Staff Bios

Liz Cox Barrett is a staff writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. She began as an assistant editor for the magazine in 2002 and joined the staff of CJR’s Campaign Desk at its launch in 2004. Since then, she has reported on campaign coverage and its practitioners (and, briefly, joined them on the trail) and written about journalism, political and otherwise, most recently as the founding writer of CJR’s blog, The Kicker, launched in mid-2008.

Curtis Brainard has covered science, environment, and medical news for the Columbia Journalism Review since 2006. In January 2008, he launched The Observatory, CJR’s first fulltime department dedicated to critically analyzing science coverage in the media and the challenges facing science journalists today. His work has been cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, The New Republic, and Wired, among other outlets. He has also discussed science journalism on Al-Jazeera English, Greenwire, Sirius satellite radio, local radio stations, and at a host of meetings and conferences.

Ryan Chittum is deputy editor of The Audit, the Columbia Journalism Review’s online critique of financial journalism. He has been at CJR since 2007 and is a former staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where he covered telecom and real estate.

Brent Cunningham is managing editor/print of the Columbia Journalism Review. He has worked as a reporter and researcher for Life magazine, a statehouse reporter for the Charleston Daily Mail, and a lecturer at the American Journalism Center Budapest and at Hungary’s Eötvös Lorand University. His critical writing about the press has appeared in the anthology Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism, as well as Nieman Reports, the Italian journal Problemi dell’Informazione, and the French journal Medias. He is currently at work on a book about class and the press.

Erika Fry is an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. She is a recent graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. From 2006-2010, she was a full-time reporter for the Bangkok Post where she covered political and social issues.

Mike Hoyt is the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. A veteran newspaper and magazine writer, he has critiqued the press at CJR for twenty years. He became the magazine’s executive editor in 2000, responsible for editorial content both in print and on the Web. In 2004 he helped launch CJR’s political journalism site, Campaign Desk, which later became merged into CJR.org. He is the co-author of Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It (Melville House, 2007).

Michael Meyer is a staff writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, where he runs the News Frontier Database, CJR.org’s project chronicling digital news outlets. His feature documentary Camera, Camera, which told the story of Western tourists taking photographs in Laos, was an official selection of the Los Angeles Film Festival and the AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival in 2010. He co-edited the feature documentary Luxury Liner, which told the story of the first ascent of the Supercrack Buttress in Utah’s Indian Creek, a seminal moment in modern rock climbing. He holds an English degree from The Colorado College and is a native of Farmington, New Mexico.

Justin Peters is the managing editor/Web of the Columbia Journalism Review. He has written for various national newspapers and magazines, including Slate, The Washington Monthly, and The New York Times, and is the founding editor of Polite.

Alysia Santo is an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. She has interned at several television news stations in upstate New York and was an editorial intern at Global Radio News in London. She is a recent graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Dean Starkman runs The Audit, the Columbia Journalism Review’s online critique of financial journalism. A reporter for two decades, Starkman was most recently a Katrina Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute, covering the insurance industry’s response to Hurricane Katrina, and spent a year covering white-collar crime on a contract for The Washington Post. He spent eight years as a Wall Street Journal staff writer. A former chief of The Providence Journal’s investigative unit, he helped lead the team that won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Investigations.

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