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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Slate

1. August 3, 2011 06:38 PM

   WSJ Fronts Amazon’s Tax Avoidance Strategy

   Color-coded maps tell employees which states are safe, bad, and neutral

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's nice to see The Wall Street Journal take a page-one look at Amazon's aggressive tax avoidance, something I've written about quite a bit here at The Audit. Its story establishes even more clearly that avoiding sales taxes is a core part of the company's business and has been from the beginning. The Journal reports that Amazon went to great...

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2. April 23, 2012 03:17 PM

   A picture is worth a thousand memes

   Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Matt Wuerker responds to Farhad Manjoo

   By Matt Wuerker

   Farhad Manjoo thinks political cartoons are stale, stupid, and unfunny—or so he argued in Slate last week, saying that, instead of honoring cartoons, the Pulitzer committee should consider including “biting infographics, hilarious image macros, irresistible Tumblrs … clever Web comics, and even poignant listicles.” But political cartoons are neither homogeneous nor passé. They come in every shape and medium and...

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3. November 14, 2012 06:50 AM

   Apples and oranges on Google and publishers

   Print performance is bad enough without putting a thumb on the scale

   By Ryan Chittum

   Slate tells us that "Google ad revenue tops entire US print media industry" in the first six months of the year, based off this chart from a German outfit called Statista: Business Insider makes it its "CHART OF THE DAY" and says "Google Is Bigger Than The U.S. Print Ad Business." That's (sort of) accurate, but misleading. There's an apples-to-oranges...

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4. May 10, 2011 09:05 PM

   Audit Notes: “People Love It,” The New Nocera, NYT Parody Flop

   By Ryan Chittum

   Andrew Ross Sorkin has a good column on a panel of top financiers discussing financial reform and too big to fail banks. This is a nice lede: The irony was thick. Alan Schwartz, the former chief executive of Bear Stearns who oversaw its near-demise and subsequent government-aided rescue, was here at Michael Milken’s annual conference — a West Coast version...

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5. May 5, 2011 09:08 PM

   Audit Notes: CEO Porn; Ryan Avent on Paul Ryan; Sbarro, Cooked

   By Ryan Chittum

   Gary Weiss says the tarnishing of Warren Buffett is a useful moment for the press to stand back and quit the CEO worship. Indeed: The annual "we love Warren" extravaganza long ago acquired many of the aspects of a cult ritual, and we in the media were right there with the shareholders, sipping the Kool-Aid. But this year's Buffett-fest was...

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6. January 4, 2011 11:31 PM

   Audit Notes: Google v. Groupon, BofA Deal, The 99ers

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal's Shira Ovide writes that Google, spurned by Groupon despite its stunning $6 billion offer for the startup, is talking like it's going to start a similar service to compete. In other words: Google's going to have to try to conquer the local-coupon market the old-fashioned way: Create a business from scratch. Oh, and use its powerful...

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7. October 3, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: Insert hospice joke here, Web pagination, too big to value

   The Washington Post diversifies its business into end-of-life care

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Washington Post is getting into the hospice business, which prompted a few too many obvious jokes about death and newspapers. But lots of people are understandably wondering what the Post is thinking. After the hospice surprise wears off, it seems like it could be a positive move, and the company has a track record of outside investments paying off....

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8. February 13, 2012 08:01 PM

   Audit Notes: Murdoch’s Hacking Scandal, Chipotle Not Apple

   By Ryan Chittum

   Murdoch's hacking scandal deepened this weekend with the arrests of several senior journalists at another News Corporation paper—The Sun— in a police-bribes investigation. The New York Times has a pretty good story focusing on the email that may bring down James Murdoch. News Corp. deleted the email, but a printout was found in the News of the World offices. But...

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9. March 22, 2012 03:13 AM

   Audit Notes: Skynet News, Gawker’s High-Low Strategy, Oil Speculators

   By Ryan Chittum

   Evgeny Morozov has a must-read piece at Slate on the rise of journalism bots, which Forbes now employs to write basic stories like earnings reports (emphasis mine): Yet the world of modern finance is increasingly dependent on automated trading, with sophisticated computer algorithms finding and exploiting pricing irregularities that are invisible to ordinary traders. Meanwhile, Forbes—one of financial journalism’s most...

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10. December 17, 2010 03:14 PM

    Covering the Republicans’ Crisis Commission Document

    Bethany McLean shows why he said-she said reporting doesn't cut it

    By Ryan Chittum

    The four Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission released their own report Wednesday on the causes of the financial crisis after voting—I kid you not—to ban the words "Wall Street," "shadow banking," "interconnection," and "deregulation" from the main report. Sure enough these words are nowhere to be found in their report. What can you say about that? How about...

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11. November 14, 2011 07:35 PM

    Insider Trading in Congress

    A new book puts faces on data suggesting members enrich themselves with nonpublic information

    By Ryan Chittum

    If I could short Congress, I would right now. Last night's 60 Minutes report, based on the work of conservative scholar Peter Schweizer, shows how powerful members of Congress benefited by insider trading, which happens to be perfectly legal if you're a congressperson. We've known for a while that Congress has almost certainly been enriching itself by buying or selling...

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12. November 11, 2011 02:11 AM

    Jim Romenesko Leaves Poynter

    And the blogosphere cries foul

    By Justin Peters

    The most frustrating thing about the Jim Romenesko affair is the way that so many people who should know better are insisting that there is no Jim Romenesko affair. Romenesko, the seminal media blogger, resigned from the Poynter Institute last night after his boss, Julie Moos, published an article detailing his occasional failure to indicate that the language he was...

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13. February 4, 2011 02:20 PM

    Salon and Slate in the Way-Back Machine

    What The Daily can learn from an earlier “digital renaissance”

    By Lauren Kirchner

    CJR has been accused of crankiness for our early critique of Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, The Daily. The Poynter Institute’s Damon Kiesow characterized our commentary as a dismissal of the new medium, similar to early complaints about the colorful, non-traditional USA Today in the 1980s. But while we felt unsatisfied by the actual content of The Daily—it felt thin,...

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14. December 8, 2010 02:01 AM

    Slate Takes on Amazon’s Unfair Advantage

    The retailer manipulates nexus law to give customers tax breaks competitors can't offer

    By Ryan Chittum

    Slate's Farhad Manjoo wrote last month about how online retailers like Amazon get a huge unfair advantage over their bricks and mortar counterparts. I want to make sure to note this—it's a good piece on an important subject. Amazon's customers don't have to pay local sales tax (except in a few states where Amazon has physical locations), which means an...

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15. August 21, 2012 11:15 AM

    The latest on Slatest

    Slate's news aggregation blog's revamp goes for quality over quantity

    By Sara Morrison

    There’s a new Slatest in town: the third version of Slatest, Slate's aggregated news blog, launched Monday. Though some Slatest readers were only just getting over the changes between Slatest's first and second versions after the April 2011 revamp (and some still mourn the pre-Slatest Today's Papers), editor Josh Voorhees believes the newest version will be able to develop a...

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16. November 23, 2010 11:46 AM

    The Power of the Drones

    Inside Slate's efforts to crowdsource good ideas

    By Daniel Luzer

    People have to be damn committed to an idea to attend an event about it on a Monday night, even one with free drinks. The last thing people want to do at 6 p.m. in the beginning of the week is stay downtown for another three hours to talk about education policy. This makes the huge crowd at Slate’s event...

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17. April 13, 2011 01:13 PM

    Two Non-Plans for the Deficit

    Slate and Times op-eds suggest Obama slack off

    By Joel Meares

    Relatively vague previews of the president’s big deficit speech today suggest he will tout cuts to Medicare, limits on military spending, and some sort of tax overhaul. Looking to steer away from criticism that his past budget declarations have been a tad formless, the president will likely present a detailed big ideas speech that will set up the Dems...

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18. May 4, 2012 12:32 PM

    What’s Slate been up to?

    CJR checks in with the Web news stalwart

    By Michael Meyer

    It's been more than a year since we profiled Slate for CJR's Guide to Online News Startups (then the News Frontier Database). Since then, the grandfather of Internet magazines lost Jack Shafer and Timothy Noah to layoffs, but also had its share of good news: the site finally transitioned away from the CMS it had been using for 10 years...

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