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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged hamster wheel

1. September 24, 2012 10:51 AM

   Audit Notes: Digital First takedown, here comes the WSJ, debt and taxes

   The Awl roughs up Journal Register's flagship paper

   By Ryan Chittum

   Brett Sokol, writes one of the most brutal piece of media criticism I've read in a long time. He examines the promise of Digital First Media by looking at its flagship newspaper, the New Haven Register—and its website—and comparing it (very unfavorably) to the upstart New Haven Independent. It’s hard to imagine a worse-designed, more downright ugly newspaper website than...

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2. February 1, 2011 07:58 PM

   Audit Notes: Hamster Wheel Manifesto, Shorts and the Bubble, Economy Picks Up

   By Ryan Chittum

   Business Insider got hold of an AOL document laying out the company's "master plan" for its content farm. I think I see smoke coming from the Hamster Wheel: AOL asks its editors to decide whether to produce content based on "the profitability consideration"... In-house AOL staffers are expected to write five to 10 stories per day. Here's how AOL editors...

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3. February 9, 2012 01:53 AM

   Audit Notes: Off the Hamster Wheel, The Dumb Money, iPad Newspapers

   By Ryan Chittum

   I like this Nieman Journalism Lab piece on how Salon hopped off the hamster wheel and saw site traffic increase dramatically. Salon's traffic jumped 40 percent even though it posted a third less than it had a year earlier. Adrienne LaFrance talks to Salon editor Kerry Lauerman: “I remember we had aggregated a Charlie Sheen story, and I saw it...

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4. September 8, 2011 08:58 PM

   Audit Notes: Social Security and Ponzi, Regulation, Hamster Wheel

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler has a nice rebuttal to Rick Perry's false claim in last night's Republican debate that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme." Strictly speaking, the metaphor is misleading. A Ponzi scheme, named after Boston conman Charles Ponzi, is a fraudulent investment operation. In its essential design it’s a con. Investors don’t earn interest and instead...

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5. March 30, 2011 07:13 PM

   Audit Notes: The Dimon Dare; Bloomberg’s Bank FOIA, Hamsters Attack!

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Financial Times reports tonight that press favorite Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, that regulation is going to kill off our cherished too-big-to-fail banks, without which our economy would surely flourish... er, I mean perish: “If you want to set it so high that no big bank ever goes bankrupt ... I think that would greatly diminish growth,” he told a...

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6. November 13, 2012 08:06 PM

   Audit Notes: WaPo on the Bain thing, deadbeat Forbes, hamster wheel

   The Post's revealing slip-up on the definition of swift-boating

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Washington Post apparently doesn't understand just how toxic Wall Street and its even more rapacious cousin, private equity—not popular in good times—really is now. The paper actually thought it might have been an error for Obama to attack Romney over his Bain Capital days: It also looked, at first, like a mistake. Democrats such as former president Bill Clinton,...

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7. May 10, 2012 07:58 PM

   Audit notes: WSJ dings austerity, Weisenthal, The Global Mail

   By Ryan Chittum

   If you're looking to get up to speed on what happened with the euro and Greece, you could do a lot worse than Marcus Walker's excellent page-one story in The Wall Street Journal today. The Journal recounts how Angela Merkel and the Germans' disastrous insistence on punitive austerity has led Greece to the point of collapse—and threatens the entire European...

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8. June 21, 2012 05:02 PM

   Audit Radio: Cleveland edition

   Dean Starkman joins a panel of Ohio journalists on the future of newspapers

   By Ryan Chittum

   Audit Chief Dean Starkman talked about the future of newspapers on Cleveland's NPR affiliate WCRN this morning. "Sound of Ideas" host Mike McIntyre talks to Dean, as well as Plain Dealer managing editor Thom Fladung, Tom Skoch, editor of the Lorain Morning Journal, Tim Smith, a Kent State journalism professor, and David Abbott, executive director of The George Gund Foundation....

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9. November 24, 2010 03:09 PM

   Big Wheel Keep on Turnin’

   Hamster for the holidays from the NYT, WSJ, and Politico

   By Ryan Chittum

   Audit boss Dean Starkman wrote a CJR cover story a couple of months ago called "The Hamster Wheel," decrying journalistic "motion for motion’s sake... news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no." Haven't read it yet? It's some 3,500 words. Put down your crackberry, stop live-tweeting the 11th season premier of Dancing With the Stars, and give...

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10. December 3, 2010 12:37 PM

    Business Insider and Financial Press Sensationalism

    Henry Blodget & Co. stroke the id of the Internet

    By Ryan Chittum

    What business press readers always lacked but never really needed was a tabloid sensationalist to hype up mundane markets and business news. Who would have ever thought Henry Blodget would be the guy to fill this void? There are a couple of things to expect when reading Business Insider or Blodget's tweets: ALL CAPS. Words like "scariest," "startling," "doomed." Headlines...

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11. June 9, 2011 11:57 AM

    FCC Report: “The Information Needs of Communities”

    By Joel Meares

    The FCC's eighteen-months-in-the-making Future of Media report—now called "The Information Needs of Communities"—is now out and available below for your perusal. Steve Waldman, the lead author of the report is currently presenting the report at an FCC Open Commission Meeting. The live stream of that presentation is here. If you're looking for a yard stick to measure the report's recommendations...

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12. July 12, 2011 05:14 PM

    Huffington Post and “Over-Aggregation”

    Where do we draw the line between aggregation and plagiarism?

    By The Editors

    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 the...

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13. February 8, 2011 04:23 PM

    Stock, Flow, and My Entrepreneurial Origin Story

    The founder of newsbound.tv steps off the hamster wheel

    By Josh Kalven

    CJR’s “Launch Pad” feature invites new media publishers to blog about their experiences on the news frontier. Past columns by Josh Kalven, founder of Newsbound, can be found here. I know, I know. I wrote last week that I’d devote my second Launch Pad column to the story of how I came to form Newsbound as a for-profit company. But...

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14. December 7, 2010 10:26 AM

    The $100 hamster wheel

    By Felix Salmon

    Back on October 1, the Fed put out a short, bland press release announcing "a delay in the issue date of the redesigned $100 note." Sometimes, there's a great little story hidden behind such news, and in this case it was CNBC's Eamon Javers who found it: An official familiar with the situation told CNBC that 1.1 billion of the...

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15. June 20, 2011 11:23 AM

    The Hamster Wheel and the AOL Way

    By Ryan Chittum

    Audit Chief Dean Starkman's "Hamster Wheel" piece has now been enshrined in the lexicon of the bureaucracy with the release of the FCC's big report on "The Information Needs of Communities." But, you know, the big wheel keeps on turnin', and though periodically hamsters tire and fly off into the wood shavings, they're replaced by fresh hamsters from whom at...

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