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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged obituaries

1. May 5, 2011 10:26 AM

   A Tight Deadline, 4,000 Words, Then Ten Years of Waiting

   A Q&A with Kate Zernike, Osama bin Laden's obituarist for the NYT

   By Lauren Kirchner

   When the news of Osama bin Laden’s death broke on Sunday night, every night editor’s dream—or nightmare—came true at The New York Times: the Times’s Eileen Murphy told Chris O’Shea at FishbowlNY that “the order was given to stop the presses.” Monday’s front page was scrapped, and a new front page with top-to-bottom bin Laden coverage was ready to go...

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2. February 17, 2012 03:37 PM

   Anthony Shadid: ‘A Gatherer, An Observer, A Listener’

   One of his former editors remembers the greatest foreign correspondent of his generation

   By David E. Hoffman

   For many readers and listeners of the news, the work of foreign correspondents is surrounded by legend and yet strangely taken for granted. Each day, on television and the radio, in newspapers and magazines and online, we see the correspondents standing in the dust of the latest bomb blast, or dodging bullets in an orchard, or navigating a natural disaster....

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3. October 6, 2011 02:08 AM

   Audit Notes: Steve Jobs

   By Ryan Chittum

   Here's Wired's striking homepage reporting the death of Steve Jobs: Scroll down and you get gray text with obituary comments from various luminaries. It's gorgeous—more like a magazine cover than the jumble of text and pictures we normally see on news sites. — Brian Lam writes an obit for Jobs and tells some of the backstory on Gizmodo's infamous scoop...

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4. June 7, 2011 04:52 PM

   Cathryn Cronin Cranston

   An obituary for CJR’s publisher

   By The Editors

   The staff of the Columbia Journalism Review is deeply sorry to report the death of our publisher, Cathryn Cranston, who lost a fight with leukemia on May 31. Cranston fell ill just days after starting the job at CJR last fall and embarked on a series of treatments, including a bone marrow transplant. In the short time she worked with...

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5. May 31, 2012 03:44 PM

   Class, warfare

   Remembering Paul Fussell

   By Daniel Luzer

   Paul Fussell, historian and cultural critic, died last week at 88. With his death, America lost a steady voice for cantankerous protest against all so many pedestrian national institutions and assumptions—the gourmet restaurant, the uniform, the armed forces. Unusually for an English professor, Fussell’s writings on American society also exemplified the characteristics of superior journalism: irreverence, accuracy, fairness, and lucidity;...

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6. July 27, 2012 06:50 AM

   Coming out posthumously

   Sally Ride and questions of how to memorialize semi-closeted public figures

   By Jennifer Vanasco

   In her column, Minority Reports, Jennifer Vanasco analyzes how the mainstream media covers social minorities. In the first obituaries about former astronaut Sally Ride, the news was easy to miss - buried at the end of the stories, after many hundreds of words about her achievements, was a variation of this sentence: “Dr. Ride is survived by her partner of...

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7. October 19, 2011 04:42 PM

   Norman Corwin, 1910-2011

   Remembering a recently deceased broadcast pioneer

   By Michael Antonoff

   It was only fitting that I learned of Norman Corwin's death from the CBS Radio World News Roundup, a program younger than Corwin despite its 1938 debut. By that year, Corwin was already entrenched as CBS Radio's resident poet/playwright/producer, a one-man workhorse who peppered the airwaves with thought-provoking plays at a time when fascism was on the rise. A contemporary...

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8. May 2, 2011 05:10 PM

   Osama bin Laden, 54, Public Enemy No. 1

   A review of the obits

   By Lauren Kirchner

   Osama bin Laden was the world’s most powerful terrorist. He was also, undeniably, the most famous. And as befits any celebrity, when his death was announced, many news organizations were ready with a biographical piece that had been pre-written and -filed in preparation for the occasion, perhaps years beforehand. Many news reports to come out since Sunday night contain background...

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