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Starting Thoughts

  1. April 10, 2009 11:45 AM

    No Fear Factor

    Bill O'Reilly's intimidation tactics won't scare me away from blogging

    By Amanda Terkel

    Last month, I had one of the most chilling experiences of my career as a reporter-blogger. I had planned on taking a day off from writing on ThinkProgress.org and going on a short vacation to a small town in Virginia. Instead, I ended up being followed from my apartment and ambushed by O’Reilly Factor producer Jesse Watters and his cameraman....

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  2. February 10, 2009 03:09 PM

    Open the Floodgates

    And let the audience in

    By Susannah Vila

    From the newsroom at CBS, where I have spent the majority of my days since I took a desk assistant job here in November, I have an abundance of time to think about why I find the job so mind-numbing. Surrounded by the metal devices that take in and transmit satellite data, I gaze longingly at the leftmost in a...

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  3. January 14, 2009 02:18 PM

    Once Burned, But Not Shy

    For this young journalist, the search for justice is here to stay. The rest is just details.

    By Christopher Wink

    


    Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell will be named Sen. Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate, a high-ranking source in the administration told the Patriot-News.

    

That was my lede after being tricked into believing Rendell was Obama's No. 2 man by a famed newsroom of top-flight state government correspondents in the Harrisburg state capital.



    This isn't the story of the Pennsylvania governor...

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  4. December 18, 2008 01:16 PM

    Everything Old Is New Again

    New media lessons from the Victorian era

    By Maha R. Atal

    For two years, I’ve been researching GWM Reynolds, a novelist-journalist-politician working in Paris (1830-36) and London (1837-69). In particular, I’ve been looking at the influence of those years in France on his English career: maybe his early Parisian affair explains why he grew into such an eclectic Victorian oddball. His contemporaries certainly couldn’t figure him out, and when they decried...

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  5. October 30, 2008 04:53 PM

    An Invitation

    Looking for letters from young journalists

    By The Editors

    Back in June, we gave one of our interns the daunting task of tracking newspaper buyouts and layoffs since 2007. She diligently worked the press clips and the phone and counted up to 2,700 by the end of the summer. The spreadsheet is not definitive but it is depressing—statistics from a plague (three here, twenty there; eighty here, 150 there)...

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