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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. December 04, 2008 03:44 PM

    The Paleontological Approach

    Let's sift through the industry's bones to figure out exactly when things went wrong

    By Leah Finnegan

    I used to want to be an anthropologist, until I realized I wanted to have a job when I graduated. Journalism was the compromise between staying in academia or working in PR (this was about two years ago). But I'll be graduating from the University of Texas in May, and my job hunt at most newspapers and magazines has already...

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  6. December 02, 2008 12:59 PM

    “The Business Is Broken”

    But I'm still having fun all the same

    By Andrea James

    I'm a business reporter, and if I had to fashion four words about the business of newspapers, I'd have to say: "The business is broken."

    This is heartbreaking considering that I just got here. I left Northwestern with a graduate degree in journalism in March 2005, and immediately landed a daily newspaper job at the Mobile Press-Register in Alabama. Score....

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  7. November 20, 2008 01:59 PM

    Hope Dies Last

    I want newspapers to survive, but will they?

    By Mallory Carra

    I wasn't even twenty-five years old and I was working for the New York Daily News. All of my friends and family called me their "big-time reporter." Except at that moment, I was the big-time New York reporter crying in a bathroom stall, thinking, "I hate this." If this was what it’s like at the “top,” why had I worked...

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  8. November 19, 2008 02:17 PM

    New Media, New Opportunities

    "It's an exciting time to be a journalist"

    By Erin Rosa

    In the five years since I first became a reporter, I have worked for two established print weeklies, both of which have gone out of business. Most recently, I was working for an award-winning online news site financially supported by a nonprofit organization, before nearly two-thirds of the staff were abruptly laid off after the election. For young...

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  9. 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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