The Battle of New Orleans: Amidst the gutting of one of the nation’s few remaining great regional newspapers, I took a long look at “the radical change in how journalism is done at the 176-year-old Times-Picayune and what that means for the future of news coverage.”
— An ink-stained stretch. Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register–and the newspaper industry? I called it “the most interesting–and important–experiment in journalism right now.”
— A BusinessWeek cover crosses a line. Minorities as greedy grotesqueries fueling a new housing bubble.
— No, it’s not another housing bubble. Hysteria in pockets of the press over a long-awaited recovery.
— A Big Mac miss by The Huffington Post. Poor reporting on a “study” by a Kansas undergrad. And a follow-up on who did and didn’t correct their errors.
— The New York Times‘s paywall continued to keep the paper afloat. I wrote about how it had reached $150 million in annual revenue, how paywall revenue overtook digital-ad revenue, and that despite all that, it still gets no respect amongst the types who said it wouldn’t work in the first place. And I criticized the Times for choosing to issue a dividend despite its still-uncertain financial future.
— The Greg Packer of small business. Drew Greenblatt’s frequent press hits usually omit National Association of Manufacturers ties
— Andrew Ross Sorkin, Wall Street concern troll. The CNBC/NYTer turns up the drama for a video on the crisis anniversary.
— Sympathy for the Walmart flack. How the PR-afflicted colossus pushes its “jobs” narrative on a credulous press.
— Guardian bombshells in an escalating battle against journalism. Greenwald partner’s detention, prior-restraint threats, and smashed hard drives
— The extraordinary promise of the new Greenwald-Omidyar venture. Adversarial muckrakers + civic-minded billionaire = a whole new world.
— Frontline’s landmark ‘League of Denial’. A gripping story of decades of NFL coverup and the deadly consequences
— John Paton, the Gorbachev of paywalls. Digital First Media will roll out meters across its newspaper portfolio.
— Elizabeth Warren, the antidote to CNBC. The senator schools the talking heads on bank regulation
Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum.