The Water Cooler
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July 2, 2012 03:02 PM
Q&A: Confront and Conceal author David Sanger
“There’s nothing ‘childish’ about raising issues of great public import”
Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power | By David E. Sanger | Crown | 476 pages, $28.00
Every White House keeps secrets, especially when it comes to national security. It’s the job of the press to learn those secrets and reveal them, unless—and it’s a big unless—the press is convinced that doing so will...
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April 9, 2012 01:13 PM
Q & A: Lucy Dalglish and Jennifer Lynch
Two open government experts talk about the year’s top FOIA issues
The FOIA Watchdog chats with Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Jennifer Lynch, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about this year's pressing FOIA issues.
How has the Obama administration's handling of FOIA issues differed from that of the Bush administration?
Lucy Dalglish: The Obama administration at least says the right things....
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April 2, 2012 11:00 AM
Q&A: The NYT’s Justin Gillis
The recent Oakes Award winner talks about how to keep climate on the front page
At the end of March, Columbia University awarded the 2011 Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism to New York Times reporter Justin Gillis for his ongoing multimedia series, Temperature Rising, examining the fundamental tenets of manmade climate change. Articles in the series, most of which appear on the front page, provide in-depth, back-to-basics assessments of global warming’s effects on glaciers,...
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March 12, 2012 11:37 AM
Should Health Journos Use Hospital Safety Data?
An interview with Kaiser Health News's Jordan Rau
In a highly touted effort to improve the quality of hospital care, the federal government has started disclosing data that ostensibly reveals which hospitals are best (and worst) at keeping their patients safe. But a few weeks ago, Kaiser Health News presented some not entirely unexpected news that turned conventional wisdom about patient safety data into, well, not-so-conventional wisdom. A...
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February 16, 2012 01:00 PM
Q&A: Eric Roston, Bloomberg’s sustainability editor
A new section tracks businesses’ response to the global “resource crunch”
At the end of November, Bloomberg News launched a Sustainability section “to uncover what businesses are doing, or what they need to be doing, to thrive as global competition intensifies for strategic resources.” Under the direction of editor Eric Roston (@eroston) and deputy editor Tom Randall (@tsrandall), the page features stories about energy, policy, natural resources, health & population,...
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February 13, 2012 02:46 PM
Q&A: Michael Morisy, Co-Founder of MuckRock
On helping journalists with their public records requests
MuckRock is an online startup that helps journalists streamline, track, and fulfill their public records requests. Since May 2010, when the beta version of the site debuted, they’ve had 851 requests filed, 232 requests successfully completed, and 66 requests denied. The site has helped facilitate the release of 25,254 pages of government documents. MuckRock is currently part of the Boston...
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January 18, 2012 03:27 PM
Medicare Vouchers Explained
A conversation with the Brookings Institution’s Henry Aaron
In the Republican presidential debate Monday, Mitt Romney came out in favor of a "premium support program, which allows people to buy either current standard Medicare or a private plan." He said he supported the proposal made by Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, which, he believed, "is absolutely right on."
"Give people choice,” Romney said. “Let competition exist in our Medicare...
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November 29, 2011 01:17 PM
Q&A: News for All the People Co-Author Juan González
The Daily News columnist talks about race and the media
Juan González is a staff columnist for New York’s Daily News, a two-time winner of the George Polk Award for commentary, co-host of Democracy Now!, and former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, where he was inducted into its Hall of Fame. With Joseph Torres, he is the co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story...
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September 19, 2011 04:02 PM
Q&A: New NBC Correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin
“Part of me wants to speak to the global audience, and a part of me wants to speak to America”
This spring, just before he turned thirty-two, Ayman Mohyeldin’s contract with Al Jazeera was ending and he was faced with a happy career decision—choosing among offers to stay where he was or go to any of three major American network news organizations. I had worked with him for the first year of Al Jazeera English, when I was an anchor...
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September 8, 2011 12:08 PM
Q&A: Beware the Gonzo Director Bryan Goluboff
"We want a talisman of these times, even in a digital age."
Beware the Gonzo, the directorial debut of Bryan Goluboff (writer of The Basketball Diaries), stars Ezra Miller, Zoe Kravitz, Amy Sedaris, and Judah Friedlander, and opens at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday. The movie follows seventeen-year-old Eddie “Gonzo” Gilman, a budding investigative journalist, whose unfailing belief in the power of print media to protect the voiceless leads him to...
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August 3, 2011 09:44 AM
The NY Times’s New Top Editor in D.C.
A conversation with incoming Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt
With Jill Abramson about to take the reins as executive editor of The New York Times, one of the paper’s leading writers is also taking on a management role. David Leonhardt, the “Economic Scene” columnist and winner of the most recent Pulitzer Prize for commentary, will become chief of the Times’s Washington, D.C. bureau after Labor Day. (The outgoing bureau...
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July 12, 2011 12:07 PM
Q&A: Luke Stangel, Co-Creator of TapIn Bay Area
“Mobile could make us focus again on what we do really well as reporters.”
This week, Bay Area News Group—publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, and several other newspapers—will release a new map-based mobile news application called TapIn Bay Area. As Luke Stangel, one of its creators, described it, “Imagine cutting up your local paper into 10,000 little pieces, and organizing those pieces on a map. TapIn is that map.”
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July 7, 2011 05:31 PM
Q&A: Sebastian Junger on Tim Hetherington
“The ultimate truth about war is that you are guaranteed to lose your brothers.”
It’s not often that one sees characters from a film gather to mourn a filmmaker. On May 24, soldiers from Second Platoon of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Division joined friends, colleagues, and family of Tim Hetherington for a memorial service in a crowded church in lower Manhattan. Hetherington was an acclaimed war photographer and the co-director of the...
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July 5, 2011 02:34 PM
How to Understand the ‘Invisible Primary’
An interview with Georgetown professor Hans Noel
The 2012 Iowa caucuses are still seven months away, but Republican presidential hopefuls are already well into the “invisible primary”—a tumultuous time of speechmaking, fundraising, coalition-building and constant travel, as they seek to boost their name recognition, stand out from the field, and secure the GOP nomination once the voting begins.
This part of the campaign looks very different than...
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The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: pyramid people, Disney and ABC, no USA Today paywall Roddy Boyd digs into a diet-shake pyramid scheme
- Hot air Rises Above on CNBC An anchor pins a minor dip in stocks on the TV appearance of a minor politician
The Observatory Science
- Dull news from Doha UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press
- Highway to the danger zone Following Sandy, HuffPo and NYT dig into the folly of coastal development
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- NBC News sets good example for Medicare reporting People perspective leads to clear explanation of impact of proposed changes
- In Pennsylvania, a niche site with wide reach PoliticsPA drives political conversation in Keystone State
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