CJR Daily Staff

Reporters
Liz Cox Barrett, Paul McLeary,
Gal Beckerman, Edward B. Colby, Curtis Brainard

Editorial Staff
Bree Nordenson, Alia Malek

Who We Are

Welcome to CJR Daily, a real-time critique of journalism and a continuing discussion and analysis of where journalism is as a craft and a business, and where it's going. Operating under the auspices of the Columbia Journalism Review, the country's premier media monitor, we focus on three areas: political journalism; the larger forces -- political, economic, technological, social, legal -- that affect journalism; and the business and financial press. We've labeled these three reports Politics, Behind the News and The Audit, and we update them daily.

This site was born as Campaign Desk in 2004, with a mandate to monitor news coverage of the presidential election campaign, for which we were awarded honorable mention from the National Press Club for our distinguished contribution to online journalism. After the campaign, we broadened our mandate to critique all of purportedly serious journalism, and changed our name accordingly to CJR Daily.

Our newest addition to the site, The Audit, has come about thanks to funding from the Winokur Family Foundation and others. We live in a time when there is heightened competition among the business press -- think Bloomberg News, cable television ventures and the rapidly growing number of Web sites entirely devoted to business news -- just as business itself has become more complex and corporate scandals have led to mandated increases in disclosure. There is opportunity in that combination , but there is peril as well -- heightened deadline pressure combined with a greatly increased volume of news is not necessarily a recipe designed to produce quality. We'll be here to tell you when it does and when it doesn't.

Eventually, in the months to come we hope to take a closer critical look at other specialties, such as environmental journalism, science journalism and medical journalism.

Beyond that, working in concert with CJR, our parent, we're committed to examining the continuing tribulations of the trade itself -- one that is going through considerable turmoil of its own as it seeks to define and redefine itself. Many journalists to whom we talk, day in and day out, have the vague sense that calcified old forms and formats are failing them; the trick will be to find new frameworks up to the task at hand.

We'll be dissecting and deconstructing all of that in the days, weeks, and months to come, and we can't think of a topic more vital. So hang on for the ride. We hope you'll keep visiting both CJR Daily and CJR, which is published six times a year and at www.cjr.org (and please consider subscribing to CJR).

CJR Daily Staff Bios

Liz Cox Barrett has been a staff writer for CJR Daily since its inception, and was a staff writer for its precursor, Campaign Desk, throughout the 2004 presidential election. From 2002-2003, Liz was an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. She is a 2002 graduate of the Columbia Journalism School. Prior to graduate school, Liz worked at an e-commerce start-up and, earlier, at a strategic communications firm. She graduated from Princeton University in 1995 with a BA in politics.

Paul McLeary co-wrote the weekly "Think Again" column with Eric Alterman for The Center for American Progress prior to his arrival at CJR. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, the New York Observer and the Christian Science Monitor.

Gal Beckerman graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism in 2003. Since then he has worked as a staff writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. He has also served as the New York correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, writes a regular book review column for The Forward and has contributed his criticism to many other publications. Beckerman's first book, a history of the Cold War movement to free Jews from the Soviet Union, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008.

Edward B. Colby joined CJR Daily as a staff writer in 2005. A former executive editor of the Harvard Crimson, he has also written for the New York Daily News and the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and for the USA, France, and Costa Rica titles of the Let’s Go travel series.

Curtis Brainard is a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and covers science/environment issues for CJR Daily. Curtis also holds an M.A. in earth and environmental science from Columbia. His thesis, based on a study of fossil corals in Vanuatu, examined variations in the amount of cosmic radiation and radiocarbon in Earth’s atmosphere. His work has also appeared in The New York Times.

Bree Nordenson is an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review and a contributor to CJR Daily. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Carleton College and has a background in psychology and psychiatric research. She finished Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in May 2006.

Alia Malek is an assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. She worked previously as a civil/human rights attorney in both the U.S. and in the Middle East.