Most Recent   |   Special Issues   |   The Kicker Podcast Join us
Columbia Journalism Review
Join us
Public Media

‘All They’re Going to Hear Is Capitulation’

The Trump administration’s ideological attacks on public media and education converge at university-based radio stations. Some are breaking free.
By Lucy Schiller
Podcast

Is It Crazy to Go to Journalism School?

A student reflects on leaving the law to pursue his writing dreams.
By Megan Greenwell

Ohio Midterms Prove ‘Pink Slime’ News Is Bipartisan

NorthStar Civic Media promises “independent local reporting.” Its founder worked on Democratic campaigns, and Democratic funders spent more than a million dollars on Meta ads promoting one of its sites.
By Kali Bomeli

The Mississippi Free Press Is Using Journalism to ‘Make Democracy Work a Little Better’

Ashton Pittman on the groundwork that prepared journalists to cover a deadlocked US Senate race.
By Elizabeth Hewitt

Crooked Con’s Hottest Takes

Meeting up with podcasters, creator-journalists, and political operatives against a dominant blue backdrop.
By Carolina Abbott Galvão

Recent

See all recent

Latino Lubbock’s Election Day

“You cannot take this particular audience for granted,” Christy Martinez-Garcia, the magazine’s founder and publisher, said.
By Carolina Abbott Galvão

Misread Mandate

Donald Trump never had the authority, or the political support, media moguls seemed to think he did. What’s next for the outlets that capitulated?
By Jem Bartholomew

Political Journalists in Disarray

Midterm missteps, a notable apology, and a sturgeon rescue.
By Bill Grueskin
Sign up for CJR’s daily email

How We Watched the Midterms

Steve Kornacki and Hasan Piker went head-to-head, and Donald Trump called in.
By Ivan L. Nagy

Novaya Gazeta’s Journalism Will Live On

The paper is shutting down. But a new project grants it electronic immortality.
By Joel Simon

Reporting the Backlash

The midterms pushed data centers center stage, as media, activists, and politicians questioned AI’s ever-expanding infrastructure.
By Lindsay Muscato

The Susan Collins Effect

“Part of it is she’s an incumbent, and part of it is it’s an image that’s cultivated by her PR people and by the Maine media to give the impression that she’s something she’s not.”
By Rob Wolfe

Investigative Sports Reporting Kicks Up

Sports desks are disappearing. But some creative, patient journalists are uncovering major scandals.
By Amos Barshad

Putin’s Least Favorite Norwegian Newsroom

A team of Russian journalists cover their country from exile.
By Daniel Shailer

The Access Issue

Inside and Out

Our new special issue on the restrictions, workarounds, glories, and trade-offs of journalistic access.

Not a Ron Burgundy Situation

Jacob Soboroff, MS Now, and reinventing the TV newsmagazine.
By Kyle Paoletta

An Election Uncovered

Tapajós de Fato, a small outlet in Brazil, has stopped covering elections “as a matter of survival.” 
By Marcos Colón

The Case of the ‘Magic Number’

CBS News and the death count in Gaza.
By Amos Barshad

An AI Company Wanted to Buy My Reporting Notes

A “data procurement worker” reached out. I was too curious to resist a meeting about their plans.
By Jules Roscoe

What to Do When Polls Are Weird

Midterm numeracy.
By Ivan L. Nagy

Fake Caroline

Editors are facing an influx of AI-written pitches, including at science publications like mine. What now?
By Tom Zeller Jr.

Reboot

Transformations

How technology is changing journalism.

Remembrance

Israel has killed scores of Palestinian journalists with impunity and waged propaganda campaigns to discredit their work, but a full accounting tells a different story.
By Aseel Mousa, Azmat Khan

‘I’m a Twenty-Five-Year-Old Who Just Bought My Local Newspaper’

A former intern bought Georgia’s Monticello News. Weeks later, he grew subscriptions by 30 percent. 
By Liz Skalka

A War of Attrition

Theodore Boutrous on taking the White House and Pentagon press access cases.
By Ivan L. Nagy

Losing Control

“I’m really fucking busy being the real Chris Hansen,” and other thoughts about Primetime.
By Susie Banikarim

Reporting from Inside

The new book from Evan Gershkovich is not just a prison memoir.
By Joel Simon

The New Boss at the Chattanooga Times Free Press

The paper has let go of most staff and implemented drastic changes. Craig Fuller, now at the helm, loves what he sees. Just don’t chew gum in front of him.
By Riddhi Setty

Politics

Survival Guide

How to keep your head above water as Trump floods the zone.

Richard LA’s Impossible Beat

Independent creator-journalists such as Carlitos Ricardo Parias, known as Richard LA, are especially vulnerable to retaliation—and deportation.
By Carolina Abbott Galvão

How Should We Cover the Climate Story?

Speaking with climate reporters about staying on the beat—because, as Bill McKibben put it, “for better or for worse, by this time next year, there’s no doubt in my mind that climate coverage will be at the forefront.”
By Carolina Abbott Galvão, Ivan L. Nagy, Riddhi Setty

Done and Dusted

With the collapse of the California-led challenge to Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros., the future of an independent CNN hangs in the balance.
By Amos Barshad

I Don’t Want My Trump TV

A day in the life of the booted White House press and the twenty-four-seven propaganda people.
By Betsy Morais

The Blade’s Shocking, Inevitable News

When I joined as a political writer, Toledo’s famed daily was known for its ambitious local newsroom. Now it’s preparing to publish its final issue.
By Liz Skalka

Collateral Damage

Almost no one has seen NAZA, a chilling new documentary. That hasn’t stopped Israel from condemning it.
By Amos Barshad

The Journalism 2050 Issue

Forecasting

Where the wind is blowing the media industry and habits of news consumption.

McClatchy’s Post-Layoff Future

“AI is clearly part of the plan moving forward,” Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee, said. “It’s been part of the plan for quite some time.”
By Riddhi Setty

Keeping Journalism in Russia’s Orbit

Guerrilla reporters, data journalism, and VPNs.
By Ivan L. Nagy

Premium (Inbox) Glossy

The Knowing introduces an all-digital reimagining of classic Black magazines.
By Feven Merid

The Future of Visual Investigations, If We Can’t Trust Our Eyes

Journalists and other experts tell us how, in the age of AI, technology is transforming the work of visual forensics. “We might have to be a little bit more imaginative,” Emily Tripp, of Airwars, says.
By Emily Goligoski, Marisa Mazria Katz, Jake Charles Rees

My 9/11 Job Interview

Just out of journalism school, I entered a new reality—for the press and everything else.
By Nicholas Boston

Continuing Furies

A new book by Rozina Ali asks us to reckon with decades of Islamophobia in the United States and the media’s role in it.
By Aida Alami

International

The Story of Gaza

Journalism confronts a crisis—Israeli attacks, starving children, hostages, mass death—that won’t let up.

What Happened in Lancaster?

The saga of a public radio station, a regional newspaper, the Pennsylvania family that funded them, and an NPR host turned nonprofit executive.
By Carolina Abbott Galvão

Why ABC Self-Censored

In a lawsuit, the network cops to making coverage decisions based on government pressure. It’s a striking admission—and an untested legal strategy.
By Joel Simon

Notes from the Non-League

The Non-League Paper, devoted to the lowest tiers of English soccer, reports on more than a hundred games each week—and has earned a fan base of its own.
By Amos Barshad

Stars and Stripes and Lawsuits

More than six months after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the Pentagon is waging a concurrent war on the American press.
By Ivan L. Nagy

Should the Press ‘Run Toward’ AI?

A new book argues that news organizations should enthusiastically adopt AI to improve their journalism. Critics aren’t so sure.
By Jem Bartholomew

The Shipping News Stars

With the Strait of Hormuz crisis raging, experts in commercial maritime traffic are having a moment.
By Amos Barshad

Synthetic Media

Artificial Intelligence

Productivity, parlor tricks, and persuading people that the truth still matters.

Karen Attiah Is Ready to Go Back to the Washington Post

“If there’s anybody that should feel awkward, it’s going to be the people involved in making this decision,” she says. If the situation doesn’t work out, she may become a martial-arts influencer or a “warrior priestess of some kind for the digital age.” 
By Riddhi Setty

How a Summer of Protests Upended India’s Media

“Celebrity anchors are being replaced by celebrity YouTubers,” Kaushik Raj, an independent journalist, says.
By Tannu Jain

Pangram Dreams of a Slop-Free Future

Max Spero—a cofounder of Pangram, an AI detection tool popular among journalists—asks, “If you’re not going to bother writing your newsletter, why should I read it?”
By Carolina Abbott Galvão

Walking Targets

Movement journalism has been a source of hope. But political attacks and funders’ retrenchment have put it at serious risk.
By Uyiosa Elegon

The 69-Year-Old Rookie

I was a fifty-year newspaper veteran and a journalism professor. Then I joined the Salt Lake Tribune as a junior editor.
By Bill Grueskin

Axios Wants to Save Local News with AI 

“At the end of the day, if someone’s going to pay you for content, you say: Well, how much are you going to pay me?” Jim VandeHei, the chief executive, said of his company’s deal with OpenAI. “If that payment feels like it’s a fair transaction price, you say yes.”
By Issie Lapowsky

Standards and Practices

A New Look at Journalism Ethics

Our series in collaboration with the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security.

Almost Persuaded

Kathleen Kingsbury of the New York Times on Nicholas Kristof and Gaza, her big bet on video, and what makes an opinion piece.
By Kyle Paoletta

Insider Outsider

“If a story is important in another part of the world,” Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal says, “it is important in and of itself.”
By Maurice Oniang’o

Striking Out

The founders of the Pittsburgh Progress want to inject their community-centric publication with a spirit of labor solidarity.
By Riddhi Setty

Feeling It, Big Time

How Tom Cibrowski, the president and executive editor of CBS News, navigates the Bari Weiss era.
By Adam Piore

Revising the Ethics Code

The Society of Professional Journalists is taking a red pencil to its ethics guidelines—the first update since 2014.
By Liz Skalka

All the News While Doing the Dishes

News organizations have embraced AI narrators. But how does artificial mediation change our relationship to a piece of writing?
By Jem Bartholomew

Remembering

Lessons Learned (Or Not)

Have journalists gotten better at covering Trump?

Defusing Misinformation Through Humor

Dave Jorgenson, cofounder of Local News International, on the post-Post life.
By Susie Banikarim

‘The Most Accurate Truth’

After CBS News hit the brakes on a 60 Minutes story about CECOT prison, the League of Latin American Citizens decided it was time to start their own newsroom. Within months, El Grito Media has become a definitive resource.
By Carolina Abbott Galvão

Brand Buying

The battered Sports Illustrated has seen a rising ticket reseller profit off its storied name.
By Amos Barshad

I Tried Investigating a Mysterious Media Company. A Police Report Was Filed Against Me.

Who was in charge—Pleroma, the International Business Times, or something else?
By Riddhi Setty

In a Fast-Moving Crisis, What Is the Role of Journalism?

Community news organizations, enmeshed in an information ecosystem on social media and messaging apps, can verify, clarify, and connect.
By Irene Romulo, Nina Weingrill

How Transparent Should I Be About AI?

Clearing up confusion about how and why to disclose AI use in writing.
By Anika Collier Navaroli
Advertisement

Magazine

Recent Issues

From the Archive

Corridor of Mirrors

The Democratic Convention in Chicago, in August 1968, was surrounded by protesters and made bloody by police violence. Whiteside was on the scene, following along with CBS News.
By Thomas Whiteside