Columbia Journalism Review
-
What did we learn from coverage of Romney’s Philly school visit?
By Ken Knelly PENNSYLVANIA — At first glance, Mitt Romney's campaign appearance last Thursday at a West Philadelphia charter school seemed a bit odd. Candidates generally go where the votes are, and Philadelphia voters delivered 83 perce...
-
A Grand Bargain on entitlements?
By Trudy Lieberman To the average person, Nancy Pelosi’s May 20 interview with George Stephanopoulos probably seemed like standard procedure for a Sunday morning talk show—another politician slipping and sliding around the questions. It ...
-
On Journatic, and making it in Hyperlocalville
By Brian Farnham In late April, a six-year-old digital startup called Journatic struck a deal with a 165-year-old newspaper company to take over its online community news operations. When the deal was reported on hyperlocal watchdog site...
-
Stories I'd like to see
By Steven Brill In his weekly “Stories I’d like to see” column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters...
-
It's 2012 already: why is opinion writing still mostly male?
By Erika Fry “Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man.” I had Sue Horton, the Op-ed and Sunday opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times on the phone one morning in early March. She was flipping through her slush pile of op-eds, calling out the gend...
-
Open Bar
By The Editors Year opened 1995 Owner James “Raff” Rafferty (born in Manchester, England) Distinguishing features Next door to the Santa Barbara News-Press. Live soccer—excuse us, football—from England and Europe in the mornings. An exh...
-
Brief Encounters
By James Boylan Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power | By Andrew Nagorski | Simon & Schuster | 385 pages, $28 As Adolf Hitler trans-formed himself from a failed regional politician to the most feared tyrant of the ...
-
The Kickstarter Chronicles
By Alysia Santo Each week, dozens of journalistic endeavors turn to Kickstarter for funding. Pitching media projects to this online community brings another meaning to the concept “public interest journalism”; success depends on how intr...
-
The private-equity problem with Romney and GS Technologies
By Ryan Chittum It's seriously grating to see an Eton and Oxford-educated ambassador's son who works for the Council on Foreign Relations rant about Obama's "populist" attack on private equity. That's Sebastian Mallaby, who takes to the ...
-
Evolved for exhibitionism?
By Curtis Brainard “Sound the evo-psych bullshit klaxon!” British science journalist Ed Yong tweeted on Thursday. He was right to be concerned. Yong’s warning pertained to an op-ed at Wired Science by Ogi Ogas. Jumping off from the strin...
-
David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, on the Times-Picayune cuts
By David Simon It's grievous what is happening to regional newspapers, especially. But the whole industry will continue to collapse until everyone swallows hard and goes behind a paywall. The New York Times has shown us the end of the be...
-
Dial back the outrage
By Emily T. Metzgar I frequently teach a large introductory class titled “Foundations of Journalism and Mass Communication.” One section of the course addresses international news in the United States as well as global media trends and p...
-
Darts and Laurels
By The Editors Much ado On March 21, The Orange County Register published a blog post, based on the sworn affidavit of a process server, alleging that Julio Perez, a California state Assembly candidate, did not live where he said, or w...
-
Sorkin's Glass-Steagall straw man
By Ryan Chittum Here's the headline for Andrew Ross Sorkin's column on Tuesday about Glass-Steagall and the financial crisis: Reinstating an Old Rule Is Not a Cure for Crisis No kiddin'. Let's see what else isn't a "cure for crisis": &m...
-
Audit notes: Buffett on newspapers, Times-Picayune, SEC lets Lehman go
By Ryan Chittum This is the most hopeful thing I've read about the business of newspapers in a long, long time: I'll quote at length from Warren Buffett's letter to editors and publishers of his newly expanded portfolio of papers: Berksh...
-
Herald’s Caputo dives deep on diverging polls
By Brian E. Crowley FLORIDA — Voters here have reason to be confused this week as they look at two polls, coming out one day apart, with one showing Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney in the state and the other showing Romney leading Obama...
-
Many stations don't factcheck super PAC ads: survey
By Justin Peters Many local television stations do not consistently evaluate the accuracy of the political ads they air, according to survey results released Tuesday by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. As Annenberg director Kathleen H...
-
Chicago police respect public’s right to record
By Alysia Santo When it comes to preventing citizens from recording police, Illinois has the most severe restrictions in the US. State law explicitly says that citizens may face up to 15 years in jail for filming an on-duty police office...
-
The Times-Picayune cuts staff and print runs
By Kira Goldenberg The news hit late Wednesday night that the storied New Orleans Times-Picayune, the newspaper that served as a community rock in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, will be cutting its print run to three times a week an...
-
Guiding Starr
By Michael Schudson and Katherine Fink Paul Starr’s short essay, “An Unexpected Crisis: The News Media in Postindustrial Democracies” in the International Journal of Press/Politics (2012), is recommended reading, especially the second pa...
-
The new medical-credit racket
By Trudy Lieberman Reporter Lindy Washburn, at The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, has revealed the latest shenanigans of unscrupulous members of the medical profession out to make a buck. Washburn, who is something of an expert on ...
-
Audit notes: No more daily in New Orleans, McClatchy, private equity
By Ryan Chittum If ever a town needed a newspaper, it's New Orleans. But David Carr reports that Newhouse is preparing big layoffs at the Times-Picayune, which will no longer be a daily newspaper. Newhouse Newspapers, which owns the Time...
-
Reparative journalism
By Curtis Brainard It’s not often that a journalist convinces a prominent scientist to recant a controversial study that he has tenaciously defended for 11 years, but that’s just what Gabriel Arana did last month. While working on an art...
-
Outrage angle covered—now how about those gas price claims?
By Liz Cox Barrett Last week, the Denver Post ran a short “local news” piece headlined, “Political billboards in Colorado use energy policy to fuel debate.” The debate thus fueled (and here covered by the Post) is not, mind you, about en...
-
Facebook fiasco
By Ryan Chittum We're starting to get a better picture of what happened with Facebook on Friday and in the run-up to its IPO, and it's not pretty. The repercussions have already begun, with a class-action lawsuit already filed against Fa...
-
How Gawker wants to monetize comments
By Felix Salmon Back in November, I grappled with the fact that online display ads in general, and banner ads in particular, are clearly not working very well; my suggested alternative was for brand advertisers to embrace the power of th...
-
Nonfiction’s 'meta' moment
By David Riedel Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction | Edited by Jill Talbot | University Of Iowa Press | 242 pages, $39.95 The word “meta” has become an inescapable part of the pop culture zeitgeist. In early May, the Boston Glob...
-
A master’s missteps
By Ted Conover Celebrated for his reportage about world-changing events and leaders of his day—the Iranian Revolution, Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia—the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski has...
-
Audit notes: Facebook disclosure, Facebook value, soft corruption
By Ryan Chittum Business Insider's Henry Blodget, who knows a thing or two about analyst/IPO scandals, writes that Facebook and/or its bankers could be in trouble for not disclosing material information to the public about its financial ...
-
When Big Data is Bad Data
By LynNell Hancock Disks of never-before-released data from the Department of Education landed with a befuddling thud in New York City’s newsrooms at the end of February. The swarm of spreadsheets had promised to provide a single ranking...
-
What's the swingiest state of them all?
By Mary Winter COLORADO — The term “swing state” is bandied about constantly in an election year, often without a clear explanation of what it means. But two recent articles in the national press offer a way to understand the term—and bo...
-
The Ford Foundation’s unprecedented grant to The Los Angeles Times
By Michael Meyer On Thursday, Los Angeles Times editor Davan Maharaj announced that his paper, once a profit engine for multi-billion dollar corporate owners and still one of the most powerful news organizations in the country, will rece...
-
Stories I'd like to see
By Steven Brill In his weekly “Stories I’d Like to See” column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters...
-
Exit Interview
By Erika Fry In 1979, Brian Lamb, then the head of Cablevision’s DC bureau, achieved what now seems unimaginable: He convinced Congress and cable executives to back his plan to create a nonprofit that would broadcast the proceedings of ...
-
That’s that, part one
By Merrill Perlman “President Obama said Wednesday he would go to Europe.” Is Wednesday the day he is going to Europe? Or the day he announced his travel plans? A little word can make that sentence clearer: “that.” But its placement can ...
-
Audit Notes: Facebook IPO edition
By Ryan Chittum I'm happy to say I was wrong (and Felix was right) in guessing that retail investors would jump into Facebook shares and push it significantly higher. The stock stayed even on Friday only with the massive support of its u...
-
The Pulitzer Prize luncheon, storified
By Kira Goldenberg The Pulitzer Prizes were officially presented to recipients on Monday afternoon at Columbia University's Low Library rotunda. See attendee reactions in (reverse chronological order) real time below: [View the story "Pu...
-
The Chicago Tribune lights up the flame-retardant industry
By Ryan Chittum A tremendous Chicago Tribune investigation into flame-retardant chemical manufacturers shows how they push their poisons on an unsuspecting public despite repeated findings that their products do nothing to prevent or del...
-
The western frontier
By Curtis Brainard American media may cluster in the east, but the west is still the land of pioneers, even in the domains of multimedia and long-form science journalism. Two young trailblazers—Quest, a multimedia science and environment...
-
The over-covered image war
By Brendan Nyhan The message war in the presidential election got underway in earnest last week, with the Obama campaign releasing a new attack ad and super PACs on both sides announcing their own big buys. If you believe some prominent ...
-
Medicare and the $500 billion bogeyman
By Trudy Lieberman Republicans and their allies are dusting off an old $500 billion deception about Medicare, trying once more to scare seniors into voting their way. The logic on this one turns truth on its head, but some in the media h...
-
The re-entry problem
By Alan Prendergast Over the course of eight days in 1978, a 15-year-old terror named Willie Bosket managed to satisfy his curiosity about what it felt like to kill someone. He did this by purchasing a .22 handgun from his mother’s boyfr...
-
Murdoch may sell his British papers
By Emily Bell News International, the UK outpost of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, might be preparing to sell off or isolate its scandal-struck newspaper titles, according to a report from rival newspaper The Daily Telegraph. The Tel...
-
You have a right to remain recording
By Alysia Santo On January 31, officers from the Miami-Dade and City of Miami Police Departments donned riot gear and headed to Government Center, in the heart of downtown Miami, to evict the Occupy protesters who had been camping there ...
-
The future of media is social
By Kira Goldenberg The Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU hosted I Want Media’s fifth annual “Future of Media” forum on Friday afternoon. Speakers included Adweek executive editor James Cooper, BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti, Jezebel...
-
A game of telephone fools the Times
By Ryan Chittum The New York Times posts a nasty correction on its Sunday op-ed by William Deresiewicz, who asserted that a study had found that 10 percent of people on Wall Street were "clinical psychopaths." That 10-percent-psycho balo...
-
What Warren Buffett sees in local newspapers
By Justin Peters On Thursday, Warren Buffett announced he will spend $142 million to purchase 63 local and regional newspapers from the Richmond, Virginia-based Media General chain--and the Berkshire Hathaway chairman says he's ready to ...
-
The entirely predictable failure of Americans Elect
By Brendan Nyhan On Thursday, the board of Americans Elect folded its presidential nominating process after the set of declared candidates repeatedly failed to muster the support required to receive the group's backing. Despite spending ...
-
The Obama camp serves up a Bain story
By Jay Jones NEVADA — One of the moments in the 2012 presidential race that we all know was coming arrived this week: the Obama campaign launched its first round of attacks on Mitt Romney over his tenure at Bain Capital. Unsurprisingly, ...
-
Title Search
By Jay Woodruff Susan Rits is a User Experience (UX) Designer who worked at Time Warner, Fox, and Google. She is founder and CEO of Zazum, based in San Francisco. Jay Woodruff interviewed her in March. Give us your Tweetable definitio...
