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Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - Nov. 06 - Journalism and curation—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine where the one ends and the other begins. The chicken/egg relationship between the two solidified into conventional wisdom during the aftermath of the Iranian election this summer, when journalists—mostly barred from shoe-leather reporting and other, more traditional methods of newsgathering—were forced to play the role of social-media editors. In the...

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The Reconstruction of American Journalism

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Leonard Downie, Jr., Michael Schudson - Oct. 19 (Special Report) - American journalism is at a transformational moment, in which the era of dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions is rapidly giving way to one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed. As almost

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Disappearing Iraq

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Jane Arraf - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - Ah, the happy world of Iraq, as seen through U.S. military press releases. Iraq could be exploding—in fact, parts of it still regularly are—but the press-release view would still be that of policemen graduating, officials cutting ribbons, and grateful citizens leading security forces and their U.S. advisers to weapons caches. The few press releases that do bear any relation to the reality we reporters see on the ground (“Iraqi Special Operations Forces Continue Operations Despite Budget Challenges”) are almost instantly recalled. The regular background briefings and press conferences that once helped put the ongoing violence into context are so last year. In a country with 130,000 U.S. troops fighting a war that still costs tens of billions of dollars a month, the military might as well be invisible. And for the most part, it seems to want it that way.

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How Will Comprehensive Reform Improve Health Care for Americans?

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - Sep. 05 (Special Report) - Far too many Americans have no health insurance or are underinsured. And, meanwhile, far too large a percentage of America’s Gross National Product goes toward health care. Our health care system is inadequate-- yet it costs too much, threatening the economy. How do we cover more people yet bring the costs down? That is the problem that all of America,...

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The Grave Dancer’s Folly

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - Jul. 22 (Editorial) - Despite the tedious posturing of both Web triumphalists (Jeff Jarvis to the Newspaper Association of America: “You blew it!”) and ideologues on either end of the political spectrum (two recent reader comments on CJR.org: “The mainstream media has sold out to our corporate controlled Congress,” and “Newspapers deserve to die like Pravda and Izveztia [sic]”), nobody is winning the debate...

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What's a Fair Share In the Age of Google?

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Peter Osnos - Jul. 15 (Special Report) - The buzz inside Google is overwhelmingly positive about what the company does and how we will all benefit from the results—including the embattled denizens of newspapers and magazines who increasingly see Google as an enabler of their demise. Barely a decade ago, Google received its first $25 million investment, based on search technology developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the company’s cofounders. By the time it went public just five years later, “Google” was a verb. Today it is the dominant force in what has turned out to be the central organizing principle of the Internet’s impact on our lives: the search function and the accompanying links, keywords, and advertising that make sense and commerce out of the vast universe of information and entertainment on the Web. Google is as important today as were Microsoft, IBM, and the original AT&T, linchpins of our culture and economy, in the development of modern computation and communications.

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Where’d the Money Go? : CJR

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Greg Marx - Jul. 08 (Opinion) - The New York Times today offers a dispatch on the health care debate from Maine, home of an endangered species: moderate Republican senators. The piece offers a solid look at the debate playing out among different constituencies to win the hearts and minds of Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, whose votes may determine whether key features of the reform proposal—such as a “public option” that would compete with private health care insurers—survive. And it notes that while Snowe is so far the only Senate Republican to back a public option, Collins has “expressed reservations” about such a move. But it leaves out one interesting tidbit. There’s nothing unusual in one of a state’s major companies making donations to its elected officials, of course, and Collins isn’t slavishly bound to her donors’ interests. (In fact, the story quotes one advocate who thinks the biggest influence on Collins’s vote may be Snowe’s.) But as the press tracks the health care debate, it should follow the money—and report what it finds—at every step.

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Groundhog Day

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Trudy Lieberman - Jul. 06 (News Analysis) - Why this year's health-care debate sounds like the one in 1993

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Science Journalism's Crystal Ball

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Cristine Russell - May. 07 (News Analysis) - In covering a crisis, it is crucial to quickly separate reliable information from speculation and hype—or, in the case of the fast-moving swine flu story, an epidemic from a pandemic. It’s easier, of course, if you have strong science and medical reporters on board.

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Obama and State Secrets? Shhh… : CJR

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Clint Hendler - Apr. 11 (News Analysis) - But on Friday, that new department sought to have the case dismissed by relying, in part, on a broad reading of a legal principle oft invoked by the Bush department, that the federal government could essentially stop legal proceedings by claiming that any litigation of the case would reveal state secrets. This is a big deal, but so far the story has received little light outside of generally liberal leaning portions of the media.

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The Sarcastic Times

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Alissa Quart - Mar. 13 (Opinion) - ... what really makes the show special is how it embodies the rise of what I think of as sarcasm news. More and more news programs are likely to go absurdist in the coming months and years. As faith in and loyalty to traditional anchors wither, one can even hear ironic Maddowian intonations creeping into the delivery of CNN’s not-so-funny anchor Campbell Brown on her new show.

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Get Off the Bus

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Amanda Michel - Mar. 05 (Special Report) - Collectively, we could do what a single reporter or traditional news organization could not. We dispatched people to report on dozens of events happening simultaneously around the country. We distributed research tasks among hundreds of volunteers, instead of a handful of paid reporters working full-time for weeks. Ground-level access, networked intelligence, and distributed labor became our editorial mainstays. More than twelve thousand people eventually signed up to participate in one way or another, including seventeen hundred writers. With such numbers, Mayhill Fowler’s Bittergate story—or something like it—was almost inevitable.

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The George Will Affair

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Curtis Brainard - Feb. 26 (News Analysis) - Thought the dust kicked up by George Will’s February 15 column in The Washington Post, “Dark Green Doomsayers,” had settled? Think again. On Friday, the Post will run a second column by Will addressing the widespread criticism he received for the last one. And while his editor, Fred Hiatt, defends both columns to CJR, the climate world is beside itself, and the case raises important questions about journalistic evidence and inference. In his first column, Will attempted to argue that predictions of dire, planetary impacts—drought, sea-level rise, etc.—caused by global warming are nothing but paranoid hype. Will used a number of misleading arguments, however. He misrepresented scientific evidence about the state of global sea ice and he resurrected a long-debunked argument about a scientific consensus on prolonged global cooling in the mid-20th century. A wide variety of scientists, journalists, bloggers, and pundits has refuted Will’s arguments many times over in the week and a half since. A comprehensive list of those rebuttals, including an early entry from CJR, can be found here.

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Grand Experiment: A Public Editor for Education

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Megan Garber - Feb. 08 (Interview) - As our newsrooms shrink, journalists working the education beat are often among the hardest hit. Not only are they working with fewer resources, but, due to newsroom restructuring, education writers often answer to editors who don’t fully understand the bureaucratic nuances of the school systems. To combat this problem, the Education Writers Association announced in December the creation of a new position, a Public Editor, to serve as an additional resource for education journalists. This week, the EWA announced the hiring of Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post education reporter and currently a freelance writer and book author (see her CJR essay about why she left the Post to write books, here), to fill the unique new role.

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Day One: New FOIA Rules

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Clint Hendler - Jan. 22 (News Analysis) - In restoring the Reno standard—a move that CJR, among many other voices, called for—on his first full day in office and via such a high profile legal instrument, Obama has struck a quick and prominent victory for government openness. Let’s hope it’s one of many to come.

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Johnny Jones 2.0

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Megan Garber - Jan. 15 (Special Report) - GlobalPost’s editorial agility—you decide, we report—is echoed in its anatomy. A lack of legacy infrastructure (foreign bureaus, printing presses, print distribution costs, etc.) means that, while “a lot of newsrooms are struggling to retrofit…..[w]e can create this for the web right from the start,” Sennott told NextNewsroom’s Chris O’Brien. And also that individual GlobalPost correspondents—armed with portable video cameras, still cameras, and audio recorders in addition to their pens and notepads—will be able to offer “a sui generis take on the wider world,” as The Phoenix’s Adam Reilly had it. Resources both physical and financial can thus be channeled directly toward GlobalPost’s primary goal: being there, and telling people what it’s like. “It’s a different structure than most traditional media outlets,” Beatblogging (NewAssignment’s beat-focused blog) notes. It’s “a flatter, nimbler structure that should allow the Global Post to add more correspondents where demand is high.”

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The enviro beat gets even lonelier

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Grist - By Kate Sheppard - Dec. 04 (News Report) - many observers are justifiably concerned that this is the worst time to be cutting back on reporters and producers with knowledge on and experience in covering these issues.

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Above the Fold: Complex Analysis

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Charles Kaiser - Dec. 02 (Opinion) - Is there any limit to the shamelessness of NBC News? That is one of several questions sparked by David Barstow’s 5,000-word assault against the military-industrial complex in general and “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex” in particular—the one owned and operated by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey...The networks reacted to that Times story with a stunning wall of silence.

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Overload!

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Bree Nordenson - Nov. 19 (Special Report) - The idea that news consumers, even young ones, are overloaded should hardly come as a surprise. The information age is defined by output: we produce far more information than we can possibly manage, let alone absorb. Before the digital era, information was limited by our means to contain it. Publishing was restricted by paper and delivery costs; broadcasting was circumscribed by available frequencies and airtime. The Internet, on the other hand, has unlimited capacity at near-zero cost. There are more than 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites today—a number that is expanding at a rate of approximately ten thousand an hour. Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day. Say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the exabyte, five of which are worth 37,000 Libraries of Congress. In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 exabytes of digital data, the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By 2010, it is estimated that this number will increase to 988. Pick your metaphor: we’re drowning, buried, snowed under.

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Race in the Race

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Columbia Journalism Review - By Megan Garber, Eric Deggans - Nov. 04 (Interview) - I think white people especially think that racism is just calling someone a nigger, or when you refuse to sit next to somebody because they’re black. But racism is also when you remove their individual accomplishments, and you look at everything they do through the prism of race. And what bothers me about Obama is that saying that about him—that the white Democrat would be more ahead in the polls—is robbing him of any individual credit.

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CJR: What Can You Buy For $700 Billion?

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - Sep. 28 (Opinion) - For a better perspective on just how massive this bailout really is, check out Zephyr Teachout's post yesterday on techPresident:

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Public Policy Matters After All

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Dean Starkman - Sep. 16 (Opinion) - ... our pals in the media&business press, political press, US Weekly--are treating this calamity like it was Hurricane Ike or some reenactment of the story of the Golden Calf. Public policy must matter at least somewhat. Otherwise, why do people pay so much attention to politics?

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CJR: Boiler Room

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Dean Starkman - Sep. 16 (News Analysis) - It seems to me that well into Year II of the Panic, the business press is in the process of making the same mistake it made in the run-up to the debacle: focusing on esoteric Wall Street concerns and ignoring the simplest, most basic, but most important one--the breathtaking corruption that overran the U.S. lending industry, including and especially the brand names, and the extent to which Wall Street drove that corruption.

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Wall Street Sank Freddie and Fannie

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Dean Starkman - Sep. 09 (Opinion) - Wall Street dominated the subprime market, which crashed the credit market, which crashed the asset values of Freddie and Fannie, obliterating their (very thin) capital bases and leading us to this moment. Listen, you'll get no elegies from me for these government-sponsored candy stores. It's clear they used their taxpayer-supported advantages in the financial markets to keep their regulators at bay and buy protection from Congress. That stinks. The Wall Street Journal today smartly reminds readers of the staggering size of the GSEs' lobbying bill--$170 million over ten years. Ponder that one for a second. As their time was running out, they spent $3.5 million in the first quarter alone on forty-two lobbying firms. That's $83,000 a piece-- probably enough to pay the sushi bills.

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The Speedy Biden News Cycle

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Megan Garber - Aug. 26 (News Analysis) - the backlash, I'd argue, may have to do with the particulars of the announcement of his selection: the hype-building delay, the ample time given for reporters to analyze the merits of other candidates, the semi-letdown of learning that the Guy Everyone Thought Would Be the Nominee was, in fact, the nominee.

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