Editorial
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December 1, 2010 03:56 PM
Editor’s Note
Congratulations to our CJR editors for their book deals and promotions
In the future, I am asking everyone on CJR’s staff to hide their light under a bushel. Otherwise, people may notice their excellence, and—poof—they’re gone. For example:
• Somebody at Harper’s Magazine noticed that James Marcus, our editor at large, has been producing a classy and illuminating Ideas & Reviews section of the Columbia Journalism Review, and hired...
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November 2, 2010 08:00 AM
Escape the Silos
How the press can help rebuild the American conversation
In his wonderful book, The Earl of Louisiana, A. J. Liebling takes many a detour on his way to explaining that state, and in one of them he talks food. Specifically, he asks why food is so great in New Orleans and so bad sixty miles or so to the north. More specifically, he discusses PoBoys.
Liebling...
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September 30, 2010 08:00 AM
What We’ve Sown
The nation needs better coverage of the Farm Bill
The debate over the 2012 Farm Bill is already under way. Collin Peterson, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, conducted a series “field hearings” in farm country earlier this year to gather input from the public, and he hopes to have a bill on the president’s desk by the end of 2011.
We applaud the early start on...
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July 2, 2010 02:50 PM
Shield Abuse
A bogus argument stretches a good law to the breaking point
We like shield laws. They encourage the flow of information by allowing reporters to promise anonymity to sources, without fear of subpoenas. We believe in freedom of information laws, too. They let the public in on public business. In a case we’re involved in, New York State is cynically pitting the former against the latter, in a way that...
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May 3, 2010 04:03 PM
The Hands That Feed
Managing conflicts of interest in the era of nonprofit journalism
The need to manage real and perceived conflicts of interest, and the self-censorship that can accompany them, has always been a part of journalism, whether it was a question of angering a major advertiser or exposing the shady dealings of the publisher’s golf buddy. With the emergence of nonprofit news outlets, from ProPublica to the St. Louis Beacon, the...
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March 23, 2010 08:00 AM
The Unconquered
A grassroots effort to keep journalism’s mission alive
In late October 2005, Dan Grech returned home to Miami after two months spent covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for public radio’s Marketplace—just in time for Hurricane Wilma’s arrival in south Florida. He slept on the floor of his office, and when he finally reached his apartment it was uninhabitable—an industrial air-conditioner from an adjacent building had been...
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February 2, 2010 06:38 PM
More Than a Job
The emotional toll of journalism’s ‘transition’
The American Newsroom photograph in our January/February 2009 issue is of a Pittsburgh Post-Gazettereporter seated at a desk that groans beneath piles of papers, files, and books. Hanging in the center of it all is a sign that reads: “You are not here to merely make a living.” With all due respect, it is not a sign likely to...
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November 10, 2009 08:00 AM
A Helping Hand
The case for (smart) government support of journalism
When in September President Obama said he would be “happy to look” at congressional proposals designed to help the beleaguered newspaper industry, the president’s throwaway line provoked a flurry of articles about how government help for newspapers would compromise editorial integrity and stifle innovation and competition rising from the digital frontier—and wouldn’t save the doomed newsrooms anyway....
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September 9, 2009 08:00 AM
Truth? Yes, Sir!
Why we need a clearer view of both our wars
General William Tecumseh Sherman, like a number of military leaders through history, despised journalists. Tom Curley, president and CEO of The Associated Press, noted in a recent speech that a reporter once appealed to Sherman in the name of truth, but didn’t get far. “We don’t want the truth told about things here,” Sherman replied. “That’s what we don’t want....
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July 21, 2009 08:00 AM
The Grave Dancer’s Folly
Blaming newspapers for their plight is a waste of precious time
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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May 16, 2009 08:00 AM
All Together Now
Journalism's collaborative future
Over the last year, a number of news outlets have done what has traditionally been anathema to journalists: collaborate with the competition. From Florida to Maine, Ohio to Texas, newspapers (mostly) are sharing content, merging bureaus, and consolidating printing operations. The efforts that have garnered headlines, though, have a whiff of desperation about them—if not for the severity of the...
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March 26, 2009 08:00 AM
Reasons to Believe
Journalism's search for a support system
There is a lot of death talk around journalism lately. A case in point that stuck in our craw was Michael Hirschorn’s recent Atlantic piece about The New York Times: the Gray Lady might expire, he predicted, by May. We doubt it. But more alarming, to us and others, was the article’s casual understatement of the meaning of such a...
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January 20, 2009 08:00 AM
Let There Be Light
How President Obama should reopen our government
Over many years, Americans have come to embrace the idea that democracy suffers when the work of government is excessively secret—the people are shut out, corruption and cynicism thrive, and accountability wanes. Yet President Bush and Vice President Cheney have run an administration in which the executive’s lust for power outstripped the public’s right to know. One of the most...
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Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Q&A;: Randy Lovely, Editor and Vice President of The Arizona Republic “To us, all the victims are equally important because they are residents of our state.”
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