News Meeting

  1. July 20, 2011 02:11 PM

    Summer Reading Club

    Recommend a book for a journalist this summer

    By The Editors

    The days are long, the dogs are panting, and the sun is still prime for shining on the pages of a good summer read. So whether your reading preferences involve snuggling your feet into the hot sand or nestling in next to your air conditioner, the time is upon us to ask our readers once again: What summer reading do...

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  2. July 12, 2011 05:14 PM

    Huffington Post and “Over-Aggregation”

    Where do we draw the line between aggregation and plagiarism?

    By The Editors

    AdAge media columnist Simon Dumenco recently posed a good question to the online news community: “What constitutes unfair -- unethical -- aggregation?”

    The question came up after Dumenco noticed that a Huffington Post writer had cribbed the central idea and supporting factual information from Dumenco’s earlier piece, "Poor Steve Jobs Had to Go Head to Head With Weinergate in...

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  3. June 28, 2011 02:53 PM

    What Should Chris Wallace Have Asked?

    “Flake”-free questions for Michele Bachmann

    By The Editors

    It came about fourteen minutes into Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace’s sixteen-minute interview with presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann. It came after questions (and, to Wallace’s credit, follow-up questions, albeit of varying productivity) about government spending and health care and same-sex marriage and several of Bachmann’s GOP opponents.

    “Finally,” said Wallace:

    [L]et's talk about Michele Bachmann...

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  4. June 22, 2011 12:50 PM

    Summer Movie Club

    What movie would you recommend to a journalist this summer?

    By The Editors

    Whether blasted in a blessedly air-conditioned megaplex, or projected on a roof-deck after dark, movies make a summer. The forthcoming July/August issue of our magazine features reviews of the recent The Bang Bang Club, a fictional portrayal of the real group of war photographers working in South Africa in the nineties, and the documentary Page One: Inside The New York...

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  5. June 14, 2011 05:05 PM

    On Sock Puppets and Best Practices

    How far should news outlets go to verify bloggers’ identities?

    By The Editors

    After some impressive detective work by several journalists, it was revealed early this week that Amina Arraf, the supposed author of blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” was a fictional character created by a forty-year-old straight man in Scotland.

    Tom MacMaster, a sometime fantasy novelist, had created an elaborate online life...

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  6. June 8, 2011 01:55 PM

    What Should Jill Do?

    Offer your advice for The New York Times's incoming executive editor

    By The Editors

    Bill Keller will officially step down from his post as executive editor of The New York Times on Labor Day, the same day Jill Abramson will move into journalism’s most coveted and most complicated role. Already, profilers and commentators are dissecting Keller’s time—read our Clint Hendler’s thoughts here—and musing over what the Abramson era...

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  7. May 31, 2011 04:58 PM

    Campaign Strategies

    How should the media determine the sort of coverage a candidate deserves?

    By The Editors

    In one of the posts on Herman Cain's candidacy discussed on Campaign Desk Tuesday, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight calls for more discussion about the quadrennial issue of how much coverage the press should devote to different presidential candidates:

    This is a question, however, that needs to be discussed more openly. What are the appropriate criteria by which...

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  8. May 24, 2011 12:49 PM

    Words We Shouldn’t Say

    Name some clichéd terms that news sources should avoid

    By The Editors

    Last Friday New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren posted a list of “words we don’t say” to the magazine’s 6th Floor blog. The list was a leftover from former New York editor Kurt Andersen—he had left it tacked to the office bulletin board back in 1997—and contains words and phrases he felt were hackneyed, over-used, or, in...

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  9. May 17, 2011 12:44 PM

    Graduation Time

    What should we tell journalism’s next generation?

    By The Editors

    It’s graduation season and journalism schools across the country are spitting out classes of elated and exhausted journalists into the big bad media market. At ceremonies from UC Irvine to NYU, commencement speakers—most of whom rose up through very different worlds than that which exists today—are calming the next generation’s fears and stoking their fires. There was Wolf...

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  10. May 10, 2011 01:09 PM

    Which News Sites Are Best at Engaging their Readers?

    And which ones are only interested in fly-by clicks?

    By The Editors

    In the conclusion to the report published on CJR today, “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” co-authors Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves offer a number of recommendations to news organizations grappling with the economics of producing news in the digital age. One of their first suggestions is...

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  11. May 3, 2011 03:52 PM

    Where Did You Get Your bin Laden News?

    And now, where do you go for analysis?

    By The Editors

    Sometimes the news is so big you just have to have the details right away, and the death of Osama bin Laden is a case in point. With a story like this, we’ll be hungry for the details for days, including reporting on some complicated questions. (Did torture help find him, or not? What did Pakistan’s military really know about...

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  12. April 26, 2011 12:16 PM

    What Are America’s Most Essential Magazines?

    Help CJR create an alternative to AdWeek’s “Hot List”

    By The Editors

    Michael Wolff’s revamped AdWeek published its thirty-first annual “Hot List” yesterday—its ranking of the top ten magazines of the moment. Number one, of course (?!), was Hearst’s Food Network Magazine, which nabbed the heaviest crown for refusing to take itself too seriously while cooking up a 1.3 million circulation in just two years. (Somewhere under a...

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  13. April 20, 2011 12:35 PM

    Be a Pulitzer Judge

    To which finalist would you give the Breaking News prize?

    By The Editors

    On Monday, the Pulitzer Prize Board handed out awards in 13 out of 14 categories for journalism. No award was given, for the first time in Pulitzer history, in the Breaking News Reporting category.

    The non-awarding of this award led the Associated Press's report on the Pulitzers (headline: "No breaking news Pulitzer in year of disasters"):

    ...

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  14. April 12, 2011 01:34 PM

    HuffPo, AOL Face Class-Action Lawsuit

    Do unpaid bloggers have a case? Or, even, your empathy?

    By The Editors

    Upon the sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million in February, CJR's Lauren Kirchner recalled that AOL settled a 1999 class-action lawsuit with unpaid "volunteers" for $15 million, and she pondered whether "a similar case [could] be brought against the AOL/Huffington Post behemoth, today, by the thousands of unpaid Huffington Post bloggers."

    This morning came...

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