Cover Story

  1. January 9, 2012 06:00 AM

    A Narrowed Gaze

    How the business press forgot the rest of us

    By Dean Starkman

    Steve Lipin didn’t fit the profile of a transformative media figure when he took over the mergers-and-acquisitions beat for The Wall Street Journal in 1995. His look was studious, his manner remarkably affable and low key, given the stress of his new job. His rise had not been particularly meteoric.

    He had started in 1985 at...

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  2. September 12, 2011 12:00 PM

    The Scandal Beat

    Does the press’s obsession with rule-breaking get in the way of real reform of college sports?

    By Daniel Libit






    In December, Ohio State University suspended five of its football players for violating the rules governing intercollegiate athletics by exchanging their Buckeye memorabilia for various forms of payment, including the handiwork of a local Columbus tattoo parlor. Over the next few months, the digging of media outlets near and far pried...

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  3. July 11, 2011 06:00 AM

    News for the World

    A proposal for a globalized era: an American World Service

    By Lee C. Bollinger

    I would be surprised if in future decades, people did not say that the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was the period in which the shape of the modern world was determined, and that two primary forces did most of the shaping: the spread of capitalism and free market economies, and the invention...

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  4. July 7, 2011 06:00 AM

    Big Bird to the Rescue?

    Public television remains largely indifferent to calls to boost serious news coverage

    By Elizabeth Jensen

    Representative Earl Blumenauer stood before a microphone outside the Capitol building in February to make a passionate plea for continued federal funding of public broadcasting. The Oregon Democrat argued that news, specifically community news, is “not commercially viable. The public needs to be there.”

    But in making his case, the bow-tied Congressman stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a life-sized, fuzzy-suited Arthur,...

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  5. July 5, 2011 02:00 PM

    The Future of Public Television

    Can Public Television News Step Up?

    By The Editors

    Television has long been our most popular news medium, the format that unites us and brings the world to our living rooms each night. Public television news is cherished by many in America, even though—resource-starved, politically beaten, and reportorially unambitious—it has always danced a step behind.

    In the following pieces, we try to envision what public television could be,...

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  6. July 5, 2011 02:00 PM

    Signal and Noise

    Trying to follow global news in America, a newcomer finds that something is missing

    By Emily Bell

    If you wished to see a vivid illustration of how the broadcast news media in the US are perceived in 2011, you could do worse than watch President Obama tell jokes.

    At the White House correspondents’ dinner he delivered a left and a right, so to speak. First, he played his “official birth video,” a clip from Disney’s...

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  7. May 5, 2011 08:30 AM

    Breathing Room

    Toward a new Arab media

    By Lawrence Pintak

    Before there was Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or even Al Jazeera, there was Hama, Syria. It was 1982 and an anti-government protest was put down with ferocious violence. The Syrian government simply destroyed whole sections of the city, leaving at least ten thousand people dead. But the slaughter went unreported in that closed society. Those of us trying...

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  8. May 5, 2011 08:30 AM

    English Lesson

    The moment has arrived for Al Jazeera English, except in the US

    By Lawrence Pintak

    [This is a sidebar article to the May/June 2011 cover story, "Breathing Room: Toward a new Arab media," which you can read here.]

    Back in November 2008, I skewered Al Jazeera English’s live coverage of election night in the US in an article for CJR.org. “It was a bit like watching a local college TV...

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  9. March 8, 2011 06:00 AM

    Tested

    Covering schools in the age of micro-measurement

    By LynNell Hancock

    Eleven New York City education reporters were huddling on e-mail last October 20, musing over ways to collectively pry a schedule of school closings out of a stubborn press office, when the chatter stopped cold. Word had filtered into their message bins that the city was about to release a set of spreadsheets showing performance scores...

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  10. January 6, 2011 08:00 AM

    Crossfire in Kandahar

    Afghanistan’s new journalists navigate an ambiguous war

    By Vanessa M. Gezari

    One hot night in September, less than a week after Afghanistan’s parliamentary election, soldiers from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force arrived at the Kandahar home of Mohammad Nader. Nader, a cameraman for the Qatar-based satellite channel Al Jazeera, was sleeping shirtless on the floor near his front door. The door stood ajar so a breeze could blow in. He...

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  11. October 29, 2010 03:12 PM

    Reboot

    An open letter to the FCC about a media policy for the digital age

    By Steve Coll

    Editor's Note: On June 9, 2011, the FCC's Future of Media Project released a report on the state of local accountability journalism and the governmental policies that foster or inhibit that journalism. In the November/December 2010 issue of CJR, Steve Coll penned this open letter to the report's lead author, Steven Waldman.


    Steven Waldman

    Future of...

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  12. September 14, 2010 06:00 AM

    The Hamster Wheel

    Why running as fast as we can is getting us nowhere

    By Dean Starkman

    “Newsrooms have shrunk by 25% in three years.” —Project for Excellence in Journalism, “State of the News Media 2010”

    “A large majority (75%) of editors said their story counts . . . had either increased or remained the same during the past three years.” —PEJ, “The Changing Newsroom,” July 2008

    “We’re all wire service reporters now.” —Theresa Agovino, Crain’s New...

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  13. July 13, 2010 06:00 AM

    A Second Chance

    How mobile devices can absolve journalism of its original sin: giving away online content

    By Curtis Brainard

    1 Talk to people who are into mobile reading devices like the Kindle and the iPad, and a scene from the movie Minority Report tends to come up. Tom Cruise, who is on the run from the law, is on a train. Next to him, a man reads USA Today on what looks and acts like broadsheet...

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  14. May 18, 2010 08:00 AM

    Look at Me!

    A writer’s search for journalism in the age of branding

    By Maureen Tkacik

    When I was nineteen and chose to accept the creeping suspicion that I would turn out to be a writer and, by extension, chronically deficient of funds, I made the fiscally prudent decision to drop out of school. I still worked on the college newspaper to which I had sacrificed so much of my grade-point average, writing a weekly...

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