Darts and Laurels
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January 5, 2012 05:00 PM
Darts and Laurels
Univision, The Miami Herald, and Marco Rubio, the GOP's rising star
In December 1987, federal police in Miami made their biggest drug bust of the year. Dubbed “Operation Cobra,” agents arrested six men who ran a $75-million marijuana and cocaine business under the cover of the exotic animal trade. The ring’s kingpin, who had helped hack a federal informant to death in 1980, was sentenced to a hundred years in prison....
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November 2, 2011 09:00 AM
Darts and Laurels
An exercise in humility: fifty years of journalism's lesser angels
An accounting of fifty years’ worth of Darts is hardly a balm for an industry careening through a wrenching transition. It is a concentrated dose of every journalistic sin imaginable, and some that defy imagination: plagiarism, laziness, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, hypocrisy, photo manipulation, staged news, stupidity, bad taste, collaborating with law enforcement, junkets, caving to advertisers, paying to play,...
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September 22, 2011 06:00 AM
Darts and Laurels
Telling the whole story about Thailand
For much of his career, the British journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall has covered Southeast Asia for Thomson Reuters. During that time, he developed a particular fondness for Thailand, learning the language and falling for the “warmth and joie de vivre of the Thai people.” From 2000 to 2002, he was deputy chief of the wire’s Bangkok bureau, and...
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July 27, 2011 06:00 AM
Darts and Laurels
Meet Brian Condra, the media's favorite "everyman"
In late 2008, as the world financial system went into collapse, a shocking self-dealing scandal toppled the Anglo Irish Bank. As Ireland slid into recession, the government nationalized the Anglo Irish Bank and the Bank of Ireland, enacting austerity measures to pay the bill: tax hikes, slashed budgets, and lower pay for state jobs. Middle- and lower-middle-class workers were...
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May 26, 2011 01:00 AM
Darts & Laurels
The Oregonian and Village Voice Media help to de-sensationalize a story
In early 2009, the FBI organized a nationwide sting operation to rescue victims of sex trafficking and arrest their pimps. Shockingly, idyllic Portland, Oregon, yielded the second highest number of arrests and underage victims in the country. The outcry from Portland law enforcement, politicians, and women’s and children’s advocacy groups was swift and loud. Mayor Sam Adams often said...
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March 29, 2011 09:00 AM
Darts & Laurels
The Portland Press Herald blurred an important line with its donation of ads during an election
The importance of a daily newspaper’s role in local politics is undeniable. Ideally, it reports the issues impartially, then makes informed endorsements on its editorial page. Media companies should also be upstanding members of their communities and lend their resources to good causes. But what happens when these roles and responsibilities come into conflict? What happens when a donation...
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January 13, 2011 10:00 AM
Darts and Laurels
Laurels to a Texas Monthly reporter and an intrepid attorney who worked to free an innocent man
When Anthony Graves was arrested for capital murder, he thought it was a practical joke. A surveillance camera in the Brenham, Texas, police station captured Graves shaking his head and smiling. “This is a big mistake,” he said. “Somebody’s messing with me, right?”
It was a mistake, but it wasn’t a joke. Graves, then twenty-six, didn’t know he was...
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November 11, 2010 08:00 AM
Darts and Laurels
Reporters at two weeklies keep the memories of unknown murder victims alive
In 2008, L.A. Weekly reporter Christine Pelisek learned that the Los Angeles Police Department had recently dedicated a secret task force to investigate the connection between several unsolved murders in the city from 2002 and 2007 and a number of other cold cases from the 1980s. When she inquired about it, the police confirmed to her that a serial...
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September 21, 2010 11:53 AM
Darts and Laurels
A Lincoln Journal Star series digs through the paper's archives and finds treasure
In an effort to fill the Monday edition, traditionally a thin news day everywhere, city editor Peter Salter has tried a few gimmicks in his ten years at the Lincoln Journal Star in Nebraska. One was a feature he called “An Hour Here,” which asked reporters to write a vignette after doing exactly what the title implies. Another was...
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July 27, 2010 08:00 AM
Darts and Laurels
The diamond thief's tale sounded too good to be true. Turns out it was.
On Valentine’s Day weekend in 2003, a gang of Italian thieves, led by a man named Leonardo Notarbartolo, broke into the Diamond Center, a vault in Antwerp, Belgium. Using items like Styrofoam, a dustmop handle, and hairspray, the thieves disabled a state-of-the-art security system that included infrared heat, motion, and light sensors, as well as a lock with 100...
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May 3, 2010 03:54 PM
Darts and Laurels
An LAT reporter did strong work on the Toyota story. But where was the rest of the auto press?
Complaints about Toyota and Lexus cars suddenly accelerating out of control began surfacing about a decade ago, and a series of inconclusive federal investigations followed. But despite the reams of auto coverage churned out by the automotive press and in the ad-rich auto sections of newspapers, this life-and-death story wasn’t broken until it had become nearly impossible to ignore. And...
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March 25, 2010 06:00 AM
Darts and Laurels
A paper in the Midwest exposes a scandal. Thirty years later, it does it again.
In 1979, Des Moines Register reporters Mike McGraw and Margaret Engel discovered sixty mentally disabled men eviscerating turkeys at an Iowa meat plant for less than $70 a month. The workers were Texas natives who had aged out of state care and been sent to the meat plant to work for subminimum wages by a Texas labor broker called...
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February 3, 2010 06:46 PM
Darts and Laurels
New profit demands raise questions about a commitment to quality
In September, soon after the Times Publishing Company sold the venerable Congressional Quarterly to The Economist Group, the new owners fired forty-four reporters and editors—19 percent of the total newsroom staff at CQ and Roll Call, which the Economist already owned. The layoffs still left 184 reporters at the two publications to cover Congress. And no doubt the Economist...
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November 12, 2009 04:18 PM
Darts and Laurels
The East Valley Tribune uncovers abuse of a school tuition program
Editor’s Note: After this “Laurel” went to press, the East Valley Tribune announced that it will cease publication online and in print after December 31. Parent company Freedom Communications, which is reorganizing under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, had unsuccessfully attempted to sell the publication and announced the Tribune's closing on Nov. 2, citing "the economic recession and changes in...
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: Off the Hamster Wheel, The Dumb Money, iPad Newspapers
- Mostly Skimpy Coverage of JPMorgan’s Overdraft Settlement
The Observatory Science
- What Drives Public Opinion About Climate Change? Politicians, economy more influential than media coverage, study says
- The Presidential Energy Narrative Campaign coverage takes on a green hue
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Some Mistakes at MoneyWatch A little more homework needed on Social Security, please
- It’s Caucus Day in Colorado: Where’s the Content? Campaign presented as theater in the Denver Post
