Editorial

  1. January 12, 2012 06:00 AM

    In the Dark

    The campaign to weaken campaign-finance disclosure laws

    By The Editors

    Journalists are big believers in the First Amendment; its legal force undergirds the fearless journalism that democracy requires. But now comes a perversion of that amendment, an effort to turn it against another tool that enables democracy-sustaining journalism: the laws that require political donors to make their names known, and that empower vital reporting on money, power,...

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  2. January 5, 2012 06:00 AM

    Executive Editor’s Note

    Welcome Cyndi Stivers, our new editor in chief

    By Mike Hoyt

    This is the first issue of the Columbia Journalism Review’s second half century, and already you’ll find a significant change aimed squarely at that unwritten future. Near the top of the masthead on page 2 is the name Cyndi Stivers, our new editor in chief, who started on December 1, and whom I’d like to publicly welcome here.

    Cyndi...

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  3. November 22, 2011 09:00 AM

    Chairman’s Note

    By Victor Navasky

    As I write this, every day seems to yield a new story about something called Occupy Wall Street. I have no idea how long Wall Street will be occupied, but it occurs to me that this fiftieth-anniversary issue of the Columbia Journalism Review celebrates something we might call Occupy Journalism. Like Occupy Wall Street, CJR is in the protest business....

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  4. November 22, 2011 09:00 AM

    Editor’s Note

    By Mike Hoyt

    This is a handsome issue, no? Two entities are responsible for that. The first is Point Five Design, our art consultant, comprised of Alissa Levin, Ben Levine, and Nathan Eames. Their classy and intelligent sensibility has graced our magazine and website since 2007. Point Five helps us turn ideas into images when illustrations are needed, and they always seem to...

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  5. Fall 1961

    Why a Review of Journalism?

    The arguments for a critical journal far outweigh the hazards

    By The Editors

    What journalism needs, it has been said time and again, is more and better criticism. There have been abundant proposals for professional study panels, for institutes with squads of researchers, for critical journals. Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism has decided to attempt such a journal. Two considerations brought about the decision: First, the need, magnified...

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  6. November 1, 2011 01:53 PM

    The Complications of our Age

    What we want is a journalism to match them

    By The Editors

    When the idea of a publication to be called the Columbia Journalism Review first came up, our founding editor tells us, some journalists and journalism professors were deeply opposed to the idea of turning the weapon of criticism on journalism itself. Doesn’t the craft require support rather than criticism? Doesn’t it have enemies enough?

    Such questions...

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  7. September 15, 2011 06:00 AM

    Size Matters

    News Corp.’s corruption would matter less if it weren’t so big

    By The Editors






    In the August 8 issue of New York magazine, the columnist Frank Rich suggests this takeaway from the News Corp. phone-hacking and bribery scandal: “An otherwise archetypal media colossus . . . is controlled by a family . . . that countenances the intimidation and silencing of politicians, regulators, competitors, journalists, and even ordinary citizens to maximize its profits and...

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  8. August 29, 2011 03:28 PM

    Editor’s Note

    The best of "Second Read"; CJR's new book

    By Mike Hoyt

    Two redesigns ago, in 2004, the Columbia Journalism Review launched a back-of-the-book feature called Second Read that has proved immensely successful. The idea was to ask journalists to look back at books that moved and shaped them. For our very first Second Read, the historian Rick Perlstein reread a favorite of his, the late Paul Cowan’s book, The Tribes of...

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  9. July 28, 2011 06:00 AM

    The Kitchen-Table Connection

    How to find—and serve—readers beyond Washington

    By The Editors

    Toward the end of last year, The Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery advised her readers that “a surprisingly broad consensus is forming around the actions required to stabilize borrowing and ease fears of a European-style debt crisis in the United States.” That consensus, she reported, had formed around a package of options for cutting the deficit, which included...

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  10. July 5, 2011 04:52 PM

    Editor’s Note

    CJR's Joel Meares wins a Mirror Award; goodbye to our 2010-2011 fellows

    By Mike Hoyt

    Prizes—oh, how we love ‘em! CJR’s Joel Meares has taken home our latest: a win in the Best Profile/Digital Media category of the Mirror Awards, given by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications to honor the year’s best media reporting. Meares won his trophy for a profile of Liz Benjamin, “the frizzy-haired muckraker of New York’s statehouse.” His...

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  11. June 7, 2011 09:45 AM

    Lift the Shroud

    Why we need Al Jazeera English

    By The Editors

    For most of the last decade, when Americans heard mention of Al Jazeera, the Arabic language Qatar-based satellite news channel, they didn’t hear anything good. The station was saddled with prejudices based on that prefix; in 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made the insinuation explicit, tagging the network as “a mouthpiece of al Qaeda.” The station...

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  12. May 1, 2011 08:00 AM

    Editor’s Note

    News about an upcoming web series on digital journalism, "The Story So Far"

    By Mike Hoyt

    This is a full issue and, we hope you agree, a good one. we invite you to read every word, especially the cover story and especially, well, everything. You may notice, for example, an emerging sensibility in the Ideas + Reviews section in the back of the book. That’s because Justin Peters, our stellar Managing Editor/Web, has added it...

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  13. March 24, 2011 10:10 AM

    Members Only

    Two cheers for high-cost subscription journalism

    By The Editors

    Washington beckons as a land of opportunity for journalists today, at least in the realm of high-cost subscription news. We’re cheering, but wary, too. A new unit of Bloomberg News is hiring 150 editorial staffers, essentially doubling the size of its DC bureau, to provide detailed coverage of federal legislation, regulation, and government spending. Politico has hired another forty...

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  14. January 18, 2011 10:00 AM

    Beyond the Facts

    A partisan era requires a vigorous press

    By The Editors

    The voters have seated a new House of Representatives with an agenda dramatically at odds with that of the president, and we’re entering a period in which the partisan divisions that shaped the first half of the Obama administration will play out in a different way. Battles will be waged with the usual weapons—a mix of facts and spin,...

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