Feature

  1. February 6, 2012 06:00 AM

    The Accidental Correspondent

    When war came to his home, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad found his calling

    By Michael Massing

    Few Western correspondents have a background as unique as Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s. A native of Iraq at the time of the US invasion, he was working as an architect in Baghdad while dodging the draft. When American forces occupied the city, he went to work as a translator for The Guardian and later became a fixer for The...

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  2. January 30, 2012 06:00 AM

    Friday Night Bytes

    In Texas, high school football is the killer app

    By Jake Batsell

    Brimming with swagger, the top-ranked Allen High Eagles burst from an inflatable tunnel, rip through a paper banner, and sprint past a giddy gauntlet of pompom-waving cheerleaders at the season-opening Tom Landry Classic. It’s Zero Week of the 2011 Texas high school football season, and a sense of urgency flows from the field to the stands to the press box....

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  3. January 23, 2012 06:00 AM

    The Ring is Counted Out

    Boxing's duplicity devours an honest magazine

    By Ivan G. Goldman

    Let’s get two things straight. One, last September I was fired from The Ring, the venerable boxing magazine, along with editor in chief Nigel Collins and most of the editorial staff. Two, I had it coming.

    So I’m not as bitter about my dismissal as you might expect, even though no one from the company...

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  4. January 13, 2012 04:20 PM

    The Times and the Jews

    A vocal segment of American Jewry has long believed that the paper has been unfair to Israel. Here's why—and why they're wrong.

    By Neil Lewis

    During the winter of 1974, Seymour Topping, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times, and his wife, Audrey, visited Jordan as part of a tour of the Middle East.

    On their stops in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, Topping often had to confront criticism that the Times’s coverage was too favorable to Israel. It was a...

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  5. December 13, 2011 06:00 AM

    The Moments

    Fifty years of media culture, as captured by Magnum photographers

    By The Editors

    Magnum Photos, founded during the most glorious age of photojournalism, has always represented a dream of how journalism can be structured: it's a members-only cooperative, controlled by the photographers themselves, whose guiding principle is to honor and promote great work. Would that print journalists could ever come up with an enduring organization so independent, communitarian, and pure of soul and...

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  6. December 2, 2011 12:45 PM

    Power of Dispassion

    Alan Schwarz changed football

    By Greg Marx

    On October 17, 2010, the Philadelphia Eagles hosted the Atlanta Falcons before a crowd of nearly 70,000. The game was expected to be a tough contest between two of the top teams in the National Football League, but the Eagles jumped out to a quick 14-0 lead and, early in the second quarter, were driving again. On...

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  7. December 2, 2011 06:00 AM

    Immediate Returns

    Ben Smith is not an old-school political reporter

    By Liz Cox Barrett

    Thirty-five-year-old Ben Smith reports on national politics for Politico from a rent-a-desk writers’ workspace on the first floor of a blue Victorian house in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. While Smith’s widely read blog at Politico bears the tag line, “A running conversation about politics,” the well-sourced, web-savvy Smith seems, at times, to be running the conversation about politics....

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  8. December 1, 2011 06:00 AM

    A Reporter in Full

    Isabel Wilkerson listens

    By Pamela Newkirk

    Isabel Wilkerson spent most of her journalism career at The New York Times where, as Chicago bureau chief, she won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the midwestern floods of 1993, and for her profile of Nicholas Whitiker, a plucky ten-year-old boy from the rough-and-tumble South Side of Chicago. She’s the author of the best-selling The Warmth...

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  9. November 30, 2011 06:00 AM

    Tenacious

    Dana Priest wants to show you how the world works

    By Jill Drew

    Washington Post reporter Dana Priest says she has always had an insatiable curiosity. At age six, she liked climbing the fences between houses in her neighborhood, looking into people’s backyards to see what was going on. In high school, Priest walked through the “Do Not Enter” doors at an airport, just to see what was behind them....

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  10. November 29, 2011 06:00 AM

    What He Knew

    Anthony Shadid saw the deeper story in Iraq

    By Terry McDermott

    Anthony Shadid is the most honored foreign correspondent of his generation: two Pulitzer Prizes, a George Polk Award, an Overseas Press Club award, book awards—the list is long. He grew up wanting to be a foreign correspondent. His grandparents had emigrated from Lebanon to Oklahoma, and he knew from a young age that he wanted to return...

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  11. November 28, 2011 10:00 AM

    Sustained Outrage

    Ken Ward Jr. stayed home to make a difference

    By Brent Cunningham

    Since he began reporting full-time, in 1991, Ken Ward Jr. has embodied the credo of Ned Chilton III, The Charleston Gazette’s late publisher, that the “hallmark of crusading journalism is sustained outrage.” In his twenty years covering the coal business in Appalachia, the forty-four-year-old Ward has exposed regulatory and enforcement breakdowns, as well as the corruption of...

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  12. November 22, 2011 09:00 AM

    Just Ask Questions

    Stanley Nelson searches for truth in the past

    By Hank Klibanoff

    Stanley Nelson is the editor of the weekly Concordia Sentinel, a 5,000-circulation newspaper in Ferriday, Louisiana. Nelson, head of a three-person newsroom, covers it all: the police, the courts, the drainage commission, politics, government, the rising this, the falling that, all of it playing out along the Mississippi River, sometimes in it, and sometimes across it, in...

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  13. November 21, 2011 06:00 AM

    A Different Life

    Andrea Bruce was a community journalist in Iraq

    By Michael Kamber

    Andrea Bruce is a freelance photojournalist, currently based in Afghanistan, whose powerful documentary work attempts to connect people across geography and culture. In 2010, she left The Washington Post, where she had spent eight years as a staff photographer. During that period, she focused on the war in Iraq, and specifically on documenting the lives of ordinary...

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  14. November 21, 2011 06:00 AM

    The Reporter’s Voice

    Seven accomplished reporters and one great photographer talk about what they do, how they do it, and why.

    By The Editors

    Since 1961, when CJR was born, journalism has undergone all manner of seismic shifts, from hot type to wireless transmission, satellites to social media, corporate control to ‘here comes everybody.’ The one constant, however—the thing that will always be the foundation for journalism’s most important work—is great reporting. In the following pieces, which we will...

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