The Water Cooler
-
January 18, 2012 03:27 PM
Medicare Vouchers Explained
A conversation with the Brookings Institution’s Henry Aaron
In the Republican presidential debate Monday, Mitt Romney came out in favor of a "premium support program, which allows people to buy either current standard Medicare or a private plan." He said he supported the proposal made by Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, which, he believed, "is absolutely right on."
"Give people choice,” Romney said. “Let competition exist in our Medicare...
Continue reading -
November 29, 2011 01:17 PM
Q&A: News for All the People Co-Author Juan González
The Daily News columnist talks about race and the media
Juan González is a staff columnist for New York’s Daily News, a two-time winner of the George Polk Award for commentary, co-host of Democracy Now!, and former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, where he was inducted into its Hall of Fame. With Joseph Torres, he is the co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story...
Continue reading -
September 19, 2011 04:02 PM
Q&A: New NBC Correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin
“Part of me wants to speak to the global audience, and a part of me wants to speak to America”
This spring, just before he turned thirty-two, Ayman Mohyeldin’s contract with Al Jazeera was ending and he was faced with a happy career decision—choosing among offers to stay where he was or go to any of three major American network news organizations. I had worked with him for the first year of Al Jazeera English, when I was an anchor...
Continue reading -
September 8, 2011 12:08 PM
Q&A: Beware the Gonzo Director Bryan Goluboff
"We want a talisman of these times, even in a digital age."
Beware the Gonzo, the directorial debut of Bryan Goluboff (writer of The Basketball Diaries), stars Ezra Miller, Zoe Kravitz, Amy Sedaris, and Judah Friedlander, and opens at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday. The movie follows seventeen-year-old Eddie “Gonzo” Gilman, a budding investigative journalist, whose unfailing belief in the power of print media to protect the voiceless leads him to...
Continue reading -
August 3, 2011 09:44 AM
The NY Times’s New Top Editor in D.C.
A conversation with incoming Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt
With Jill Abramson about to take the reins as executive editor of The New York Times, one of the paper’s leading writers is also taking on a management role. David Leonhardt, the “Economic Scene” columnist and winner of the most recent Pulitzer Prize for commentary, will become chief of the Times’s Washington, D.C. bureau after Labor Day. (The...
Continue reading -
July 12, 2011 12:07 PM
Q&A: Luke Stangel, Co-Creator of TapIn Bay Area
“Mobile could make us focus again on what we do really well as reporters.”
This week, Bay Area News Group—publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, the Oakland Tribune, and several other newspapers—will release a new map-based mobile news application called TapIn Bay Area. As Luke Stangel, one of its creators, described it, “Imagine cutting up your local paper into 10,000 little pieces, and organizing those pieces on a map. TapIn is that map.”
... Continue reading -
July 7, 2011 05:31 PM
Q&A: Sebastian Junger on Tim Hetherington
“The ultimate truth about war is that you are guaranteed to lose your brothers.”
It’s not often that one sees characters from a film gather to mourn a filmmaker. On May 24, soldiers from Second Platoon of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Division joined friends, colleagues, and family of Tim Hetherington for a memorial service in a crowded church in lower Manhattan. Hetherington was an acclaimed war photographer and the co-director of the...
Continue reading -
July 5, 2011 02:34 PM
How to Understand the ‘Invisible Primary’
An interview with Georgetown professor Hans Noel
The 2012 Iowa caucuses are still seven months away, but Republican presidential hopefuls are already well into the “invisible primary”—a tumultuous time of speechmaking, fundraising, coalition-building and constant travel, as they seek to boost their name recognition, stand out from the field, and secure the GOP nomination once the voting begins.
This part of the campaign looks very different than...
Continue reading -
June 3, 2011 12:51 PM
Q&A: Joel Simon On CPJ’s “Impunity Index” and Violence Against Journalists
“For a long time, the threat was sort of a badge of honor. ‘Yeah, I got a threat, I must be getting to them.’”
On Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists released its fourth annual Impunity Index—a ranking of countries determined by the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of the population. Counting murders from January 2001 to December 2010, Iraq was ranked at the top of the Index for the fourth straight year, with ninety-three murders unsolved. Somalia...
Continue reading -
May 27, 2011 11:34 AM
He-Said She-Said and Death Panels
A Q&A with the Manship School’s Dr. Regina Lawrence
Almost two years ago, former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin sent out her infamous “death panels” post on Facebook. The media couldn’t resist the incendiary update. Soon, the two-word phrase—a demonstrable misrepresentation of the end-of-life counseling options proposed in the president’s health care plan—turned up the heat at Town Hall meetings and lodged itself in the discourse like...
Continue reading -
May 19, 2011 04:03 PM
Q&A: Poli-Sci Blogger John Sides
The GWU professor on what we can—and can’t—learn from early polling
The 2012 election is almost eighteen months away, but politics junkies are already being treated to polls asking if people plan to vote for Barack Obama in his re-election campaign, and testing how he fares against specific Republican opponents. What can these polls tell us so far ahead of the election, and what opportunities—or perils—do they create for reporters? To...
Continue reading -
May 13, 2011 10:00 AM
A Watershed Moment for the Chesapeake Bay Journal
On its 20th anniversary, the paper is growing and remolding its image
The current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review features a short article about the twentieth anniversary of the Chesapeake Bay Journal, a free monthly newspaper that covers environmental issues affecting the bay and its environs. Over the last five years, the paper has been working to expand its reporting and remold its image. CJR’s Curtis Brainard...
Continue reading -
May 5, 2011 10:26 AM
A Tight Deadline, 4,000 Words, Then Ten Years of Waiting
A Q&A with Kate Zernike, Osama bin Laden's obituarist for the NYT
When the news of Osama bin Laden’s death broke on Sunday night, every night editor’s dream—or nightmare—came true at The New York Times: the Times’s Eileen Murphy told Chris O’Shea at FishbowlNY that “the order was given to stop the presses.” Monday’s front page was scrapped, and a new front page with top-to-bottom bin Laden coverage was ready...
Continue reading -
April 20, 2011 10:14 AM
Q&A: Calvin Trillin
“I think journalists make a mistake writing about more than one person at a time”
Trillin on Texas | by Calvin Trillin | University of Texas Press | 184 pages, $22.00
Last month, long-time New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin published his twenty-seventh book, a collection of nonfiction pieces about Texas and Texans titled, appropriately, Trillin on Texas. Trillin grew up in Kansas City, Mo., and lives in Greenwich Village, but having spent fifteen years reporting...
Continue reading
—advertisement—
Desks
The Audit Business
- NYT: Criminal Charges in the Foreclosure Scandal
- Audit Notes: Regressive Taxes, Another Task Force, Keller on Copyright
The Observatory Science
- The Presidential Energy Narrative Campaign coverage takes on a green hue
- Keystone XL Jobs Bewilder Media Reporters still fumbling numbers in wake of pipeline’s rejection
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Nevada GOP Shows How Not to Conduct a Caucus Confusion, “clueless media policies,” day-late results
- USA Today Touts the Government’s Good News on Medicare But was it the full story?
