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For most of its run, dating to the magazine’s founding, in 1961, the Columbia Journalism Review published a column called Darts & Laurels. The feature pointed out highs and lows from journalists’ work, though there was a bent toward highlighting the screwups. For decades, this was the first thing that many journalists turned to when their issue of CJR arrived in the mail—though it was more out of trepidation than exuberance. For every note about a courageous reporter or a brilliant photographer, there were at least as many negative items about the news business—like the New Jersey newspaper that published a “Roasted Nuts” headline about a fire at a psychiatric hospital, or the California radio station that fired its weatherman amid fears that his rainy-day forecast might deter crowds from a Rush Limbaugh–themed picnic.
CJR discontinued Darts & Laurels a decade ago this month, around the time that social media turbocharged its self-appointed task of parsing journalists’ work. The belief that the wisdom of the crowds could replace the insight of a few was spreading widely at the time. In the same spirit, the New York Times eliminated its public-editor position in 2017, with Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher at the time, arguing that “our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be.” Just this week, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, announced that the paper’s opinion section would focus on the defense of “personal liberties and free markets.” He said the days of “a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views” were over, because “today, the internet does that job.”
But here we are in 2025, at a moment when journalists are under far more legal and financial pressure than we could have imagined in 2015, while the need for independent, fact-based reporting has never been greater. In that spirit, CJR executive editor Sewell Chan asked me to help resurrect the column, but with a tweak: it’ll now be called Laurels and Darts, for a few reasons I’ll lay out below.
First, it’s not hard to find a boneheaded story, headline, tweet, or editorial call. Why, I’ve been known to do it myself every now and then. At the same time, there’s a lot of great journalism out there, much of which is coming from non-MSM, non-Beltway news organizations, from Wired to Government Executive to Mississippi Today.
Relatedly, I just served as a judge for a national contest to recognize the best reporting about state government, and am blown away by the many terrific, deeply researched stories by journalists far from Washington. And even though I spend a lot of my waking hours reading news from around the country, most of these stories had never crossed my radar. We’d like to highlight some of those.
Finally, we want to applaud creativity and innovation in storytelling and to cheer on the application of great reporting to such media as video, podcasting, and newsletters, along with new forms of audience engagement and public service.
Of course, it won’t be all puppies frolicking through sun-drenched fields of clover. We’ll call out screwups, too.
That said, there are some things we won’t be doing. We’ll generally avoid criticizing errant sub-headlines or social media posts, especially those that don’t reflect the content or tone of the underlying stories. There’s a fish-in-a-barrel quality to such critiques.
We also won’t spend much time highlighting or targeting op-ed pieces, except for those that are deeply reported and veer more into news than opinion.
And where am I coming from on this? My sensibilities reflect a career equally divided between local and global newsrooms. My first job out of college put me in Fort Yates, North Dakota, where I started a weekly paper on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. From there, I held reporting and editing jobs in Baltimore, Tampa, and eventually the Miami Herald, where I became city editor. That was followed by almost thirteen years as a senior digital and print editor at the Wall Street Journal, a few more at Bloomberg, and the past fifteen at Columbia Journalism School, as a dean and now as a professor.
In that spirit, my CJR colleagues and I will be on the lookout for stories published by freelancers as well as newsrooms small and large—though I’ll admit the softest spot in my hardened heart is for journalists juggling multiple stories on competitive beats. And we’d like to showcase items that aren’t already surging to the top of Bluesky’s or X’s charts.
But since we can’t read everything or be everywhere, we invite you to submit suggestions for Laurels and Darts by emailing laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We’ll read every one of them, and if we publish an item that you were the first to suggest, we’ll cite you as the source.
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