September/October 2011

Articles

By Alissa Quart Sep 20, 2011 at 06:00 AM

When author Jon Krakauer started looking into the altruistic claims of his former friend, the best-selling author of Three... More

Transparency Watch: A Closed Door

From the EPA to NASA, the FDA to OSHA, President Obama has failed to make science accessible

By Curtis Brainard Sep 14, 2011 at 01:44 PM

In July 2009, just months after President Obama took office promising to revolutionize government transparency, leaders of the Society of... More

Urgent Call

Cell phones help a marginalized Indian community speak out

By Chitrangada Choudhury Sep 13, 2011 at 12:39 PM

On the evening of May 16, 2010, Vijjobai Talami, the headwoman of Gumiapal village, phoned CGNet Swara, a fledgling mobile... More

The Scandal Beat

Does the press’s obsession with rule-breaking get in the way of real reform of college sports?

By Daniel Libit Sep 12, 2011 at 12:00 PM

In December, Ohio State University suspended five of its football players for violating the rules governing intercollegiate athletics by... More

Fade to Black

As a video revolution sweeps the world, US television news caps its lens

By Dave Marash Sep 8, 2011 at 06:00 AM

For the first time in history, mankind is developing a universal language: video. People now communicate with video on... More

Along Recession Road

Meet some of the people who are falling out of the American middle class

By Dale Maharidge Sep 1, 2011 at 02:25 PM

To earn rent money, a laid-off single mother in Moulton, Alabama, has a yard sale. She parts with the bed... More

All the President’s Pundits

When the White House tries to shape, seduce, and spin, what’s a journalist to do?

By Paul Starobin Aug 24, 2011 at 02:34 PM

On a Thursday evening this past May, Eliot Spitzer, hosting his now-cancelled CNN show, lobbed a chummy question to... More

Pirate Radio, Mayan Style

Indigenous stations want to come in from the cold

By Connor Boals Aug 24, 2011 at 01:48 PM

When you get to Sumpango, in the central highlands of Guatemala, you won’t be able to find Radio Ixchel... More

Departments

Telling the whole story about Thailand

By Erika Fry Sep 22, 2011 at 06:00 AM

For much of his career, the British journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall has covered Southeast Asia for Thomson Reuters. During that... More

Size Matters

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

By The Editors Sep 15, 2011 at 06:00 AM

In the August 8 issue of New York magazine, the columnist Frank Rich suggests this takeaway from the News... More

Editor’s Note

The best of “Second Read”; CJR’s new book

By Mike Hoyt Aug 29, 2011 at 03:28 PM

Two redesigns ago, in 2004, the Columbia Journalism Review launched a back-of-the-book feature called Second Read that has proved immensely... More

Going Strait

Narrowing down the difference between “strait” and “straight”

By Merrill Perlman Aug 28, 2011 at 01:54 PM

When two words sound the same and have similar meanings, you know they’re going to merge eventually. But until they... More

News Frontier

The power of one

By Michael Meyer Aug 28, 2011 at 01:49 PM

Entry barriers are low in the online news world. Cheap hosting and free templates have launched a million blogs, including... More

Hard Numbers

Some stats and figures on the news industry

By The Editors Aug 28, 2011 at 01:38 PM

109number of segments CNN aired on the News Corp. phone-hacking scandal, July 4-13 71number of segments aired on MSNBC 30number... More

Haven Bound

A Q&A with Icelandic Parliamentarian, Birgitta Jónsdóttir

By Alysia Santo Aug 28, 2011 at 01:30 PM

In 2008, Iceland was hit hard by the global financial crisis. Citizen outrage and political unrest followed, sparking a... More

Local (Wiki)Leaks

Finding local angles in the secret cables

By Dave Maass Aug 28, 2011 at 01:23 PM

Like any digital-age enterprise reporter, I scan certain online databases as a matter of daily routine: local campaign-finance and... More

Notes From Our Online Readers

Readers recommend books to our summer reading list

By The Editors Aug 28, 2011 at 12:42 PM

In mid-July, with temperatures rising and the entire CJR office dreaming of beach chairs and umbrella drinks, we asked our... More

Readers respond to our July/August Issue

By The Editors Aug 28, 2011 at 12:16 PM

PBS: Where’s the Beef? Elizabeth Jensen’s story “Big Bird to the Rescue?” (CJR, July/August) in your cover package about the... More

Fostering an awareness of our commonalities, ten years after September 11th

By The Editors Aug 28, 2011 at 11:54 AM

Four planes. One-hundred-and-two minutes of the towers smoking. Almost three thousand dead. Then, suddenly, it is ten years later,... More

Ideas & Reviews

What a Country

Two new efforts to make sense of America’s struggles

By Julia M. Klein Sep 29, 2011 at 11:56 AM

In the midst of a cross-country pilgrimage, Iraq war veteran Colby Buzzell finds himself transfixed by an “old dusty American... More

The Cheap Seats

Joe Bageant told uncomfortable truths about class in America

By Sasha Abramsky Sep 27, 2011 at 06:00 AM

In the last decade of his life, Joe Bageant came full circle. He and his third wife, Barbara, were... More

They Killed Classifieds, Didn’t They?

Consider TimeOut New York, in comic format

By Ted Rall Sep 1, 2011 at 03:04 PM

. More

China rescues 89 trafficked children, arrests 369

Headlines that editors probably wish they could take back

By The Editors Aug 28, 2011 at 02:06 PM

Bison study plan to use sterilization, Jackson Hole (WY) Daily, 6/3/11 2 parrots sought in Long Beach birdnapping, Press Telegram... More

Brief Encounters

Short reviews of books on newspaper publishers

By James Boylan Aug 27, 2011 at 05:04 PM

The Magnificent Medills: The McCormick-Patterson Dynasty: America’s Royal Family of Journalism During a Century of Turbulent Splendor By Megan McKinney... More

Happy Birthday, Wikipedia!

Ten years of Wikipedia and their neutral point of view policy

By Michael Schudson and Katherine Fink Aug 24, 2011 at 03:21 PM

Wikipedia is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, to the surprise of skeptics who never thought a volunteer-written, open-access encyclopedia... More

Among the Mongers

Henry Mayhew and the pursuit of history, from the bottom up

By Jeffrey Greggs Aug 24, 2011 at 02:44 PM

There is no place in any era more evocative of soot, steam, gruel, and misery than Victorian London. It... More

Most Popular
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Twitter

New survey reveals everything you think about freelancing is true - Data from Project Word quantifies challenges of freelance investigative reporting

Why one editor won’t run any more op-eds by the Heritage Foundation’s top economist - A reply to Paul Krugman on state taxes and job growth made some incorrect claims

Why we ‘stave off’ colds - It all started with wine

The New Republic, then and now - Tallying the staff turnover at the overhauled magazine

Why serious journalism can coexist with audience-pleasing content - Legacy media organizations should experiment with digital platforms while continuing to publish hard news

Why Bill O'Reilly can play hardball on his war zone story (5)

Why scientists often hate records requests (4)

Showdown over the future of independent documentaries at PBS (2)

The LA Times goes deep on superbug outbreak (2)

Why Jan Brewer is sounding like James Risen (2)

Tweets by @CJR

Email blasts from CJR writers and editors

The rise of feelings journalism (TNR)

“Bloom engaged in an increasingly popular style of writing, which I’ve discussed on my blog before, which I call “feelings journalism.” It involves a writer making an argument based on what they imagine someone else is thinking, what they feel may be another person’s feelings. The realm of fact, of reporting, has been left behind.”

Things a war correspondent should never say (WSJ)

“The correspondent retelling war stories surely knows that fellow correspondents had faced the same dangers or worse”

The joyful, bloody media circus of bringing down Brian Williams (Bloomberg)

“In the media, we eat our own for sport”

On WaPo trying to interview a cow (National Journal)

“‘I wasn’t milked on the White House lawn by a strange man,’ The Washington Post—the venerable institution that would later come to break the Watergate scandal and win 48 Pulitzers—quoted her, a farm animal, as saying”

Bloggingheads

Greg Marx discusses democracy and news with Tom Rosenstiel of the American Press Institute

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