March/April 2009

Articles

By Charles Lewis Mar 25, 2009 at 02:15 PM

Washington, D.C., 2014—It didn’t seem possible. Who would have thought, amid the newsroom devastation of the first decade of the... More

Old Hands, New Voice

How NGOs learned to do news

By Carroll Bogert Mar 24, 2009 at 05:55 PM

NEW YORK, 2014—Back in 2009, the future of international reporting looked bleak indeed. Several big U.S. newspapers had shut down... More

Unchaining the Monitor

How an early Web-first strategy worked out

By John Yemma Mar 23, 2009 at 06:07 PM

BOSTON, 2014—In October 2008, The Christian Science Monitor announced it was shifting to a “Web-first, multiplatform strategy.” The bulk of... More

So Cool

How an economic weather map changed the climate

By Adam Davidson Mar 22, 2009 at 08:30 AM

Washington , D.C., 2014—The economic weather map, which started out as a gimmick, changed everything. It showed us how the... More

The New Niche

How tax incentives and technology came to the rescue

By David S. Bennahum Mar 21, 2009 at 08:00 AM

Washington, D.C., 2014—By 2009, we were at an impasse. The news business—newspapers in particular—was collapsing, and there was no obvious... More

In the Foothills of Change

Foreign coverage seems doomed, but it’s only just begun

By John Maxwell Hamilton Mar 20, 2009 at 12:36 PM

Some months ago, while exploring files in the nearly empty, ink-blackened basement of the old New York Times building on... More

No Profit, No Problem

How a new city daily (on newsprint!) rolled

By Michael Stoll Mar 20, 2009 at 08:00 AM

San Francisco, 2014—With the collapse of the business model undergirding the tradition of muckraking journalism—and the double-digit profit margins it... More

Rise of the Reader

How books got wings

By Peter Osnos Mar 19, 2009 at 04:20 PM

New York, 2014—Back in 2009, the headlines about book sales and the future of the publishing industry looked about as... More

Two Tents

How Politico might work out. Or not.

By John F. Harris Mar 18, 2009 at 08:00 AM

ARLINGTON, VA, 2014—The quirky assignment handed down by CJR’s editors—to imagine the future as though observing the past—brings to mind... More

Get Off the Bus

The future of pro-am journalism

By Amanda Michel Mar 5, 2009 at 07:00 AM

Standing before a fawning crowd at a private fundraiser in San Francisco last April, Senator Barack Obama’s usually finely calibrated... More

Suffering in Silence

Ground Zero’s other victims

By Anthony Depalma Mar 4, 2009 at 06:09 PM

Even now, more than seven years later, images of that day remain frightfully raw, in large measure because a legion... More

The Sarcastic Times

For Rachel Maddow and the other ironic anchors, absurdity is serious stuff

By Alissa Quart Mar 3, 2009 at 08:37 PM

On a Wednesday night in December, Rachel Maddow, in a toreador-style black jacket, waits for her show to start. She... More

Good Morning, Postville!

An unlikely thorn in Agriprocessors’ side

By Nathaniel Popper Mar 3, 2009 at 05:56 PM

As a new work week began in Postville, Iowa, last November, Jeff Abbas, with his bushy gray beard and ample... More

Roll the Dice

How one journalist gambled on the future of news

By Charles M. Sennott Mar 3, 2009 at 07:00 AM

Nine months. We’d been at this project for nine months, beginning with a few sketches on a whiteboard about how... More

Departments

Snark Hunt

The search for the true meaning

By Merrill Perlman Apr 9, 2009 at 06:45 PM

Sometimes, dictionaries just don’t get it. this one will define a word one way; that one will define the same... More

Reasons to Believe

Journalism’s search for a support system

By The Editors Mar 26, 2009 at 08:00 AM

There is a lot of death talk around journalism lately. A case in point that stuck in our craw was... More

Craigslist = Straw Man

Tracking advertising revenue in the digital age

By Steven S. Ross Mar 5, 2009 at 10:54 AM

Data gathered by the Newspaper Association of America show a savage decline in newspaper ad revenue in the third... More

One Shot

A Q & A with Iranian photographer Jamshid Bayrami

By Jane Gottlieb Mar 4, 2009 at 06:31 PM

In 1999, an Iranian college student and an Iranian news photographer crossed paths briefly but momentously in Tehran during... More

Dutch Treat

The Netherlands’s newspaper economic crisis

By Hélène Schilders Mar 3, 2009 at 06:18 PM

After a cry for help from the print media, the Dutch government has established an €8 million ($10.2 million) fund... More

Send tips and suggestions to [email protected]

By Katia Bachko Mar 1, 2009 at 10:27 AM

Laurel to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Tennessean, and The Post and Courier for strong reporting on the coal-ash... More

Ideas & Reviews

Buyer Beware

A history of redlining and racism in Chicago

By Helene Stapinski Mar 2, 2009 at 05:34 PM

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black America | By Beryl Satter | Metropolitan Books | 512... More

Picture Perfect?

In three new graphic histories, the facts get a visual boost

By Richard Gehr Mar 1, 2009 at 05:48 PM

08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail | By Michael Crowley And Dan Goldman | Three Rivers Press |... More

Brief Encounters

Short reviews of books about Fred Friendly and America’s early newspapermen

By James Boylan Mar 1, 2009 at 04:00 PM

Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism | By Ralph Engelman, Foreword by Morley Safer |... More

Luces in the Sky

Covering big pharma in the age of marketing

By Michael Schudson & Danielle Haas Mar 1, 2009 at 03:11 PM

When Time magazine went culinary trend-spotting in July 1951, it bypassed usual suspects like new ice-cream flavors and found a... More

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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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