Media

The Wall Street Journal has been doing terrific reporting on the unfair advantages high-frequency traders are getting from news organizations. Its latest page-one story looks at how a Deutsche Börse "news service" helped spark an FBI investigation into how government data is transmitted by publishers. The story comes two months after the Journal reported that Thomson Reuters was charging big...

On Monday night, a panel of journalists and public relations experts gathered at the National Press Club in Washington DC to discuss the role of federal public affairs offices. While communications officers see themselves as useful intermediaries between the public and its government, many reporters regard them as obstructive bureaucrats stemming the flow of information. John Donnelly, a reporter with...

In 2010, the German media conglomerate WAZ sold its Bulgarian Media Group to two millionaire tycoons: Ognian I. Bonev, chairman and executive director of Bulgaria's biggest pharmaceutical company, and Lyubomir Pavlov, a former banker. Included in the purchase were two mass dailies, 24 Chassa and Trud. The latter's longtime editor, Tosho Toshev, was promptly fired. Soon after, Toshev published--in a...

This month, CJR presents "required skimming," a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments. --Authored by law student Benjamin Kabak, Second Avenue Sagas tracks transit news across the New York City, with occasional forays into other parts of the Tri-State area. The blog gets its...

It's hard to remember a more flattering profile of an important CEO than the one gracing the cover of the current Fast Company. The headline is "King Bezos," and there doesn't seem to be much irony lacing through there. The subhead is: "Inside the 3-part plan to make Amazon the most loved* company in world." The asterisk points to a...

PROVO, UT--Each week, in a small northern New Mexico town, there is a scene that connects with the journalism of a century ago: newsies on street corners hawking the latest edition. The ritual has even been know to cause traffic jams in Espanola, where people either love their weekly newspaper--the Rio Grande Sun--or hate it. But either way, most feel...

This month, CJR presents "Required skimming," a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions. If we overlooked your favorite awesome financial fraud site, or food mag, or whatever, please tell us in the comments. —Peter Henning, a Wayne State law prof, is a go-to source for all things white collar on the NYT's Dealbook vertical. —If there's is a...

The hosannas for Donald Graham got a bit out of hand in the wake of his sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos. I'm thinking specifically of this open letter in the Post itself, from the guy who wrote Graham's advance obit. Henry Blodget is on to something here in writing about an investor (whom Valleywag writes is "probably"...

SANTA BARBARA, CA -- Sometimes, a headline pretty much tells the whole, journalistically horrifying story. Late in July, Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS TV broadcast a short video report on back-to-school immunizations; the accompanying web article sported this headline, "Doctors Debate Need for Child Vaccinations." Well, no, they don't, actually. The medical consensus in support of a standard series of...

In recent weeks, we talked about idioms that are misheard, and thus miswritten. Now, we'll discuss some idioms that say the opposite of what they mean and whether they're "acceptable" English. As we mentioned some time ago, the title of Bill Walsh's new book, Yes I Could Care Less, was scolded by LinkedIn for bad grammar. If you cancare less,...

An internal review found serious problems with an award-winning NPR investigation. This past Friday, NPR Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos released an 80-page report reviewing an October 2011 Peabody-winning investigation into the South Dakota foster care system's treatment of Native American children. The ombudsman's review concluded that the investigation as aired violated NPR's Code of Ethics. NPR management has vehemently disagreed with...

Over the weekend, Brendan Nyhan appeared on MSNBC's UP With Steve Kornacki to discuss his recent United States Project piece, "The Scandal Attention Cycle. How the media lost interest in IRS targeting, even as new facts emerged." "The media doesn't want to run a headline saying, 'Not as Much News Here as We Thought'," said Nyhan. "So instead they simply...

The headline of the moment is that US authorities are poised to arrest two JP Morgan officials for allegedly covering up losses in the London Whale trading debacle of last year. Whether this signals a newfound aggressiveness in white-collar prosecution at the federal level remains to be seen. Here's hoping. But beneath the surface, evidence has been quietly piling up...

How many doctors are really refusing to treat Medicare patients? It's a simple enough question. But it's also one of many politically charged questions in healthcare, and politics makes for elusive answers. If you're a doctor or a physicians' trade group angling for higher reimbursements from Medicare, you make the case that a lot of doctors are leaving because they...

This month, CJR presents "Required skimming," a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions. If we overlooked your favorite too cool for school food mag, please tell us in the comments. --Michael Wahid Hanna: A senior fellow at the Century Foundation, Hanna has emerged as a go-to authority on the ongoing political crisis in Egypt, giving thoughtful, informative opinions...

Score one for the watchdogs at Bloomberg News, whose reporting helped force the Obama administration to admit that it touted wildly inflated mortgage-fraud prosecution numbers a month before the election. Phil Mattingly and Tom Schoenberg noticed right away that something was amiss with Eric Holder's announcement, filing this story two days after the AG said a yearlong sweep had resulted...

On Tuesday, the American Meteorological Society released its annual "State of the Climate" report, a hefty, 258-page document chronicling changes in global warming data. Compiled by members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with 384 scientists from 52 countries, the report is used to set and influence domestic climate policy and distributes statistics that form the baseline for...

Audit Chief Dean Starkman and PolitiFact founder Bill Adair, now a professor at Duke, talk to Minnesota Public Radio about the bombshell media news of the year: The Grahams' sale of the Washington Post to Amazon's Jeff Bezos. Have a listen:

Culled from CJR’s frequently updated “Must-reads from around the Web,” our staff recommendations for the best pieces of journalism (and other miscellany) on the Internet, here are your can’t-miss must-reads of the past week: Donald Graham's choice -- On Monday afternoon, he sacrificed his family's ownership in the hopes of saving the thing itself Why the sale of the Washington...

A little more than a month ago, The New York Times came forth with a story describing how a dangerous disease called valley fever is infecting thousands of people throughout the Southwest, especially in California and Arizona. It's an airborne fungal disease--"a silent epidemic," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls it--and it has the potential to...