Media

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. Threat Level: Wired's privacy and cybersecurity coverage will make you change every single one of your passwords and then consider leaving the Internet forever and live in a cabin in the...

Jack Shafer of Reuters hits on something I've been thinking about recently: What newspapers can do to capitalize on their still-robust delivery networks: Nobody knows more about deadline deliveries and distribution than Bezos's Amazon, which has spoiled several nations with its reliable service. I can't imagine what plans Bezos has for the print edition of the paper--if I did, I'd...

There must be a dozen serious, fascinating implications of the jaw-dropping news that the Graham family is selling the Washington Post to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Here are a few quick takes, which we'll be fleshing out in the days, months, and years ahead in the wake of a truly landmark event in newspaper history. First, this will be the...

What a weekend. The news that the New York Times Company-owned Boston Globe was sold to Red Sox owner John Henry for $70 million, just 6 percent of the $1.1 billion it sold to NYTC for in 1993, broke on Saturday. (Adjusted for inflation, the Times Company is selling it for 4 percent of what it paid, though the company...

For two weeks we highlighted phrases that are written from what people hear, sometimes with amusing results. A reader asked: "Aren't all those [examples] mondegreens, like 'very close veins' when 'varicose veins' is meant?" Yes and know. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines a mondegreen as "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung." It's best...

The morality of unpaid internships have been getting quite a bit of airtime, be it the lawsuit of the Fox Black Swan interns or now-successful professionals reminiscing about their own experiences as the lowly and unpaid. And of course, there's been no dearth of posts commenting on these issues. While some coverage has taken interesting approaches to getting through the...

The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway objected Friday to my latest CJR post in a goalpost-shifting effort titled, "The Campaign to Wish Away the IRS Scandal." The steep dropoff in coverage of the controversy even as new facts emerged is unremarkable, Hemingway argues, because later developments "didn't fundamentally change the perception of what was driving the scandal." Despite his assertions, the...

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. The Conscience of a Liberal. Paul Krugman has been the essential thinker of the crisis, proven right time and again as his opponents' predictions have failed miserably. In addition to winning...

Michael Hiltzik slams the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission for letting JPMorgan Chase off the hook with a $410 million fine, no admission of guilt, and no individual prosecutions: Of the $410 million, $125 million represents the disgorgement of illicit profits from Morgan's scheme -- money the bank wouldn't have collected at all if it operated within the law. (The sum...

Once upon a time, a newspaper bought a baseball club. That was 1981, and the mighty Tribune Company bought the Chicago Cubs, then at one of many low points in its not-especially distinguished history, for $24 million, or about $62 million in today's dollars. That was awkward. The question at the time was how candidly or deeply could a newspaper...

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: Should Reddit be blamed for the spreading of a smear? -- The case of Sunil Tripathi The Bradley Manning verdict is still bad news for the...

As Brendan Nyhan wrote Thursday for CJR, the elite mainstream press has largely lost interest in the IRS scandal, even as the original narrative--about selective enforcement targeting conservative political groups--has been undermined by the emergence of new facts. The conservative media, though, hasn't let the story die, and has been trying to keep that narrative going. And so on Thursday...

The Huffington Post has all but retracted the story on Big Macs and wages that I criticized here (as did Tom Maguire, who deserves credit for getting there first). It has pointed out the errors, where they came from, and how they were made. It's admirably done what you're supposed to do when you mess up. That's far more than...

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. Bad Astronomy: Phil Plait's space and cosmology blog, now at Slate. Plait worked on the Hubble Space Telescope for a decade, and in astronomy education for some years after that, before...

As a young writer Pacific Standard digital director Nicholas Jackson built his career through a time-honored tradition: cold-emailing editors. "I would guess as to what their email address would be and, after having Gmail send back five or six or seven failed attempts, finally get through," says Jackson. "If you can get into their personal inbox, you're harder to ignore."...

At this point, the evidence on the Internal Revenue Service scandal is clear. Contrary to the initial hype, there is no credible evidence of White House involvement in targeting conservative groups or even evidence that Tea Party or other conservative groups were targeted exclusively. It turns out that the keyword lists used by the IRS to target groups applying for...

The New York Times's once-torrid paywall growth continued to slow in the second quarter, adding 23,000 digital-only subscribers. That's the second quarter in a row that the NYT has set new lows for digital-subs growth (it added 36,000 in the first quarter), signalling that the slowdown is real and circulation revenue growth is no longer quite enough to offset advertising...

Despite Tuesday's acquittal of Pfc. Bradley Manning on the charge of "aiding the enemy" by sharing hundreds of thousands of military documents with Wikileaks, Col. Denise R. Lind's verdict on that count does not reject the notion that whistleblowers who share information with journalistic outlets--or anywhere online--could still face that charge in the future. In declining to dismiss the charge...

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. --The Atavist: Featuring original e-singles that are "between magazine-article and book length," The Atavist releases one compelling longform story a month. Storytellers can also sign up to use its platform, Creatavist,...

You've read a lot about how Big Data can save the world and all that. You don't read much (at least until Snowden) about its downsides. The New York Times's Jessica Silver-Greenberg reports on one reason so many people can't get bank accounts: They're caught up in massive databases that turn minor violations like overdrafts into offenses that force people...