Media

It was supposed to be a punishment--220 hours plucking garbage off the streets of Baku, Azerbaijan. Instead, journalist Khadija Ismayilova turned her community service assignment into an impromptu rally for change. In a Facebook post, Ismayilova told supporters she would be "sweeping for democracy," bringing attention to the corruption and human rights abuses that plague the oil-rich country. Activists, journalists,...

UPDATE, July 25, 2013 (This replaces two earlier updates): On Tuesday, June 25, the Supreme Court dismantled a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. A month later, it was widely reported that the Justice Department would take fresh legal action in a string of voting rights cases, signaling its willingness to aggressively police voting rules to prevent discrimination. It...

How big corporations pay--or don't pay--their taxes isn't a subject that gets a lot of quality explanatory coverage, though it should. And with momentum quietly building in the House, the Senate, and the White House to fix a clearly flawed system, now would be a good time to start. Fortunately, some publications are digging in. We begin with The...

The Washington Post announced on Monday the launch of a new tech policy blog, The Switch, that will cover "NSA surveillance, patent trolls, broadband networks, and much more." It's going to be headed up by Tim Lee, who jumped ship from Ars Technica to the Post in May and has been writing up until now for Ezra Klein's Wonkblog. (His...

One of the disadvantages of being a freelance writer is that there's no larger platform promoting all of your work. It's up to you to develop an audience for your writing. Sure, there's Twitter and Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Tumblr. But it's so easy for those links to get lost in the deluge. Enter the email newsletter. I...

On Tuesday, journalists, investors, and technology enthusiasts gathered at WNYC's Greene Space to meet Matter One: the first graduating class of startups from business accelerator Matter. Based in San Francisco, Matter supports media entrepreneurs by giving them $50,000 and five months to hash out ideas, develop prototypes, and test them with audiences. The company is headed by journalists Corey Ford,...

I had a hunch that David Kocieniewski's piece on Goldman Sachs's metals maneuvers would stand up in the face of the severest scrutiny, and little in this Goldman press release on the ensuing contretemps suggests otherwise. To be sure, the press release, "Goldman Sachs and Physical Commodities," doesn't mention the Times by name and is directed at the wider flap,...

AUSTIN, TX -- He is the chosen one. The frontrunner. The presumptive nominee, and even the likely next governor of the second most populous state in the country. Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott. Wait--who is Greg Abbott? To political reporters and insiders in Texas, Abbott's story--after 10 years as the top lawyer for Texas--feels well-worn. (He's the politician with the...

Over the weekend, the media world was shaken by the announcement that mathematical guru Nate Silver, the dude who buried Republican fantasies with arithmetic during the 2012 presidential election, was changing jobs. Silver packed up his New York Times-hosted FiveThirtyEight blog and decamped for ESPN/ABC/Disney. Terms of the deal are still unknown, but it is presumed that Silver will have...

James O'Shea, former editor at the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, was close to the center of the successive storms at the Tribune company, from its ill-fated 2000 merger with newspaper chain Times Mirror--then owner of the LA Times and Baltimore Sun--to the disastrous 2007 takeover by a group of investors led by Sam Zell, leading to the...

On some level you have to feel a little bad for the Walmart flack. You try polishing the image of an eyesore-producing, taxpayer-subsidy-guzzling, shoddy-goods-peddling, union-busting, $260 billion cutthroat monopsonist. On the other hand, the company has quite a few PR successes, particularly below the national-media radar. Walmart is in a pitched PR battle right now to build six smaller stores...

In the early hours of New Year's Day in 2009, a young man named Oscar Grant boarded a BART train bound for Oakland. He was 22, traveling with a few friends and his girlfriend. They had spent the night watching the fireworks in San Francisco. What comes next is documented in the terrible cellphone videos that circulated in the days...

In his "Stories I'd like to see" column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com. 1. TV's campaign addiction: This report from The New York Times's Brian Stelter two weeks ago explains how campaign cash spent in hotly contested presidential election swing states and...

Rebecca MacKinnon is the sort of person who, after Edward Snowden leaked details of the government's digital surveillance program, could say, if she wanted to: I told you so. At least, that's what fans have been telling her, lately. While she was promoting her 2012 book, Consent of the Networked, she spent a good bit of time talking about surveillance...

Robert Khuzami made the big bucks as Deutsche Bank's general counsel for the Americas during the subprime securitization orgy, which Deutsche's American arm helped unleash with toxic instruments that would crush the economy and millions of homeowners and workers. Then in 2008 a promising young candidate was elected to bring hope and change to the land amidst a financial crisis...

Nate Silver's move from The New York Times to ESPN is turning the reporter-statistician into the editor in chief of his FiveThirtyEight.com site, relaunching in "impending months," Silver said during a press call with ESPN President John Skipper on Monday afternoon. The tradeoff of access to ESPN's resources and reach is that the company now owns the FiveThirtyEight site and...

FAIRWAY, KS -- A palpable exhaustion seems to have set in this year among some journalists when it comes to the Keystone XL pipeline project, which has been under review for five years. "It seems to us that we have finally reached the 'enough already' moment in this debate," Bloomberg News said in an April editorial. "Enough dawdling," said the...

Here's a shocker: People don't talk the way they write, or the way they should write. They have accents; they slur words or runthemtogether. They leave off the "g" at the end of lots of words, and they mispronounce some, forgetting an "r" in "libary" or "Febuary." But when people write, they should make sure those accents, elisions, and dropped...

Two reporters on the hospital beat deserve a Laurel for recent work--both for taking a hard look at how hospitals are raising the national healthcare tab, the opposite of an oft-stated goal of Obamacare. The reporting of Jim Doyle, who covers hospitals for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Phil Galewitz who does the same for Kaiser Health News, shows...

Dave Kocieniewski's corker in yesterday's Times is just a gorgeous piece of work, as an investigation, a piece of writing, and as a window onto the sad state of our financialized economy and collapsed regulatory regime. It's, like, nice. [UPDATE: But not, like, first to the topic. See my note below.] The piece has something for everyone suffering from Wall...