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Required skimming: nouveau healthy dining

August 26, 2013 - 5:59am
My New Roots Run by a "holistic nutritionist," this blog posts inventive recipes, designed to impart a mostly plant-based kind of eating. There are a few health-ified classics, like these no-sugar-added raw brownies. (They don't taste like brownies, but they're delicious.) My Life Runs On Food Writer Sanura Weathers wants to put the well balanced meal...
Categories: Media

Audit Notes: Complex collapse, Sears spiral, NYT

August 26, 2013 - 5:50am
The Guardian has an excellent and disturbing take on the crash of Nasdaq's systems on Thursday: A series of system crashes affecting Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft in the past fortnight has brought warnings that governments, banks and big business are over-reliant on computer networks that have become too complex... Jaron Lanier, the author and inventor of the concept of...
Categories: Media

ESPN-Frontline deal was destined to implode

August 23, 2013 - 2:32pm
Correction appended When ESPN teamed with Frontline to cover the NFL safety and concussions beat last year, the sports network was lauded for its lofty intent and canny judgment. Here is definite proof ESPN is interested in being a news organization, and not merely existing to promote its broadcast partners, went the prevailing thinking. But then came the inevitable follow-up...
Categories: Media

Must-reads of the week

August 23, 2013 - 1:50pm
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: What I learned from getting shot -- "Defenders of stop-and-frisk and racial profiling have made me break my public silence about the night I almost died"...
Categories: Media

Those struggling $300,000-a-year households in the WSJ

August 23, 2013 - 10:00am
This Wall Street Journal day-in-the-life-of story from a couple weeks ago is even more boring than its headline—"What It's Like Being a Middle Manager Today"—suggests. That's right up there with "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." Here's the lede: The parking lot at Fair Isaac Corp. in San Rafael, Calif., is empty when Michelle Davis pulls in at 6 a.m. For the next...
Categories: Media

Required skimming: climate change

August 23, 2013 - 5:59am
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. InsideClimate News The energy and climate science covering website is technically a startup, but you couldn't tell based on their polished enterprise reporting--published by a team...
Categories: Media

Exchange Watch: Missing in Montana

August 23, 2013 - 5:57am
While it was good to see the AP's statehouse reporter do a story this week on the release of rates that will be posted on the Montana healthcare insurance exchange, his piece fell short of helping Montanans understand the insurance policies they must choose from, beginning in October. It's too bad, too, since the AP is likely the biggest...
Categories: Media

The women's pages

August 23, 2013 - 5:55am
Last week, when entrepreneur Bryan Goldberg announced he'd scored $6.5 million in capital to "completely transform women's publishing," he was eviscerated by women writers and editors, many of whom work for the dozens of existing women-centric sites. And rightfully so--his announcement rendered their work invisible, and to add insult to injury, female media entrepreneurs routinely fail to garner this amount...
Categories: Media

Voting wars redux in Texas

August 22, 2013 - 1:50pm
AUSTIN, TX -- In the coming months, a federal appellate court in Texas will rule on whether the Justice Department can continue to have a say about how the country's second most populous state handles that most basic right of a citizenry: voting. But the case isn't likely to end there. In the wake of the US Supreme Court's far-reaching...
Categories: Media

Food fight!--The food police, part 3

August 22, 2013 - 10:20am
There's a riot going on in the streets of Foodieville, as some prominent food writers do battle over the role of "Big Food" in the American diet, and it seems to have no end in sight. This is unproductive--albeit entertaining--behavior that is obscuring some thoughtful reporting about practical solutions our nation's problem with healthy eating. It all started in...
Categories: Media

NewsHour at a crossroads

August 22, 2013 - 9:56am
After a two-year holding pattern following the gradual retirement of Jim Lehrer from on-air duties, PBS NewsHour is entering a transformative period. On September 7, the program will expand to seven days a week, debuting a weekend edition of the NewsHour and ending years of frequent questions from viewers, along with the service's own ombudsman, about the lack of scheduled...
Categories: Media

Required skimming: Radiolab-esque science stories, online

August 22, 2013 - 5:50am
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. Nautilus: Like Radiolab, Nautilus picks one big theme and dives, running deep and long and plucking sometimes discordant notes that come together into one symphonic whole. Matter: Not "quite a website...not...
Categories: Media

The WSJ short-arms a promising Amazon piece

August 22, 2013 - 5:50am
The Wall Street Journal posts a very interesting blog item about how Amazon is showing signs that it's losing its most important competitive advantage: lower prices. Alas, it oversells what it's got. After years of successfully avoiding having to collect sales taxes drawing to a close—far too late—Amazon is losing the unfair price advantage it's had over bricks and mortar...
Categories: Media

Bloomberg as the anti-News Corp.

August 21, 2013 - 3:20pm
The external review into how Bloomberg News staffers used and misused confidential client data available on Bloomberg LP terminals in their reporting turned up few if any surprises and effectively puts the mini-scandal to bed. If anything, the belt-and-suspenders review—conducted by a flying squadron of lawyers and consultants, along with a journalistic wiseperson or two—will only reaffirm Bloomberg's standing as...
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When a kiss is just a kiss -- or barely even that

August 21, 2013 - 1:00pm
I was relieved to see this article from the Associated Press yesterday, which was carried in several outlets: "Russian Runners Say Kiss Was Not a Protest of Anti-Gay Laws." Why? Two reasons. First, the odd, breathless speculation over whether a Getty photo of two athletes kissing on the podium at the world championships in Moscow was a protest or not...
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Audit Notes: The Guardian, LAT on the OCR, Google bus piñata

August 21, 2013 - 10:00am
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's bombshell column Monday night was one of the biggest pieces of media news in recent years. But as the HuffPost's Michael Calderone points out, the paper stuffed it on page 28 with just a teaser on page one. It's impossible to criticize Rusbridger, though, who has become the premiere editor of his generation with the paper's...
Categories: Media

Michael Pollan and Amy Harmon 'talk' it out

August 21, 2013 - 5:56am
Amy Harmon's work is so particular her job title is pretty much synonymous with her name. Though technically Harmon reports for the The New York Times' national desk, the two-time Pulitzer winner writes almost exclusively long features that explore the human experience of science and technology. The Times invests in Harmon's brand of journalism: She spends many months...
Categories: Media

Exchange Watch: Nevada

August 20, 2013 - 2:30pm
A few days ago Dennis Myers, the news editor of the Reno News & Review, sent along a press release about Nevada's insurance exchange, called Nevada HealthLink. I glanced at it quickly, thinking it had come from the Nevada Division of Insurance, the state's regulator in Carson City. It said "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE" in the top right corner, gave...
Categories: Media

Little mag, big ideas

August 20, 2013 - 10:00am
It's not easy being a little magazine. But The New Inquiry, an online journal and monthly magazine of culture and politics, is making it look easy. "We have no paywall, no advertisers, no benefactors, and we're creative commons," said 27-year-old editor in chief Rachel Rosenfelt. Instead, the publication relies on revenue from subscriptions, with readers signing on for as little...
Categories: Media

The UK government's investigations of the Guardian and David Miranda are troubling

August 20, 2013 - 9:45am
Last year the Turkish government jailed 21 journalists working for the DIHA news agency on trumped up anti-terrorist charges. The reporters were covering the Kurdish separatist movement, but Ankara maintains the journalists reporting endangered national security. This last weekend, the UK government detained and interrogated for nine hours, under the parameters of an anti-terrorist law, the partner of Guardian journalist...
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