CJR Daily

DETROIT, MI -- More than one-third of the editorial staffers at the venerable Cleveland Plain Dealer lost their jobs on Wednesday. The cuts, part of owner Advance Publications' shift to a "digital-first" strategy, gutted the newspaper of about 50 experienced journalists. The paper will also implement previously-announced plans to cut home delivery to three days a week starting August 5,...

Advance Publications's remorseless campaign to impose a free-online content model on its regional newspapers exacted another heavy toll with the Cleveland Plain Dealer today eliminating the jobs of about 50 journalists, about a third of its already shrunken newsroom—and more, according to the union, than even the company had said it would. Rollie Dreussi, executive secretary of the union...

There's an audible sense of panic in Ruby Cramer's voice when she answers the phone at our scheduled interview time. "Oh god, I'm so sorry," she says, cutting me off after I identify myself. "Can we do it tomorrow? Literally, any time tomorrow." The BuzzFeed politics reporter, who's currently both trailing Anthony Weiner--filing long narrative pieces from his mayoral campaign...

The Huffington Post reports that McDonald's could double its workers wages by raising the price of a Big Mac by 68 cents. It went large on the Internet on Tuesday. Unfortunately, what it originally claimed was a study by a University of Kansas researcher turns out to be something—a term paper, maybe?—given to Huffington Post by a KU undergrad. And...

Australia has suddenly become a hotbed for political factchecking. In May, PolitiFact Australia launched as the first international affiliate of the Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact, bringing the site's signature Truth-O-Meter ratings to the country's ongoing election campaign. And in early July, an independent Australian website called The Conversation launched its own dedicated Election FactCheck site, which departs from the approach...

On Tuesday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a report, produced by an internal "Review Panel," on the school's actions during the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, which ended in January when he committed suicide at 26. Swartz was facing a trial for allegedly using MIT's network to download reams of scholarly articles from the online resource JSTOR, a violation of...

Competition for government contracts tends to drive down prices for taxpayers. But when bidding requirements are narrowly-crafted, as the New York Times showed in an insightful piece Monday, competition may be stifled and operating costs pushed up. The Times account concerned replacing presidential helicopters, all of them at least 30 years old, but the points it made can help reporters...

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. Is higher ed the capital of featherbedding? This sentence in an LA Times editorial two weeks ago about Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano becoming the president of the...

Politico recently summed up the president's recent sales pitch for Obamacare this way: "Make the big sell by talking small." And indeed, in a mid-July address, the president tried to assure Americans that all was going according plan, Politico reported, by painting "an optimistic picture of how Obamacare is putting money back into the pockets of consumers who will soon...

Fox Business's John Stossel is a long-time opponent of the minimum wage. I don't mean he opposes raising the minimum wage, something that puts him decidedly out of the mainstream. I mean he opposes any minimum wage, which puts him roughly in Ayn Rand/WSJ editorial page territory. The idea being that a minimum wage causes mass unemployment, particularly amongst young...

Over at The New Republic, Marc Tracy offers a helpful peek into how an ignorant Fox News interview--a religion scholar who happened to be Muslim was asked why he wrote a book about Jesus--became a "traffic bonanza" for BuzzFeed. Basically, as Tracy recounts, BuzzFeed embedded the video in its own post with a catchy headline and then used its Webby...

Last week, we talked about some idioms that have been twisted by people who write them as they hear them, not as the phrase should read. Here are some more. Some of these twisted phrases make some sense, because they use words that seem to fit in the phrase, until you really dig into them. One of those is "wet...

For all that has been written, spoken, screamed, and whispered about the Affordable Care Act, there is still a lot of confusion and lack of knowledge among the public. No wonder, I suppose. Republicans continue to attack it as if it were a scourge from hell. Democrats are desperate to tout it. Meanwhile, it keeps changing, as portions are...

The Wall Street Journal's Dennis Berman has an excellent piece on the future of the truck driver, whom he notes has been almost uniquely insulated from the decline of the working class. Now the robots are coming for these jobs too. Gigantic automated trucks produced by Caterpillar are replacing most of the 180 drivers at one iron mine in Australia....

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: How forensic linguistics outed J.K. Rowling -- Not to mention James Madison, Barack Obama, and the rest of us The Carlos Danger name generator -- Discover...

He's back. After four years in self-imposed exile, Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy landed in Phnom Penh last Friday to throngs of flag-waving fans wearing white caps branded with a rising sun--the Cambodia National Rescue Party's telltale logo. Rainsy came for the showdown: this Sunday, the CNRP will face ruling Prime Minister Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party in parliamentary elections....

Michael Aneiro of Barron's watches Meredith Whitney, the discredited Cassandra of the municipal-bond market, on CNBC. Whitney has been popping up again now that Detroit has gone bankrupt. Maria Bartiromo tosses her the softballs, naturally, asking a silly question about why the WSJ wrote a negative piece about her firm. Aneiro: "I don't want to be in the press," Whitney...

Reuters has long been one of the most prolific producers of climate change journalism, leading The New York Times and the Guardian for most climate-centric articles in 2011. But a new assessment lends credence to recent claims that the newswire is pulling back its coverage after the addition of a global-warming skeptic to the company's editorial management. On Tuesday, Media...

Minimum-wage earners make nearly a third less than minimum-wage earners did 45 years ago. But it's "intellectually bankrupt" to point that out, according to The Wall Street Journal editorial page and a Richard Berman front group for low-wage employers. The Employment Policies Institute's Michael Saltsman (who disingenuously calls himself a "Defender of the Minimum Wage" on his Twitter bio) wrote...

MIAMI -- With Florida embarking on an ambitious effort to privatize much of the state's prison healthcare--the largest such undertaking in the nation--the time is ripe for journalists to take a deeper look into the history of such programs, and the companies getting massive contracts for taxpayer dollars. Newspapers in Florida have nibbled around the edges of this complex story,...