CJR Daily

Not long ago, freelance health writer Debra Gordon sent out an SOS on a listserv for health reporters. Gordon was writing a consumer piece walking readers through the process of signing up for the new health insurance exchanges. She quickly realized that neither shopping for insurance nor writing about the shopping process was easy. "I spent about four hours just...

There are racists living in America. This is not news. And yet, when Nina Davuluri, an Indian American, was crowned Miss America on September 15, it sparked a flurry of angry tweets by unhappy racists, causing several reputable news outlets to take note. Online publications from BuzzFeed to Jezebel.com--among many others--reprinted some of the most vitriolic and offensive tweets verbatim...

Speaking of people on Wall Street saying incredibly stupid things, watch this clip of CNBC's Joe Kernen that Media Matters flagged yesterday: In a discussion with Andrew Ross Sorkin and Becky Quick about the rupee, Kernen faked an Indian accent and asked, "Are they good at 7-Eleven?" Sometimes the mask slips—even on national television. Kernen, who's written a book about...

Bloomberg's Carol Hymowitz profiles a retired Oral-B marketing director who at 77 is working two jobs flipping burgers and handing out samples at Sam's Club. We'll be seeing a lot more of this with the coming wave of Baby Boomer retirees—the first generation hit with the enormous policy failure that is the decline of pensions and the rise of the...

FAIRWAY, KS -- "I was not sent to Washington to shut down the federal government," Sen. Mike Johanns told the Lincoln Journal-Star over the weekend. The Nebraska Republican was lashing out at the GOP-led House, which had voted on Friday to tie the continued funding of the entire federal government to the defunding of the Affordable Care Act--a move that...

Today from noon to 5pm (Eastern time), CJR's United States Project is teaming up with the journalism school at the University of Texas at Austin for an event in Austin titled, "The State of Accountability Journalism in the State of Texas." A livestream of the proceedings will be available below. We'll also be live-tweeting the event here. Tune in to...

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. Default scenarios: With a deadlock over raising the debt ceiling looking more likely than a stalemate over funding the government to avert a shutdown, I've been looking for...

A couple of weeks ago, Felix Salmon asked: "Can Rupert Murdoch hold on to Kara Swisher?" Well, now we have our answer. He doesn't want to, at least at whatever price she was asking. Last week, Dow Jones, a unit in Murdoch's News Corp.'s empire, said it would not renew its contract with either Swisher or her partner, Walt Mossberg,...

When a Senate committee this month approved the "Free Flow of Information Act of 2013," applause was heard from scores of media shield law supporters, from the Newspaper Association of America to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. To them, the news came as a relief after revelations the feds had secretly seized Associated Press phone records and...

The Wall Street Journal buries the lede in a major way in its Saturday piece on AIG CEO/bombthrower Robert Benmosche that ran on the cover of Marketplace with this anodyne headline: At AIG, Benmosche Steers a Steady Course CEO Stabilizes Insurer, Focuses on Core Mission Up high in the story: Benmosche's assurance that "'too big to fail' has been solved"...

Spend time on Twitter or Reddit, or anywhere on the internet for that matter, and you'll learn lots of new words, or new meanings for older ones. Often, the new words will appear in the printed equivalent of a spittle-infused diatribe, by a party using the words to make a point, or to wound. And the new words will often...

As Congress starts thinking about renewing and, maybe, reforming copyright law, already there's a debate brewing. One on side of this debate are content industry groups who think that, in the digital age, copyright law should give intellectual property more protection in order to give artists a financial incentive to create. On the other side are internet companies and digital...

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was always destined to fail. It had an enormous task: Tell us what—and who—caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. For that, it was stacked with bipartisan political appointees (rather than say, seasoned prosecutors), assigned a hard deadline of a little more than a year, and handed an appalling $10 million budget. To...

On Wednesday, HuffPost Live aired a segment on a student at the University of Lagos, in Nigeria, who claims to have scientific proof that same-sex marriage is wrong. With the aid of magnets, animal mating, arithmetic, and a string of incoherent babble, Chibuihem Amalaha--a PhD candidate in Chemical Engineering at the University--explained that homosexuality is wrong because "like" cannot attract...

This Andrew Ross Sorkin vignette on "Two Myths and One Reality" five years after the fall of Lehman Brothers is must-see TV. Sorkin looks pained, for once, to be apologizing for Wall Street all the time. If you turn off the sound, it looks like an R&B video produced by Brooks Brothers: But let's leave aside the Times's overly dramatic...

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: Men should wear makeup -- Farhad Manjoo finishes his run at Slate with a true #slatepitch Death of an adjunct -- Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct...

What can we say about Florida, that bad boy of healthcare reform? Every time states are supposed to do something to implement Obamacare for the uninsured--and there are some 3.9 million in Florida, or nearly 21 percent of the population--the state throws another hissy fit. To its credit, the Florida press corps has been chronicling these outbursts pretty well, and...

I've criticized DealBook a fair amount lately, so I want to flag this good piece that questions why authorities have failed—yet again—to do anything about senior Wall Street executives implicated in wrongdoing. Peter Eavis: It's an outcome that has vexed the public since the financial crisis of 2008. The government says there is wrongdoing at a large bank and makes...

Robert C. Maynard--journalist, editor, newspaper publisher, and former owner of The Oakland Tribune--spent much of his career trying to improve diversity in journalism. His namesake organization, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, is devoted to that effort. Twenty years after his death, the organization is headed by his daughter, Dori Maynard, who is troubled by what she sees as a...

MIAMI, FL -- As Florida Gov. Rick Scott prepares for a second attempt to purge the voter rolls of non-citizens--despite a lack of evidence that non-citizen voting is a serious problem--The Miami Herald continues to dig up actual election-related mischief. The paper's impressive reporting, on problems going back to 2010, has been crucial in law enforcement efforts here and...