CJR Daily

Does The New York Times Company have $24 million a year to spare? Apparently its executives—and more to the point, its Wall Street analysts and its Sulzberger trust fund kids—think it does. The company is reinstating its dividend, which it suspended for nearly five years while the company's business cratered. Now, there's been no resurgence in NYT fortunes, though the...

Inside a bullet-worn airsoft arena in August, I led 15 journalists and activists at gunpoint through a labyrinth of graffitied walls and into a small, cramped enclave. There, they were ordered to stand with their palms against the wall; and if they didn't comply, I was ordered to shove them with my gun. I'll admit that I'm a small woman...

Wednesday, New York Mets pitcher Matt Harvey appeared on the Dan Patrick Show, a national radio program simulcast on NBS Sports Network, to push an endorsement deal he has with the cellular service company Qualcomm. It was a disaster. The backstory: The hurler was one of the breakout stars of the baseball season, mixing incredible speed on his fastball with...

The media love simple narratives based on dramatic events, so it's no surprise that many journalists have suggested that President Obama's fortunes hinge on Syria. In pursuing this line of reasoning, reporters have started to blame every second-term problem Obama faces on his failed effort to attract Congressional support for a military intervention. But while his efforts were not very...

This week, for the first time in ages, I cleared my email backlog. Much of the correspondence in the queue was questions for this column--several of which, fittingly, dealt with email etiquette. Herewith, a brief return to our Q&A advice format, answering some of your inbox conundrums. I receive anywhere from five to 15 pitches from PR reps every day....

SANTA BARBARA -- It was June 2009, and the Santa Barbara News-Press imbroglio that had begun three years earlier was still playing out. A panel discussion on the future of journalism in Santa Barbara drew an audience of some 200 people, but a fair amount of the discussion focused not on the future but the past, particularly as it related...

Today's must-read is this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column by Daniel Kovalik of the United Steelworkers on the death of an 83-year old adjunct professor who had taught at Duquesne University for a quarter century. In poverty after years of abysmal wages and no benefits from Duquesne, Margaret Mary Vojtko faced Orphans' Court after someone called authorities to say she couldn't take...

At first glance, the Fed chairperson's race is one for the textbooks: a classic case of spin and counterspin, mostly emanating from unattributed anonymice. This is the spin cycle in its purest form. First it was Yellen vs. Summers and that other guy, the third tenor. Then it was Summers. Now, it's not Summers, and probably Yellen, we think....

A piece of medical news made the rounds last week with the kind of fodder that makes Web editors dance for joy: the kind of material that demands some choice, search-engine friendly punning in the hed. "Choose Dads With Smaller 'Nads," was the title of a Time Healthland post covering a study released earlier this month demonstrating an inverse correlation...

A couple of weeks ago, British GQ put on its annual Men of the Year gala, where it hands out awards for things like Breakthrough Menswear Designer Brand alongside honors for, Politician of the Year, "Oracle," and Hugo Boss Most Stylish. The TV personality award this year went to Piers Morgan and the Achievement of the Year went to a...

It's time to move beyond the wonk studies that showed up all summer, which concluded that maybe the much-awaited rate shock (for insurance premiums on the state exchanges) is not in the cards. Reports from the consulting firm Avalere Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, RAND Corp., and Kaiser Family Foundation have fueled the notion that premiums next year will...

Like most newspapers around the country, The Seattle Times has cut staff and shaved resources in recent years to balance the ever diminishing budget of the modern newspaper. But unlike many of its counterparts, the Times has managed to continue publishing strong science coverage, maintaining both a science and an environmental reporter and producing impressive enterprise work, like last year's...

"Should you worry about the NSA? Eh, maybe," was the title of the night's first slide, when the Hacks/Hackers New York group led a session on encryption and security on Monday. The event was meant to get journalists familiar and comfortable with several of the free, basic tools that can help them protect their own work-in-progress and their communications with...

Ever wonder why the very rich pay so little in gift and estate taxes, which are intended in part to prevent dynastic wealth from hobbling economic growth? Bloomberg's Zachary R. Mider had an excellent piece last Thursday that used the Waltons--heirs to the Walmart fortune--as a case study to explain how it's done. Reporters who want to understand how the...

The question of whether women can "have it all" has been the source of many a polemic. The discussion is focused around the struggles of educated, upper-middle-class, heterosexual women to juggle demanding jobs, child rearing, and maintaining a sex life and marriage. Anne-Marie Slaughter kicked off the debate's most recent incarnation with her 2012 Atlantic piece on the inflexible hours...

DETROIT, MI -- The Ann Arbor News was back on newsstands last week, four years after Advance Publications closed the 174-year old daily that once boasted of being older than the state of Michigan. The revival of the bygone print brand (though not the daily frequency) was one of two moves Advance recently announced for its Ann Arbor publication; the...

GOOD, the earnestly liberal magazine that folded and turned itself into a "social network for social good," is now partnering with the US military to create better killing technology, a turn of events that's up there in the annals of Greatest Sellouts of All Time. BuzzFeed's John Herrman flags a jaw-dropping press release touting its alliance with the military to...

English has many prefixes that make a word into a negative or opposite: Add "non-" to "profit," for example, and you have something that doesn't aim to reap financial rewards for personal gain. Add "dis-" to "invite," and you're not going to that party any more. Usually, you can remove the prefix and see what the "positive" is. But some...

"How Detroit Went Broke," published Sunday in the Detroit Free Press, is a superbly reported, written, and illustrated investigative project that shows how simplistic narratives about the Motor City bankruptcy miss the real story. Every reporter covering government finance will benefit from studying this package. Free Press business reporters Nathan Bomey and John Gallagher pored over more than a...

We tend to think of the Lehman crash as a bad thing. And, well, it was. But, on the bright side, its fifth anniversary did at least inspire some excellent journalistic retrospectives. Hey, it's something, so let's have a look: A must, if maddening, read, for instance, is the Center for Public Integrity's where-are-they-now series that finds the usual...