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Back in 2008, Dan Catt took a picture of his young son drinking from a juice box, the flaps ingeniously lifted up to give his small hands something to grip. He posted the picture on Flickr with the title "Parent Hacks: The Juice Box Flaps" and a caption explaining that the flap trick keeps kid "from squirting juice all over...

In February 2012, Megan Twohey was looking at reports on the difficulties with international adoptions when she noticed a gap in coverage: What happened to the children after they reached the United States? She took to the Internet, scouring it for information on foreign adoptions, until she stumbled upon online forums for American parents who wished to offload their unwanted...

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: A plea for caution from Russia -- What Putin has to say to Americans about Syria Harvard Business School case study: gender equity -- Year after...

Dear Leaders of Journalism: I cannot recommend highly enough that you start talking to people outside your circles. #riptide #silos— Jeanne Brooks (@jmfbrooks) September 9, 2013 On September 9, three fellows at Harvard's Shorenstein Center and Nieman Journalism Lab published Riptide, an "oral history of the epic collision between journalism and digital technology, from 1980 to the present." In crafting...

It's hard to say what the retiree healthcare segment on NBC Nightly News last Tuesday was all about. It was a confusing, garbled, too-brief mess of a story on one of the most complex and important topics for older people and those nearing retirement. That's a shame, since people in this demographic still watch the evening news shows and...

Even on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington--a march he organized--the name Bayard Rustin rings hardly any bells. Rustin was an intellectual, an iconoclast, a civil rights leader, and a pacifist. He was also openly gay. He fought segregation through peaceful, civil disobedience and was a key advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., yet fellow activists held him...

The New York Times's DealBook once again publishes a story about how the valiant crimefighters at the SEC who really, really wanted to prosecute wrongdoers for the financial crisis but found themselves thwarted by the higher standards of "justice." That's the gist, anyway. The piece shows the pluses and minuses of the type of reporting practiced by the paper's DealBook...

There's a concept in psychology called "inattentional blindness." In study after study, if people are focused on one task, they will literally not see something else right in front of them--like someone in a gorilla suit beating her chest in the middle of a group of people who are throwing a ball around. I wonder if inattentional blindness is what...

Google released an unusual report on Tuesday--"How Google Fights Piracy," a 25-page document that detailed its anti-piracy principles, the efforts it has made to minimize piracy, and the limits of its power to stop illegal downloading. This wasn't a well-researched white paper, proposing new ideas, and it wasn't a press release--it didn't contain any news. It resembled most closely a...

BuzzFeed's Peter Lauria, a former Daily Beast employee, scooped Daily Beast editor Tina Brown on Wednesday by announcing her plans to leave the news outlet when her contract expires in January. Upstaging Brown, whose new project is to advance "theatrical journalism" in her Tina Brown Live Media organization, Lauria's BuzzFeed article cited a "source with direct knowledge" before Brown herself...

The other night, my father, a lawyer, sat down with a fistful of hospital-related news clippings--as he often does when we haven't seen each other for a while--and began to read aloud this headline from a blurb in the New York State Law Digest: Hospital owes no general duty to drunk patient, brought in by friend, to bar him from...

Over the weekend the Daily Mail's David Rose published a long screed on climate change with some pretty startling revelations: Namely that global warming, as evidenced by depleting sea ice, had paused, causing scientists to believe we are heading for a period of--wait for it-- "Global Cooling." "Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of...

It looks like The Daily Beast is in real trouble. Barry Diller is getting rid of Tina Brown, according to BuzzFeed's Peter Lauria and it's clear the site just doesn't work financially and won't anytime soon: As for the future of The Daily Beast website that Brown edits, no decision has been made. Included among the options IAC is considering...

CHARLESTON, SC -- With all due respect to Texas, North Carolina has become ground zero in the voting wars. An omnibus bill signed by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory on Aug. 12 made the Tar Heel State the first to drastically change its election laws since the Supreme Court's landmark decision on the Voting Rights Act. Since then, ballot battles have...

In a 16-minute address to the nation Tuesday night, President Obama both made the case for military action against Syria in response to its alleged use of chemical weapons and postponed a final decision on such action to give Russia's diplomatic proposal for the international community to take control of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile time to work. The speech may...

These late summer weeks have been prime time for big, splashy media launches. In sports, Fox Sports 1 debuted to great fanfare as the first real competition to ESPN in the sports cable arena, while on the news side, Al Jazeera began its bid for the US market in earnest, against the established behemoths of CNN, Fox, and to a...

The stupid Internet news spat du jour features Ezra Klein accusing BuzzFeed of "straight stealing" one of the Washington Post's features. Did BuzzFeed plagiarize the WaPo's Max Fisher? Did it re-report its excellent foreclosure series without pointing to the Post? No. BuzzFeed borrowed a style of clickbait headline the Post has used to successfully manipulate our lizard brains into increasing...

And so it came to pass that insurance companies in the North Country delivered for state residents some very low premiums for policies to be sold in Minnesota's insurance exchange (known as MNsure). State Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman announced last week that Minnesota has the lowest average rates for individuals and families compared to other states that have revealed the...

With the anniversary of the Lehman crash hard upon us, Laura Gottesdiener's* new book is the perfect reminder that journalism is still just scratching the surface of the social catastrophe that is the mortgage crisis. A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight For a Place to Call Home chronicles the lives of four families uprooted by foreclosure and other...

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. Scoping out the budget for attacking Syria: This article in Defense News estimates that if President Obama attacks Syria the cost would likely be "hundreds of millions of...