Behind the News
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December 02, 2008 07:00 AM
LeT’s Not Jump the Gun
Guessing is great, but the pundits’ certainty is worrisome
Last week’s attacks in Mumbai were, in a word, horrific. As happens after every crisis, the pundits and analysts swarm the nearest media outlets to share their views on what happened, why, and who did it. This is perfectly understandable—a manifestation of what Nassim Taleb calls our desire to assign a narrative to every action so that it might have...
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December 01, 2008 12:56 PM
The Unbearable Lightness of Kabul
Lots of bombs go off in Afghanistan, but the media only seem to report the ones that hit internationals
Late last week, a car bomb exploded near the American embassy in Kabul, killing at least four civilians. The bombing is part of the larger story in which terror attacks in Afghanistan’s capital have increased over the last year, and people have begun to feel less safe in the once-secure city. Expatriates are hiding in their walled compounds,...
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November 24, 2008 08:45 AM
Above the Fold: Down the Rabbit Hole
John Cassidy, Joe Nocera, and others trace our economic ruination
With this morning's papers bringing news of the government's newest commitment of tens of billions of dollars to prop up Citicorp—its third major lurch towards socialism in three months—one fundamental question remains: How the hell did we get here?
The freshest answers come from this week's New Yorker, last week's NOW (PBS), and, especially, Deborah Amos's interview with...
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November 14, 2008 03:17 PM
The Conflict in the Congo
It belongs on Page One
The ethnic and political free-for-all in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has raged for over a decade, and has pitted over a half-dozen countries and numerous other paramilitary and militia groups against each other. An estimated five million people have been killed in the conflict.
In mid-October of this year, the UN brokered a tenuous cease-fire between the...
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November 14, 2008 01:03 PM
The Changing Media Landscape 2008
New media experts discuss the state of the news media
On Tuesday, November 11, Columbia's Journalism School convened its annual "Changing Media Landscape" panel to discuss the current state of the news media and the direction it will take in the future. Participants--Sewell Chan, editor of The New York Times's City Room blog; Jacob Weisberg, chairman of Slate; Erica Smith, news designer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Paper...
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November 14, 2008 10:55 AM
The Art of the Fake Correction
Inside the hoax New York Times's corrections section
The groups responsible for this week’s fake edition of The New York Times took great care to produce a newspaper that looked like the real thing. They mimicked the paper’s fonts and layout, included an imagined column by Thomas Friedman, and even launched an accompanying website. Regular Times readers also experienced the familiar sensation of finding...
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November 12, 2008 07:15 AM
Pressed For Information
Business school PR departments respond to the financial crisis
As Brian Kenny watched Lehman Brothers’ collapse on Sept. 15 from his office inside the Harvard Business School, he knew there was little time to follow the unraveling news story—let alone consider his personal financial stakes. Kenny, the chief of marketing and communications at HBS, realized immediately that he would soon become very popular among members of the media.
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November 07, 2008 01:31 PM
(Comic) Strip Mining
Comics editors scramble to replace Berkeley Breathed’s Opus
With cartoonist Berkeley Breathed's decision to end his comic strip career, many Sunday funnies readers are about to find there's literally no substitute for Opus.
Instead, starting this weekend, dozens of papers—including The Baltimore Sun, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland—are boosting the size of existing comics in order to fill the space.
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November 04, 2008 11:58 AM
Studs And Me
Studs Terkel interviewed me, and I didn't even know it
I only met the master interviewer Studs Terkel once, but that occasion remains a high point of my thirty-five years as a journalist.
And the funny part is, although I was a reporter, I didn’t meet him in that role, but, rather, as interviewee.
It was 1992, and I was in the middle of a two-week author’s tour Bantam Books...
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November 03, 2008 04:39 PM
Talking to Studs
Studs Terkel, master listener
An interview with Ann Banks about growing up on Army posts is included in Studs Terkel's American Dreams: Lost and Found (1980).
Telling Studs Terkel a story was not a relaxing experience. He listened really hard. And what he heard was what you would have said, had you been a more expressive and insightful version of yourself. Your job was...
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November 03, 2008 03:44 PM
Phantom Militias
Don’t believe everything you read about Pakistan’s tribal conflicts
Verifiable stories out of northwestern Pakistan are difficult to come by: the entire region exists in what Rosanne Klass once called "a smattering of romantic fact so closely mixed with romantic fiction that it would be difficult to disentangle the two.” The few western reporters to return from the area speak of its danger, its excitement, and the battles between...
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October 31, 2008 09:32 AM
Charting a New Course
Will The Christian Science Monitor’s new model save the rest of journalism? No.
The future is here, sort of. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that starting in 2009 it would stop putting out the daily paper, cutting back to a weekly dead-tree edition, and a concerted focus on daily web content.
The Monitoris a nonprofit whose moneys come from three sources: $9 million in subscriptions; $2 million in...
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October 29, 2008 02:59 PM
Lost In Translation
Did a federal judge bash pro-bono legal work, or did a reporter misunderstand?
What could be less controversial than lawyers volunteering their services for those in need? Pro-bono work—from the Latin pro bono publico, “for the public good”—is not only a staple of the legal profession but an ethical obligation: the American Bar Association suggests that lawyers devote at least fifty hours per year. Pro-bono lawyers intervene on the behalf of...
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October 29, 2008 10:00 AM
The State of Mexican Journalism
An address from Grupo Reforma president Alejandro Junco de la Vega
Nowhere in the Americas is it more dangerous to practice journalism than in Mexico. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, twenty-one journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, seven of them in direct reprisal for their work. Those deaths, and the many other assaults that are a constant threat to Mexican journalists, mirror a rising trend of drug-related...
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October 29, 2008 10:00 AM
The State of Mexican Journalism
An address from Grupo Reforma president Alejandro Junco de la Vega
Nowhere in the Americas is it more dangerous to practice journalism than in Mexico. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, twenty-one journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, seven of them in direct reprisal for their work. Those deaths, and the many other assaults that are a constant threat to Mexican journalists, mirror a rising trend of drug-related...
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October 24, 2008 01:36 PM
All the News That's Fit to Feed
How the Times' latest high-tech gambit could actually work
Last week, The New York Times announced that it was finally launching the first of its long-awaited news APIs."Application programming interface" may sound complicated, but its essence is simple: the Gray Lady was packaging up its news in a way that can play nicely with others on the Internet.
APIs work by establishing a trusted relationship between computer...
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October 22, 2008 02:03 PM
Take Me to the Other Side
Reporting from inside the Taliban is an old story
Nir Rosen’s blockbuster article in Rolling Stone on his “embed” with the Taliban in the Ghazni province of Afghanistan is being roundly praised as a stellar work of investigative journalism. But does it really deserve all the acclaim?
In 1994, Nancy DeWolf-Smith, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, embedded with the original Taliban...
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October 21, 2008 02:07 PM
Obsession with Controversy
What are papers to do when fear, funding, and free speech collide?
Sometime around early June, about the time Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, an agent for a shadowy group called the Clarion Fund approached Newspaper Services of America, the nation’s biggest newspaper ad placement agency, with a proposition. Clarion wanted to use newspapers to distribute millions of copies of a DVD titled Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West,...
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October 20, 2008 02:07 PM
Wikipedia vs. Joe the Plumber
Wikipedia users debate Wurzelbacher's newsworthiness and notability
If John McCain and Barack Obama's invocation of "Joe the Plumber" twenty-odd times in their final debate wasn't enough to vault the Ohioan into national prominence, subsequent newspaper articles and interviews from far and wide certainly did the trick. But over at Wikipedia, the question of Samuel J. Wurzelbacher's notability has created a real mess.
Since John McCain...
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October 14, 2008 04:10 PM
The Therapeutic Press
The Russian media, um, underreports the financial crisis
CNN.com led this morning with a story about kitchen-table financial panic fomenting backyard violence. “An out-of-work money manager in California loses a fortune and wipes out his family in a murder-suicide,” the story reports. “A 90-year-old Ohio widow shoots herself in the chest as authorities arrive to evict her from the modest house she called home for 38...
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Desks
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Talking Shop: Gail Collins The New York Times columnist on caucuses, campaigning, and the glory of deadlines
- Baucus Watch, Part III Montana reporter digs deep into the senator’s white paper
The Audit Business
- WSJ Watchdogs Sketchy Conseco Insurance Move
- Ebony on the Fall of Detroit The magazine reports the U.S. car industry’s demise is hitting blacks especially hard