Feature
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December 02, 2008 10:07 AM
Trimming the Hedges
Web jungle, Web garden—you decide
It may seem like people have been gawking at the proliferation of online news sources for ages now, but it was not so long ago that readers had a much narrower field of options. The Democratic and Republican national conventions threw that fact into high relief at the end of last summer. The New York Times media critic David Carr...
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November 25, 2008 10:22 AM
Picture This
The infographic comes of age
The infographic was among man’s earliest means of communication (think petroglyph), yet after millennia of evolution, this marriage of text and images is only now realizing its full potential as a journalistic tool. The proliferation of data, the ease of access to that data, and the emergence of new ways to carve it up and serve it to overburdened readers...
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November 20, 2008 09:00 AM
At Risk in Mexico
Drug violence is silencing the press
On November 13, Mexican crime reporter Armando Rodriguez was killed outside his Juarez home by an unknown attacker. Rodriguez covered the crime beat for the national daily El Diario for fourteen years, and had briefly been transferred to the paper's El Paso office after receiving death threats this past February. Rodriguez was not that week's only gang victim in Juarez:...
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November 18, 2008 09:00 AM
Overload!
Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information
In 2007, as part of the third round of strategic planning for its digital transformation, The Associated Press decided to do something a little different. It hired a research company called Context to conduct an in-depth study of young-adult news consumption around the world. Jim Kennedy, the AP’s director of strategic planning, initially agreed to the project because he...
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November 11, 2008 12:12 PM
Surface Routines
How we read on the Web
Overload—the amount people feel compelled to know combined with the volume of information they have to sift through in order to know it—is perhaps the largest factor in the increasingly distinct difference between how people read printed material and how they read online. Faced with the reality of having two eyes, one brain, and what the latest count estimates to...
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October 02, 2008 09:00 AM
The Ploughman and the Professor
Consumer reporting in the age of the wise crowd
Journalism is a funny line of work. It wobbles between aspirations to be taken seriously as a “profession,” with all the status and respect that entails, and a desire to be the voice of the people, a critic of the pretensions of the professional class. We’re used to being condescended to, or attacked by, doctors, lawyers, diplomats, and the...
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September 25, 2008 09:00 AM
In the Beginning
From a consumer movement to consumerism
Last year, New York’s state legislature, which has historically led the nation in passing pro-consumer credit legislation, approved a pair of bills aimed at protecting residents from questionable lending practices, the kind that have come back to haunt the economy. One of them would have put the brakes on the “universal default” provision, which lenders use to jack up...
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September 09, 2008 09:00 AM
The Lee Abrams Experience
How to hear the man who would transform Tribune
Abrams Unbound
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In a modest, cluttered office on the sixth floor of Chicago’s Tribune Tower, the future of American newspapers looks to its past. It is here that Lee Abrams, a former radio consultant and the new “chief innovation officer” for the Tribune Company, seeks inspiration in stacks of yellowing front pages. He likes old-school screaming headlines, he says,... -
September 01, 2008 11:28 AM
Attitude Adjustment
How the Internet could usher in a new golden age of consumer journalism
Like the air that sustains life, facts that would help hard-pressed consumers are all around us. Instead of gathering and delivering such facts, however, we often leave subscribers gasping for useful information. And so their numbers dwindle.
Americans tend to consume all their income these days, and sometimes more than their income, which is shrinking. They are in a...
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August 05, 2008 11:38 AM
The Hunger
Egypt's bloggers want to be journalists
Sandmonkey was determined to quit his blog. Sniping away at life and politics in Egypt had become too risky, he said, even under the cover of his anonymous online moniker. Too much of a chance the government thugs would hurt him or someone close to him, or smash his computer equipment. He wasn’t alone in his worry. The dozen...
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July 08, 2008 09:00 AM
Climate Change: Now What?
A big beat grows more challenging and complex
Media coverage of climate change is at a crossroads, as it moves beyond the science of global warming into the broader arena of what governments, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens are doing about it. Consider these recent examples: a decade from now, Abu Dhabi hopes to have the first city in the world with zero carbon emissions. In a windswept...
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July 03, 2008 09:00 AM
Endangered Species
The big-city sports columnist: devoured by TV, negated by the Net
“All I ever wanted to be was a newspaper writer.”
Those were the self-eulogizing words of Tony Kornheiser upon accepting a buyout from his newspaper home of nearly three decades, The Washington Post, in mid-May. Truthfully, the bon vivant known to fans as “Mr. Tony” had long since surrendered his perch as the top sports columnist in the nation’s...
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July 01, 2008 09:00 AM
Crossing Lines
In a bombed-out Detroit neighborhood, a new blog works to rekindle a community
A few miles east of Detroit’s gleaming new ballpark and glittering new casino hotels, a few miles west of the sprawling mansions lining Grosse Pointe’s Lakeshore Drive, north of the General Motors assembly plant, south of the Daimler-Chrysler assembly plant, and just west of the regional airstrip known as City Airport, you’ll find a five-acre parcel of land known...
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June 03, 2008 09:00 AM
My Year in the Trenches
A veteran editor goes back to square one, and learns something new
It was a store-bought cake with a row of candles and a message in sugary script. Excited young voices filled the room in a third-floor apartment at the crest of the hill that rises behind New Hampshire’s statehouse. As the candles were lit, one of the party’s hosts quieted the crowd and said it was obvious who should have...
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May 29, 2008 09:00 AM
Shop Stewards
Der Spiegel’s employee-owners gave their boss the boot. Now they must prove they can revive the venerable German magazine.
Stefan Aust, the longtime editor of Germany’s leading newsweekly, Der Spiegel, was on a boat trip near the Indonesian island of Ambon when he learned that he was out of a job. Although Der Spiegel’s circulation numbers were good, many of its journalists thought there had been a decline in the quality of the magazine’s journalism. The nation’s elites no...
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May 22, 2008 09:00 AM
Saved by the Shield
A reporter recalls his legal crucible after the Chiquita story
Ten years ago this month began a period of my life that I have come to call my season in hell. It was a prolonged horror of court hearings and depositions following the collapse of The Cincinnati Enquirer’s investigation of Chiquita Brands International. But like all calamities, it delivered unexpected insights. One of the most important for me was...
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April 01, 2008 09:00 AM
The Grave Dancer
Sam Zell and Tribune's fate
When the Tribune Company went private in December, Sam Zell completed a deal that many had said he couldn’t get done. Now comes the hard part—staying solvent.
In an unusual two-phase deal, an Employee Stock Ownership Plan set up by Zell borrowed nearly $8 billion on Wall Street to buy all 240 million of Tribune’s outstanding shares, taking the...
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March 13, 2008 09:00 AM
Red Ink Rising
How the press missed a sea change in the credit-card industry
One of the paradoxes of the business press is that while everyone should read it, since we all live in the economy, not everyone does. In fact, most people don’t. I suspect, if they look at financial publications at all, they flip through with a sense of disconnect. Forbes, Fortune, the Financial Times, and the agenda-setter for the financial...
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March 04, 2008 09:00 AM
Happy All the Time
Fox Business Network's populist sensibility is refreshing, sort of, but nobody's watching. Here's why
On January 4, Wall Street suffered big losses. On my TV, several non-celebrities had a lengthy and lively discussion about what, if anything, the Federal Reserve should do to fix the U.S. economy. The panel was critical of the financial community—which has been badgering the central bank to cut interest rates—for its narrow view of Fed policy. “What’s good...
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January 08, 2008 09:00 AM
Transcript: "The Language of Strangers"
A town comes together to discuss the role of a community newspaper
Author’s note: The tape recording of the newspaper meeting began shortly after the meeting started so, regrettably, this document does not include remarks by several community members. In transcribing the tape, I made the best attempt I could to understand each speaker, although at times it was impossible to hear each word. Rather than editing for the written page, my...
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Desks
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Baucus Watch, Part III Montana reporter digs deep into the senator’s white paper
- No More Questions A punctuation suggestion for Bob Herbert
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