Columbia Journalism Review

Browse past and current articles from this publication.

Opening shot.(public-service journalism)(Brief article)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Embattled automakers need lithium for the batteries that will power the next generation of electric cars. Bolivia has half the world's known supply of lithium, buried beneat . . .

Reasons to believe: journalism's search for a support system.(Editorial)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There is a lot of death talk around journalism lately. A case in point that stuck in our craw was Michael Hirschorn's recent Atlantic piece about The New York Times: the Gra . . .

Left hanging.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
In "Hung Out to Dry" (CJR, January/ February), Laura Rozen makes a good point when she writes that "the national-security press dug up the dirt, but Congress wilted." But let's not forget that for m . . .

Whose truth?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Excellent essay ("Un-American" by Michael Massing, CJR, January/February). After the 2004 election, when analysts were trying to figure out how the red and blue states had become so divided, it seem . . .

Dart dispute.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
You missed your target with the Dart thrown at the Cleveland Plain Dealer for failing to stick by reporter Bob Paynter's story on racial disparities in the Cuyahoga County criminal-justice system. P . . .

Notes from online readers.(LETTERS)(Interview)(Brief article)
WE RECENTLY LAUNCHED PAGE VIEWS, our Wednesday blog about books. James Marcus, who edits the Ideas & Reviews section of C JR and, now, Page Views, interviewed David Denby, the New Yorker film critic . . .

Editor's note.(LETTERS)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE THUMBNAIL MAGAZINE COVER ABOVE IS SOMETHING WE'RE PROUD TO present--the first issue of Columbia Journalism Review Chinese, to be published and d . . .

Craigslist = straw man.(Currents)(newspapers' advertising revenue)
[GRAPHIC OMITTED] Data gathered by the Newspaper Association of America show a savage decline in newspaper ad revenue in the third quarter of 2008, down 18 percent from the same period the previou . . .

One shot.(Currents)(Jamshid Bayrami)(Interview)
IN 1999, AN IRANIAN COLlege student and an Iranian news photographer crossed paths briefly but momentously in Tehran during a student protest of regime practices. The photographer, Jamshid Bayrami, . . .

Hard numbers.(Currents)(Brief article)(Statistical data)
26.9 million live video streams CNN.com Live delivered on inauguration clay (more than five times the previous record of 5.3 million last year on election day) 8,500 status updates posted on Faceb . . .

They called me once--to comment when Britney and Madonna kissed....(Currents)(Britney Spears)(Brief article)
'They called me once--to comment when Britney and Madonna kissed.... But I was too busy reading about Afghanistan to do it.'--Rachel Maddow, in early January, when asked whether she had ever appeare . . .

Dutch treat.(Currents)(government fund for the Netherlands' print media)
AFTER A CRY FOR HELP FROM the print media, the Dutch government has established an 8 million [euro] ($10.2 million) fund to jumpstart the search for digital and other innovative solutions to the dra . . .

Snark hunt.(LANGUAGE CORNER)(snarky)(Definition)(Brief article)
SOMETIMES, DICTIONARIES JUST DON'T GET IT. THIS ONE WILL DEFINE A WORD ONE way; that one will define the same word another way. C'mon, people! It's not like anyone's depending on you or anything! . . .

Darts & laurels.
LAUREL to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Tennessean, and The Post and Courier for strong reporting on the coal-ash spill in Harriman, Tennessee. On December 22, a forty-acre elevated retent . . .

The sarcastic times: for Rachel Maddow and the other ironic anchors, absurdity is serious stuff.(IN MEDIA RES)
ON A WEDNESDAY NIGHT IN DECEMBER, RACHEL MADDOW, IN A TOREADOR-style black jacket, waits for her show to start. She types last-minute notes on her computer with the intensity of a graduate student. . . .

Good morning, Postville! An unlikely thorn in Agriprocessors' side.(ON THE JOB)
AS A NEW WORK WEEK BEGAN IN POSTVILLE, IOWA, LAST NOVEMBER, JEFF ABBAS, with his bushy gray beard and ample paunch, manned the mike at the town's lone radio station, KPVL. After a song by Billy Brag . . .

The companies they keep: Fortune's dubious list of the best employers.(ANNOTATION)
Fortune does the unemployed reader a disservice with this bold headline, "Now hiring! How to Land a Top Job." Or maybe not; we're in a bad recession. Throughout the issue, in fact, Fortune provides . . .

The American newsroom.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ProPublica New York, NY October 22, 2008 . . .

Roll the dice: how one journalist gambled on the future of news.(Cover story)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Nine months. We'd been at this project for nine months, beginning with a few sketches on a whiteboard about how we might design a Web site for international news in the digi . . .

2014: how we got here: voices from an imagined future.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] These are hard times. CJR counts a stunning 11,250 journalism jobs lost, mostly at newspapers, in the last two years. Out of necessity, these are times of great innovation, . . .

Get off the bus: the future of pro-am journalism.(OffTheBus)
Standing before a fawning crowd at a private fundraiser in San Francisco last April, Senator Barack Obama's usually finely calibrated rhetoric loosened up. He characterized the electoral mood among . . .

Suffering in silence: ground zero's other victims.(journalists who covered the World Trade Center attack)
Even now, more than seven years later, images of that day remain frightfully raw, in large measure because a legion of photographers and journalists made the unimaginable events of September 11, 200 . . .

In the foothills of change: foreign coverage seems doomed, but it's only just begun.(Essay)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Some months ago, while exploring files in the nearly empty, ink-blackened basement of the old New York Times building on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan, I came across . . .

Buyer beware: a history of redlining and racism in Chicago.(Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black America By Beryl Satter Metropolitan Books 512 pages, $30 EVERY NOW AND THEN, THE ZEITGEIST smiles down upon a writer and . . .

Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism.(Book review)
Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism By Ralph Engelman, Foreword by Morley Safer Columbia University Press 440 pages, $34.50 THOSE WHO SAW GOOD Night . . .

Luces in the sky.(THE RESEARCH REPORT)(Henry and Clare Luce )(Column)
WHEN TIME MAGAZINE WENT CULINARY trend-spotting in July 1951, it bypassed usual suspects like new ice-cream flavors and found a truly cutting-edge trend: horsemeat for dinner. With beef prices high, . . .

The lower case.(newspaper articles)(List)
Funding would help alleviate foreclosure problems (Hagerstown, MA) The Herald-Mail 1/7/09 * Firefighters transported a woman who fell Tuesday at 10:04 a.m. from the Heights of Cape Ann to Addiso . . .

Opening shot.(Brief article)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The New Deal marked a dramatic expansion in the scope and complexity of the federal government. This increased complexity heightened the need for a more transparent bureaucr . . .

Let there be light: how President Obama should reopen our government.(Barack Obama)(Editorial)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over many years, Americans have come to embrace the idea that democracy suffers when the work of government is excessively secret--the people are shut out, corruption and cy . . .

Going deep.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Bree Nordenson has done a great job synthesizing a great deal of information into a first-rate piece of explanatory journalism ("Overload" CJR, November/ December). She has done her homework and is . . .

Keeping house.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Your excellent and most welcome editorial ("Drawing Lines: Why do we let political operatives act like journalists?" CJR, November/December) suggests questions that are truly fundamental but long an . . .

From CJR.org: notes from our online readers.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
IN OUR NEW WEEKLY ONLINE FORUM, NEWS MEETING, we opened the floor in December to our readers to debate the journalistic virtues or shortcomings of Twitter, a short-message service, that played a sig . . .

Fixing a hole.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Analysis of the press is a dirty job, and C JR has done pretty well by and large. That said, I have to disagree with some assumptions you made in your November/December Opening Shot. You complain . . .

CSI: Wall Street.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
Dean Starkman's "Boiler Room" essay " (CJR, September/October) brought to mind a point that came up during the Enron collapse. I received a call from a Canadian friend who, like me, is a forensic ac . . .

Editor's note.(LETTERS)
GOOD JOURNALISM AND GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY GO HAND IN GLOVE. BOTH ultimately seek to provide the power of information to the people, and both tend to discourage the kinds of acts by government and . . .

Cloudy skies.(Currents)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In many ways, CleanSkies.tv, an online outfit offering "energy and environmental news, information, discussion, and commentary," resembles other TV news operations. It has o . . .

Glory days.(Currents)
THESE ARE BRUTAL TIMES for the newspaper industry. Widespread buyouts, shuttered bureaus, diminished ambitions--in many cases, not even the physical size of the paper has been spared. May I suggest . . .

Hard numbers.(Currents)(Brief article)
86 percent of adults over the age of eighteen who read a local community newspaper each week (in markets served by newspapers of less than 25,000 circulation) 59 percent who consider their local n . . .

Entitled time.(Currents)(Brief article)
AFTER TWO HARRIED YEARS on the trail, an endless stream of hotel rooms, fast food bolted on the fly, the same speeches day after day after day, journalists finally had time to curl up with a good bo . . .

Great expectations.(LANGUAGE CORNER)(Brief article)
PLEASE SELECT THE STATEMENT THAT BEST DESCRIBES HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT THE new Obama administration: a) I am eager to see what happens; b) I am anxious to see what happens; c) I can anticipate what will . . .

Darts & laurels.(Column)
Dart to the Cleveland Plain Dealer for failing to stick by its story. Last October, investigative reporter Bob Paynter, at the urging of Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg, produced "Justice Blinded: Ra . . .

Un-American: have you listened to the right-wing media lately?(ON THE CONTRARY)
IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING THE ELECTION, THE DEBATE OVER THE ISSUE OF media bias, and of whether the press was overly kind to Barack Obama, has continued to swirl. Much less attention has been paid to a . . .

In the tank: did the press help elect Barack Obama?(LEARNING CURVE)
FIRST, ALLOW ME TO CONFESS MY SINS. FOR THE LAST ELEVEN YEARS, I HAVE made my living practicing the dark art of journalism, and while perhaps not a full-fledged member of that nefarious institution . . .

Back to the future: how sports writing can recapture its relevance. (THE SPORTS PAGES).
IN THE 1920S, THE NEW YORKER PUBLISHED A PIECE THAT DECLARED SPORTS A "trivial enterprise" involving "second-rate people and their second-rate dreams and emotions." The magazine went on to concede, . . .

The Wikinews ace: why Shimon Peres sat down with David Shankbone.(ON THE JOB)
ONE MORNING IN DECEMBER 2007, A LAW-SCHOOL DROPOUT NAMED DAVID Shankbone sat on a couch in Shimon Peres's office in Jerusalem. He'd been invited into the Israeli president's inner sanctum for an exc . . .

Shadow & light.(THE AMERICAN NEWSROOM)(Brief article)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There are many reasons why the U.S. economy is in such staggering trouble. One is that some of the maneuvers that put us at risk were largely invisible to journalists and ci . . .

What we didn't know has hurt us: the Bush administration was pathological about secrecy. Here's what needs to be undone after ei
Advocates for open and transparent government are quick to note that no American presidential administration has, in practice, been enthusiastic about reducing secrecy in the executive branch--for s . . .

Hung out to dry: the national-security press dug up the dirt, but Congress wilted.
In November and December 2005, The Washington Post and The New York Times published two groundbreaking national-security stories that revealed controversial and possibly illegal behavior by the Bush . . .

What we learned in the meltdown: financial journalists saw some trees but not the forest. Now what?
One day in June 2005, my colleague Nell Henderson and I hiked over to the Bond Market Association to get ourselves educated on collateralized debt obligations and related products. I was editing The . . .

Opening India: the world's largest democracy finally has an FOI law--so why have journalists been slow to embrace it?(Freedom of
In October, community activists from around India gathered at the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi to celebrate the third anniversary of the country's Right to Information Act and assess . . .