What If, Indeed

Hamilton Nolan, in a 2021 piece for The Columbia Journalism Review, under the headline “Bezos Has Been Hands-Off. What if That Changes?”: Bezos has given the paper the resources to be bigger and better, and, by most accounts, pretty much stayed out of the newsroom’s hair, besides … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 1 year ago

Ten Tips for Reporting in an Autocracy. | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 1 year ago

Trump Threatens New York Times, Penguin Random House over Critical Coverage. | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 1 year ago

Jeff Jarvis: Why Are Liberals Infuriated with the Media? | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 1 year ago

Los Angeles Times editorials editor resigns after owner blocks presidential endorsement. | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 1 year ago

The organization that safeguards the internet’s history is under attack. | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 1 year ago

Profile of the NYT Pitchbot twitter account. | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 1 year ago

Mathew Ingram is leaving CJR. This is his last piece. | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 2 years ago

Separate, unequal, and ‘glorious.’ | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 2 years ago

Columbia in crisis, again. | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 2 years ago

Why we invented a new metric for measuring readership

"One particular piece of the journalism model that is broken? How news organizations measure their readership." Pageviews are not a million miles away from hits - which is how we measured success in 2003. This is much-needed innovation from The 19th. Alexandra Smith, who wrote th … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 2 years ago

A new leader for Press Forward, at a pivotal moment for journalism. | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 2 years ago

They gave local news away for free. Virtually nobody wanted it. | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 2 years ago

How to report better on artificial intelligence - Columbia Journalism Review

Be skeptical of PR hype Question the training data Evaluate the model Consider downstream harms adactio.com/links/20304 | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

CJR profiles Defector, “the last good website”

an attempt to do digital media differently as a worker-owned co-op without outside investors, supported by readers, and writers own their IP # | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

2024 coverage is shaping up to be the same as always

Last week, the political press turned to a familiar yearly ritual: covering the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. This year’s edition took place under multiple clouds—Matt Schlapp, the event’s top organizer, is facing an allegation of groping (which he denies); m … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

Where did Facebook's funding for journalism really go?

“People want more local news, and local newsrooms are looking for more support,” Campbell Brown wrote in 2019 when Meta (then Facebook) announced its three-year, $300 million commitment to global “news programs, partnerships, and content.” In a press release titled, “Campbell Bro … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

Concerns about TikTok balloon again in Congress

For more than a billion users around the world, TikTok is just a mobile video-sharing app that they scroll through to watch people dancing and cats falling off of furniture (or cats dancing and people falling off of furniture). For the US Congress, however, TikTok is a political … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

Journalists Remain on Twitter, but Tweet Slightly Less

“As it turned out, not enough people were migrating off Twitter and onto the same platforms as Grimes for it to be a sufficient replacement. On Mastodon, she has a much smaller and less diverse community that didn’t let her obtain the same level of reporting. Likewise, the 40,000 … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

How public policy can help save local news

It’s understandable that the idea that government should help save local media makes many journalists’ skin crawl. How can reporters get support from one of the institutions we’re supposed to be holding accountable? In this case, journalists should rethink their concerns. Here’s … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

Covering the new Congress

What links the Republican Reps. Scott Perry, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (beyond, in the case of the latter two, a buzzy recent Daily Beast story about a bathroom shouting match)? All voted to overturn President Biden’s win in the 2020 election, and wor … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

On Wednesday—Day Three of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—the digital newsroom Semafor came out with the third installment of its “Davos Daily” newsletter, a one-stop template for how the media covers the WEF and the global rich. There’s the cocktail-party scene-se … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

Ivory-tower journalism has failed. It’s time we focus on building public infrastructure where everyone can find, factcheck, and produce civic information

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@cjr.org | 3 years ago

Semaform and function

THE NEWS Yesterday, Semafor—a much-discussed yet hitherto-nonexistent news site—finally launched. The brainchild of Justin Smith, formerly the CEO of Bloomberg, and his namesake-but-not-relative Ben Smith, the muckraking former editor of BuzzFeed News and media columnist at the N … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

John Fetterman, transparency, vulnerability, and the press

A week ago, New York magazine dropped a cover with a simple yet striking image: a close-up shot of John Fetterman, the hulking, goateed Democratic nominee for US Senate in Pennsylvania, staring straight forward, his brow slightly furrowed, alongside the headline “The Vulnerabilit … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

Elon Musk, Twitter, and questions of diligence

In July, Twitter sued Elon Musk for his failure to complete his $44 billion acquisition of the company, a process he formally initiated in April. Musk subsequently filed a countersuit in which he alleged that Twitter was not telling the truth about some aspects of its business, i … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

For a news organization, being owned by an oligarch can be complicated.  In 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post from the Graham family, those complications were not top of mind. The Post was in a downward spiral, sloughing off staff and flirting with irrelevance. Bez … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

The Washington Post has a Bezos problem

For a news organization, being owned by an oligarch can be complicated.  In 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post from the Graham family, those complications were not top of mind. The Post was in a downward spiral, sloughing off staff and flirting with irrelevance. Bez … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

The social-media platforms, the "Big Lie," and the coming elections

In August, Twitter, Google, TikTok, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, released statements abouthow they intended to handle election-related misinformation on their platforms in advance. For the most part, it seemed they weren't planning to change much. Now, with the Novem … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 3 years ago

The platforms and the challenges of the next election

“It’s mid-August of an election year in America, which can only mean one thing,” wrote Sarah Roach, Nat Rubio-Licht, and Issie Lapowsky in Protocol’s “Source Code” newsletter yesterday. “It’s time for every social media company to announce how it plans to combat whatever fresh he … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

“IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT.” Thirty years ago, The Sun, a Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid in the UK, plastered those words on its front page—a humblebrag it was not—after John Major, then Britain’s Conservative prime minister, was reelected; the day before, the paper had mocked up a f … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Tech platforms, data, and the aftermath of Roe v. Wade

Last Friday, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court case that had enshrined legal access to abortions in the United States. The decision was widely expected, thanks to a story that Politico published in May, based on a draft opinion th … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Insiders

A Friday morning last fall, in the subterranean labyrinth of the Capitol building, on either side of thick double doors: a throng of reporters and the House Democratic Caucus. No sound from the room could be heard in the hallway.(cjr.org) | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

The complicated conversation about the impact of the January 6 hearings

Over the weekend, with the House committee investigating January 6 having arrived at the midway point in its schedule of televised hearings, ABC News and Ipsos jointly published a poll, conducted since the latest hearing, with an eye-catching finding: nearly 60 percent of those s … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Facebook and paying for news

On June 9, Keach Hagey and Alexandra Bruell reported for the Wall Street Journal that Facebook, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, was “re-examining its commitment to paying for news,” according to several unnamed sources who were described as familiar with Facebook’s plans. The pot … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

The Final Boss

A new book on Anna Wintour reinforces her powerful persona

| Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

The Doctor vs. MeToo (2021)

How an HIV specialist in Germany is using media law to erase reporting of sexual abuse allegations against him

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@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Facebook’s new data-sharing plans raise old concerns

On Monday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said that it plans to share more data about political ad targeting on its platform with social scientists and other researchers, as part of what the company calls its Open Research and Transparency project. According to CNN, Meta w … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Musk's Twitter bid, and the "bot" complication

Elon Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter for $44 billion is only a month old, but it has already had more twists and turns than any Coney Island roller coaster. After Musk filed notice of his offer with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 13, Twitter’s board of directors im … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Columbia's Jelani Cobb: 'Everything is on the table'

CJR · Columbia’s Jelani Cobb: ‘Everything is on the table’   The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism announced today that Jelani Cobb will be its new dean. Cobb is a professor at the school, a staff writer at The New Yorker, an author, a documentary producer, and the director … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Facebook, AI, and a less friendly news feed

Last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, reported its quarterly financial results, noting that while the number of Facebook users increased during the first months of this year, the company's revenues grew at the slowest rate since Facebook went public a decade ago. This … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Haiti: Covering a chaotic nation, with deadly consequences

On the early morning of March 14, 2018, photojournalist Vladjimir Legagneur left home for an assignment in Martissant, a sprawling neighborhood in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince that has been referred to as “ground zero” for warring gangs. He was documenting the aftermath … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

2022 is already the deadliest year for journalists in Mexico

On a Monday in early January, in the Floresta area of Veracruz, a port city on Mexico’s east coast, the body of a man dressed in blue jeans and a brown shirt was found on the street. He had been stabbed at least seven times. At first it looked like an armed robbery gone wrong. [… … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Twitter plus China could equal pressure for Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s plan to acquire Twitter for $44 billion has raised concerns among numerous Twitter users, who have expressed fears that his remarks promoting unrestrained freedom of speech may enable right-wing trolls to engage in harassment with impunity, and that his promise to “au … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Unionized journalists at Miami Herald, sister papers to walk out

Unionized staff at three newspapers in Florida—the Miami Herald, its Spanish-language sibling El Nuevo Herald, and the smaller Bradenton Herald—are refusing to work for one day Friday amid ongoing contract negotiations with their owner, McClatchy. The union has been engaged in mo … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

WNYC removes dozens of articles over attribution issues

WNYC removed forty-five stories from its websites, wnyc.org and Gothamist.com, according to an announcement on the site today, because they contained “unattributed passages from other sources,” in forty-two of the cases, and had been “published on other websites by the author” in … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

War in Ukraine is the latest platform moderation challenge

On March 10, a Reuters headline announced that Facebook would temporarily change its content rules to allow users to post calls for the death of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, as well as “calls for violence against Russians.” (Reuters later modified its headline to specify”i … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago

Who’s behind this website? A checklist to help journalists and researchers

By Priyanjana Bengani (@acookiecrumbles) and Jon Keegan (@jonkeegan) IRE NICAR Conference – March 4, 2022 Slides: English | Russian The Tow Center would like to thank Dr. Svetlana Borodina and the Harriman Institute for translating this presentation into Russian.    What is this? … | Continue reading


@cjr.org | 4 years ago