Blog Profile / Columbia Journalism Review
| URL : | http://www.cjr.org/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Media / Media Industry News | |
| Posts on Regator: | 11424 | |
| Posts / Week: | 43.2 | |
| Archived Since: | April 26, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Hard numbers
72 percent of all US adults who say the most common way they hear about news from family and friends is through "word of mouth" 23 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds who say they primarily get news from family and friends via social media 43 percent of tablet users who say they are consuming more news since getting...
Old news
(Daniel Chang) Ben: Tell me about your media diet when you were young. Jerry:?As a kid, I read the newspapers that my father brought home: The New York Times and his evening papers of choice, the World-Telegram and the New York Post. There were seven papers in New York back then, segmented somewhat by...
Cause and affect
(Data courtesy of DoSomething.org) Who says kids are apathetic and don't care about the news? Well, kids do--but their behavior suggests otherwise. A 2012 TBWA Worldwide survey found that 56 percent of all young adults described themselves as "activists." Last year in the US, 2.4 million teens participated in campaigns organized by DoSomething.org,...
That's incredible
"A lot of students believe all news is created equal," says Alan Miller of the News Literacy Project, which helps kids learn to assess the information they encounter. "At a younger age, they sometimes believe that if someone put it online, it must be true." Older high-school students grow more wary of "bias, whether personal, commercial, or ideological."...
Open Bar
Sabra Ayres Gandamack Lodge Kabul, Afghanistan Although the bar's official name is the Hare and Hound Watering Hole, most people know it as The Gandamack. Year opened?2001. The founder of the lodge, Peter Jouvenal, was a cameraman working with the BBC's John Simpson when the Taliban were ousted from Kabul. Hordes...
Language Corner
The witness, according to the news story, said the robbers were "plum crazy." Not unless they were robbing a green grocer. (It was a McDonald's.) A "plum" is a fruit, usually of a deep purple color, also called "plum." When dried, "plums" used to be known as "prunes" until prunes got a marketing department and became known as "dried plums."...
The importance of counting stories
One of the cold, hard facts of media punditry is that no one can read everything—or should be expected to—so any assertion about a publication or any group of them is going to be just that, an assertion. Is BusinessWeek better now that it's Bloomberg BusinessWeek? Probably, but that's just an impression, even if commonly held....
Honey, I shrank the IRS
Last week, we pointed to a piece of news that we have yet to read or hear from most major news organizations: The federal budget deficit is going to take a hit, because Congress included the government's fundraising arm, the Internal Revenue Service, in the sequester. Put in proper context, meanwhile, that story is a bigger...
Room for two
Certainly a thousand-mile race across the vast empty expanse of the Alaskan wilderness has room for two massive, longform articles about it, right? That is the question that occurred to me when I saw that both Ben McGrath of The New Yorker and Brian Phillips of Grantland had written epics about the Iditarod, the fabled Alaskan...
Covering 'The American Presidency'
In Hollywood and the accounts of many of the nation's leading journalists, events in Washington revolve around the president, who is thought to have virtually unlimited powers to cajole, charm, threaten, or bribe legislators into enacting his agenda. Show More Summary
And that's the way it was: April 30, 1993
In 1993, computer users all over the world were still working out how best to share information over the Internet. It had been around for decades, and email and file sharing were popular, but there wasn't a simple way to share information with a wider audience. Two years earlier, the WorldWideWeb had gone online, but it was competing with other...
In the Egypt Independent's closure, an end of a beginning
Like many things in Egypt these days, the fight to save the Egypt Independent from termination went viral almost instantly. A cry for help by the newspaper's editors earlier this year cited "the current economic crisis" as reason for...Show More Summary
Participial con-fusion
WARNING: Grammar lesson ahead. If you ever knew what a "participle" was, you may have forgotten. Same with the word "gerund." And if you ever heard the term "fused participle," you probably zoned out completely. The concept of a "fused participle," though, is a good one to know, if sometimes disputed and difficult to understand. But let's try. "He...
Crowdsourcing done right
Crowdsourcing -- obtaining data, information, or ideas from a group of people -- can quickly bring up vast quantities of information that might otherwise be unavailable. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, crowdsourced mobile videos and photos added to the available footage. It was an iPhone photo that provided the clearest image of one of the suspects....
Four Corners coverage: immigration reform
PROVO, UT -- Journalists in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah have raised vital policy, political, and accountability issues as US senators debate an 844-page immigration bill. Even so, journalists can do more to scope out special...Show More Summary
When reporters are kidnapped
James Foley was supposed to arrive by 4. It was Thanksgiving, and Foley, a freelance journalist covering the war in Syria for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse, was going to meet his friend Nicole Tung, another journalist, in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli to catch up and rest for a couple days. But Foley never showed. "I was starting to...
Google vs Brazil
In 2009, Google started releasing some basic information twice a year about the takedown requests it receives from governments around the world. The idea, the company says, is to shine a little light on the "scale and scope" of the content that governments don't want on the Internet. Google receives thousands of these requests every year--2,285 from June to...
And that's the way it was: April 29, 1999
In the late hours of April 29, 1999, NATO bombed Avala Tower, a tall, elegant television transmitter that had been a symbol of Belgrade since it was built in 1965. It was not its symbolic value, of course, that drew the bombing, but NATO's claim that the tower was a part of the Serbian wartime military machine. In military language,...
Audit Notes: Awful on Bangladesh, the Kochtopus, US day care
They were still pulling the hundreds of dead bodies out of the collapsed garment factory in Bangladesh when Slate's Matthew Yglesias wrote that "while having a safe job is good, money is also good" in one of the most repugnant pieces I've seen in some time: Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very...
Who's covering local climates?
Want to know more about how the climate is changing in your area, and who's writing about it? On Earth Day, Earth Journalism Network, an arm of Internews, a nonprofit global media development organization, launched an interactive map, Climate Commons. Show More Summary