Columbia Journalism Review

Happy National Grammar Day! The silence in the place of cheers is deafening. Grammar is a boring, regimented set of rules that, like algebra, you had to learn in school and never had to use since. Except that it's not as regimented as you think it is, and we do use grammar, every day. The "rules" of grammar are more...

In January, The New York Times introduced the first visual overhaul of its site since 2006. The changes are fairly subtle--a cleaner look, section navigation that requires an extra click, articles that are easier to browse. But the redesign wasn't about the visible so much as the possible. The new version blends every medium into one experience, whether it's...

It came as a jolt. After 25 years at The Washington Post, where I'd spent my early days as a reporter and my later years as the managing editor, I was ready for a break. And I was taking one, on my back porch, listening to music and enjoying the still life of a freelance book editor. But nine...

BuzzFeed, as much as any newsroom, is the antithesis of traditional. A neon sign celebrates the Hot List, BuzzFeed's signature form. The receptionist hands new employees swag--a sweatshirt and a canvas bag decorated with a classic BuzzFeed headline: "84 Things That Aren't on an Everything Bagel." The conference rooms ringing the newsroom are named for viral cats: "Shironeko," "Princess...

"What makes something go viral?" That has become the $64,000 question among journalists. Ask 10 different publishers and you'll get 10 different answers. Emotional pull. LOL factor. Cuteness. Shocking statistics. Breaking news. A headline that's been rewritten 25 times and systematically tested for clickability. As more and more people declare Facebook and Twitter their primary news sources, media outlets have...

Khalid Mohammed, a photographer for the Associated Press, took a picture 10 years ago of two charred American bodies hanging from a bridge and surrounded by a crowd of cheering Iraqis. His was far from the only photograph depicting the killing and mutilation of four civilian contractors on the streets of Fallujah on March 31, 2004, and the attack,...

On a Friday night in January, Bill Maher made an off-kilter joke about mass shootings. By the following Monday, Tamara Holder was summoned to The Sean Hannity Show, where she has built a following playing an extreme form of devil's advocate for Fox News. Sandwiched between two right-wing pundits and the show's brash host, the progressive Holder held her...

My article on the most important document in the recent and turbulent history of water in Texas opened in a leisurely fashion. "The 295-page draft of the 2012 [state water] plan, published last week in the midst of the worst-ever single-year drought Texas has ever experienced, is a sobering read," I wrote in The Texas Tribune, in 2011. Last...

Eightbar Baltimore, MD Year opened 2013 Distinguishing features Don't expect to spot Eightbar from the sidewalk. Instead, you'll need to enter Baltimore's legendary Atomic Books, a pop-culture emporium where local journalists often appear to read from their latest books, and which offers an unmatchable selection of hard-to-find magazines. Inside Atomic is where you'll find Eightbar, tucked into a modest, living...

DART to The Daily Mail, Gawker, and NBC, among others, for gleefully reprinting a story about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un having his uncle torn apart by dogs. It was lurid, provocative and--surprise--not true. China-based satirist Pyongyang Choi Seongho posted the "report" on microblogging site Weibo; news outlets snapped it up without verification. There isn't much the Western media...

The business model of network television--plugging the power of a national broadcast operation into a grid of local stations--is coming to newspapers, and Gannett, at least, is pinning its future on it. The McLean, VA, newspaper and broadcast chain has begun inserting national and international news sections carrying the USA Today brand into some of its local dailies. The move,...

On January 30, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and CJR hosted a lively panel discussion on "Journalism After Snowden." The J-school's Tow Center for Digital Journalism and CJR are partnering on a yearlong research project about the wide-ranging implications of the Snowden revelations, and the panel event kicked it off. Tow Center Director Emily Bell moderated the...

When photographer Claire Martin first heard about Faerieland, a sanctuary close to the eastern Australian coast for gay men who crave a quieter and more open way of life, she was instantly enamored. Stretched over 134 acres of re-growth rainforest, it's a place for those who seek meditation, communication, physical and emotional nakedness. The inhabitants of Faerieland strive for...

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Carlos Martínez de la Serna started working as a journalist in 1998, when he joined the Spanish newspaper El Mundo as an intern. Eleven years later--after launching their website, leading the site's health news coverage, and reporting on global health issues from East Africa and East Asia--he quit, determined to broaden his tool set to create journalism for the...

Space isn't what it used to be. At least, that's the thought Mike Massimino fears is floating around the American mind. The antidote, he says, may lie with the media. Since NASA ended the space shuttle program a couple of years ago, public interest in space has deflated, he says. Not many people know about NASA's current programs, or...

What do you call a revue of dancing soldiers? A "troupe" of "troops," of course. That was kind of a "trope." A "troop" is a group of people in the military, and a "troupe" is a group of people in performing arts. They both come from the French troupeau, or "crowd." A "trope" is a figure of speech, or, in...

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64 percent of American adults using Facebook 30 percent of American adults getting news from Facebook 16 percent of American adults using Twitter 8 percent of American adults getting news from Twitter 300 million decline in pageviews from readers coming from homepages within the BuzzFeed Network sites (HuffPost, Slate, TMZ, etc.) between January and December 2013 130 million number of...

The award-winning BBC Four documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer opens with a quote from Bertolt Brecht: "Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it." Apt words which could have been cribbed from the Russian punk-rock collective's own manifesto. In March 2012, a month after their brazen guerilla performance in...