CJR Daily

Author Chuck Windig, GigaOm's Mathew Ingram, and TechDirt's Mike Masnick all took on the question of ebook pricing recently, arguing that production costs (you know, minor details like advances, editors, etc.) don't or shouldn't factor into the end price. Ingram writes that "It doesn't matter what e-books cost to make," and Masnick follows with "Nobody Cares About the...

In March 2011, Lisa M. Hamilton, a writer and photographer, began a series of road trips around rural California. She had a grant from the Creative Work Fund—a San Francisco-based foundation that supports collaboration between artists and nonprofits—to tell stories that would help bridge the cultural divide between the rural and urban parts of the state. Initially she...

“Catalogue” can also be spelled “catalog.” “Dialogue” can also be spelled “dialog.” But “monologue” is rarely spelled “monolog.” The Americans are at it again. The combining form “logue” is French, descended from Latin, and it indicates an engagement of some sort, a discourse, if you will, between people or things. People browse “catalog(ue)s” to “discuss” what items to buy; a...

Conor Friedersdorf makes a nice catch on Tom Friedman's Sunday column bemoaning the commercialization of seemingly all aspects of American life: For example, his column is bizarrely titled, "This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone," despite the fact that right above it on NYTimes.com there is a banner ad for a Citi/American Airlines credit card. But Friedersdorf...

We all know Obamacare is Romneycare and Romneycare is Obamacare and that the Bay State has set the standard for everything health reform—from the individual mandate right down to ways to cut its gigantic medical bill. Or at least the media have passed along that narrative. The Wall Street Journal’s recent piece, “Same State, New Stab at Health...

Time touched a nerve this week with its provocative cover photo of 26-year-old Jamie Lynne Grumet and her 3-year-old son standing on a chair next to her, nursing her left breast while both stare directly (and unapologetically) at readers. The underlying story focused on the “attachment parenting” method developed by Dr. William Sears, which...

In his weekly “Stories I’d Like to See” column, journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill spotlights topics that, in his opinion, have received insufficient media attention. This article was originally published on Reuters.com. 1. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner: How much for charity? Two Sundays ago, Tom Brokaw used an appearance on Meet the Press to attack...

Long before Facebook or Foursquare, men like the late management consultant Martin Jay Levitt were connoisseurs of social networks. At the beginning of each new gig Levitt would have a client’s human resources director create detailed diagrams mapping the relationships between all employees, accounting for gossip, date of hire and pay, even details of his sex life, if any...

When Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign last month, the former Pennsylvania senator all but sealed Mitt Romney’s easy victory in the state’s April 24 primary. Santorum also dashed the expectations of his home state’s broadcasters, who were counting on the candidate to keep the race competitive and their ad inventory—much of which had already been reserved...

The Candidate: What It Takes to Win—And Hold—The White House | By Samuel L. Popkin | Oxford University Press | 350 pages, $27.95 Academic political science and Washington policymaking once had a close relationship: during the Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations, for example. No longer. As Karl Rove writes as a blurb on this book, most contemporary political science...

MICHIGAN — Quinn Klinefelter is a longtime news editor at WDET, the National Public Radio station in Detroit. His voice is easily recognizable, and so, apparently, is his face. Klinefelter recalls walking down a block, absorbed in his thoughts, when he passed a man he’d never met. They were several yards past each other when the man turned back and...

In what FT Alphaville called "the most excruciating bank conference call we’ve ever heard," press favorite Jamie Dimon announced last week that JPMorgan Chase has lost more than $2 billion on bad derivatives bets made by its chief investment office. It could (meaning, it probably will) lose more than that. On Thursday, we were told up to another...

Early on a February morning, in a glass-walled conference room high up in the Hearst Tower in Manhattan, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe spoke in a careful, reassuring tone. “We can do this; I know that we can do this,” he told the audience, which included representatives from magazine-industry heavyweights like Condé Nast, Hearst, and Time Inc. “Hang in there...

The Seattle-based political news site PubliCola is closing, despite strong readership. As founder Josh Feit describes in a post, the site is quite popular, with “more than 400,000 monthly page views during the election season and currently more than 10,000 Facebook and Twitter followers.” But that doesn’t always equal commensurate returns. Feit writes, “We haven’t been...

The hits keep coming at Chesapeake Energy. Today, it's The Wall Street Journal's turn. It reports on page one that the company has put $1.4 billion in unreported liabilities off its balance sheet, far more than analysts had estimated. Most of these costs will hit this year and next, at a time when the company needs to raise substantial...

CJR has been writing since late last year about a proposed FCC rule that would require local TV stations to post their public records of political ad sales on the Internet. So with the new rule announced in late April and set to go into effect soon, we were delighted to team up with the folks at Poynter Friday afternoon...

A variety of news outlets has covered two papers published this week indicating that the Weddell Sea area of Antarctica might be susceptible to faster-than-expected ice loss, but most went astray in one way or another. The most troublesome of the bunch was the piece from Reuters whose lede reads: Scientists are predicting the disappearance of another vast...

NEVADA — In this state, where it’s legal to carry an unconcealed handgun, John Oceguera, the Speaker of the Nevada Assembly, didn’t even need to unholster his pistol to shoot himself in the foot. He’d probably prefer to imagine taking aim at the messengers—the political journalists who roasted him on two television programs, and in print, this week. Oceguera, a...

Sarah Tressler, the Houston Chronicle society reporter who was fired in March shortly after the Houston Press exposed she also moonlighted as a stripper at Houston’s high-end gentlemen clubs—and blogged about it under the alias ‘Angry Stripper’—is now suing the Chronicle for gender discrimination. Tressler, who filed the suit with help from...

It’s fitting that veteran tech journalist Dean Takahashi, who grew up a self-described “arcade rat,” weaned on classics like Pong and Galaga, has become one of the country’s most prominent writers about the video game industry. He opened his “nice, big REI bag” for Tyler Orsburn to prove a bit of hard-earned journalistic wisdom: “You gotta have...