CJR Daily

Rep. Howard Coble knows the reputation of intellectual property law--that it is dull and boring. But at a Congressional hearing on Thursday, he had a message for anyone who shared that viewpoint: "Get used to it, because IP is not going away," he warned. Yesterday's hearing was the first that the Judiciary Committee held after its chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte,...

Culled from CJR’s frequently updated “Must-reads from around the Web,” our staff recommendations for the best pieces of journalism (and other miscellany) on the Internet, here are your can’t-miss must-reads of the past week: The completist guide to Star Trek -- Matt Yglesias watched every Star Trek movie and every episode of every TV show in the franchise Dear Twitter...

The dilemma for journalists this week: How should you cover a series of proto-scandals with seemingly little in common? As far as we know, internal Obama administration edits of talking points about the Benghazi attacks, Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny, and the Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press phone records aren't part of some overarching...

The media covers social minorities regularly in the daily churn of news. A lot of that coverage just skims the happenings of the day--a court win, an activist group announcement, what a controversial figure said on his Twitter feed. But sometimes, reporters are allowed the time and the space to examine a social minority issue in depth, or from an...

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. That's Peggy Noonan today in The Wall Street Journal, and no, she will not be laughed out of Washington. There are papers to sell and clicks to harvest. Forget about the fact that there's zero evidence of any White House involvement in the IRS flagging Tea Party groups,...

Last week's release of the wildly varying prices that hospitals charge Medicare may no longer be news du jour, but it's worth revisiting the topic, because it was and is an important story, it was an important step by the government, and it offers important follow-up opportunities for the media. And there's more to glean from the reaction to the...

PROVO, UT -- Water issues may not be the sexy beat to which young journalists first aspire, but here in the southwest, such coverage is critical--and, unfortunately, receding, says Arizona Republic senior reporter and self-described "water geek" Shaun McKinnon. "Water reporters are definitely an endangered group of people," said McKinnon, who has covered water for more than 14 years for...

Conservatives are howling about the IRS targeting Tea Party groups applying for nonprofit tax exemptions. Well, welcome to our world. Nonprofit journalism has been going through the same thing for the last few years, with almost none of the screeching—even though journalism organizations had a much better case for tax exemptions than did the Tea Party groups. Tell me if...

Last week, my declaration that this is the best moment to be working in journalism was met with some side-eye after outlets from the Daily News to, cough, the Columbia Journalism Review announced layoffs. "BREAKING: No it's not," tweeted Dallas Observer editor Joe Tone. "Not sure the folks getting pink slips today at the #DailyNews would agree," said Jennifer Vogt....

Many journalists may be shocked by Monday's revelation that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) used a subpoena to obtain phone records for several AP bureaus last year, in a pattern that the New York Times reports, "strongly suggested they are related to a continuing government investigation" into the news organization's May 2012 reporting on CIA activities in Yemen. In...

As campaign ads saturated the airwaves during the 2012 campaign, and piles of campaign cash buoyed stations' balance sheets, media watchers wondered: how would the windfall revenues affect the local TV industry, and the news coverage it produces? We now have a partial answer: the ad-buying binge has accelerated the ongoing trend toward ownership consolidation in the industry. According to...

To walk through San Francisco is to examine the area's lurid, sometimes brutal mid-nineteenth-century origins. Each street has a story. Guerrero Street is named for Francisco Guerrero, a landowner and politician killed by a slingshot-wielding horseback assassin in 1851. Charles H. Gough, a local milkman, served on the committee that named many of the streets in 1855; in a bit...

The burgeoning "scandal" over how the IRS chose for review 75 applicants for tax-exempt status puts on full display an unfortunate tendency in journalism--to quote people accurately without explaining the underlying context. Yes, it is as wrong for IRS employees to select groups to scrutinize based on their names as it is for police to stop and frisk young people...

The Huffington Post's Shahien Nasiripour comes up with a great angle on news that the Education Department expects to make $51 billion in profit this year off student loans: Exxon Mobil Corp., the nation's most profitable company, reported $44.9 billion in net income last year. Apple Inc. recorded a $41.7 billion profit in its 2012 fiscal year, which ended in...

MIAMI, FL -- Miami Herald political reporter Marc Caputo didn't expect high drama when he ventured into a community immigration forum in North Miami's Haitian Evangelical Church last night. A home-field discussion between four Democratic members of Congress who generally see eye-to-eye on immigration rarely makes for riveting copy. But immigration "is a big issue, and it's just something we...

According to a recent Pew study, 16 percent of adults online use Twitter -- 8 percent daily. I'm pretty sure most of that 8 percent are journalists. Journalists love Twitter, whether using it for writing, conversation, or fighting. And I love to watch--and judge--the sparring. If you see a #JournoTweetFight that you think merits inclusion, please give me a heads...

In his "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 commencement speech market: It's my guess that the most sought-after commencement speaker this season is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. How many invites did she get,...

The Bloomberg terminal-snooping story is a serious ethics problem, but I've read some awfully hysterical takes on it in the past couple of days. It's time to get some perspective on what we know happened and just how wrong it was. Adam Penenberg of Pando Daily wrote a head-scratcher headlined, "How is Bloomberg's snooping different from News Corp.'s phone hacks?"...

In the latest post on its Behold photo blog, Slate waded into ongoing debates around "thinspo"--pro-anorexia imagery posted to foster online communities around maintaining dangerously low body weights--by posting photos that fit the designation. The post profiles a project by UK-based photographer Michelle Sank that focuses on body modification in young people. One of the nine photos used in the...

The New York Times recently posted an opinion piece and a short film about a "vigilante copy editor" who was "correcting" placards at the sculpture garden at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Among the hundreds of comments lamenting the proliferation of bad grammar and misspellings in the world were the inevitable swipes at the grammar and spelling of the other...