CJR Daily

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...

Rate hikes just keep coming. The latest we've heard about come from Blue Cross Blue Shield in North Carolina, which just warned 125,000 customers who bought individual policies to brace themselves for unusually large increases. CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maryland announced hikes averaging 25 percent for its individual policies and about 15 percent for small businesses. Medico, based...

Bloomberg News has gotten a big black eye for snooping on its customers, and Editor-In-Chief Matt Winkler apologizes in a column headlined "Holding Ourselves Accountable." We are defined by our words -- and they applied to us when a Bloomberg LP customer expressed concern that Bloomberg News reporters had access to limited client information. Our client is right. Our reporters...

At Gina McCarthy's congressional confirmation hearing in early April, questions about transparency at the Environmental Protection Agency, which she'd been tapped to run, weighed heavy. Both the Society of Environmental Journalists and Republicans on the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works, which hosted the confirmation hearing, had released separate statements accusing the EPA of secrecy and demanding more openness,...

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: Why Kathryn Schulz despises The Great Gatsby -- It is the only book she has read five times despite failing to derive almost any pleasure at...

House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a letter on Thursday stating that they would not recommend individuals for appointment to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), an obscure government panel created as part of the Affordable Care Act in an effort to reduce cost growth in Medicare. Unfortunately, the board is best known as the...

FAIRWAY, KS -- In late 2012 and early 2013, reporters in Kansas began to take note of an oddity in the massive tax-cut plan pushed by statehouse conservatives and Gov. Sam Brownback. Profits generated by certain local companies, they found, would suddenly face no state tax liability at all, while other companies of comparable size would still have to pay...

The parody newspaper The Onion isn't a news organization, of course. But once in awhile, it tells a truth that our news organizations don't. Take, for example, their recent story on Chris Brown. Brown is a double-platinum R&B singer known for his dance moves--and for beating his girlfriend, the singer Rihanna, so badly in 2009 that she went to the...