CJR Daily

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 interest influence behind the proposal―drafted by the so-called Gang of Eight―as well as learn from great examples of watchdog reporting in the Four...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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. It combines up-to-date information on climate change indicators like temperature, rainfall, and carbon-dioxide emissions across the...

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: Carjack victim recounts his harrowing night -- "Don't do that," Tamerlan said, studying him. "Don't be stupid." Jill Abramson and 'the sexist stereotype' --...

AUSTIN, TX -- In El Paso, the former school superintendent is now in prison, the Justice Department is investigating, and more school officials are being fired--all the fallout of a widespread cheating scandal in which top educators tried to game standardized test scores so they could collect undeserved bonuses. That scandal came to light thanks to...

A bill that is crucial to the civil rights of the LGBT community was reintroduced in both houses of Congress on Thursday, and you probably didn't hear a thing about it. That's because the bill isn't about marriage. If it were a national marriage bill, the media would have been all over it. Heck, if it were just the first...

The torrid growth in digital-only subscribers to The New York Times slowed sharply in the first quarter. Worse, advertising fell so sharply that the paper's overall revenue declined slightly. But it's worth correcting some misimpressions about what those numbers really mean. Quartz's Zach Seward, for instance, writes a post headlined "The New York Times paywall has hit a growth...

On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the former Soviet Union. An explosion and fire released catastrophic levels of radiation into the atmosphere over much of the Western USSR and Europe. The cost to contain the spread of the radioactive particles was enormous. The official Soviet count for fatalities was 31,...

In the wake of the Citizens United case and other court rulings, there's an unprecedented amount of money sloshing around in American politics. The volume of coverage that money attracts might be unprecedented, too--at least at the highest levels. Even amid the disruption and pressures on the journalism industry, the nation's top newspapers delivered steady coverage of the campaign-finance beat...

This week, Politico published a largely anonymously-sourced hit piece on New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, charging that she is blunt, demoralizing, condescending, and is "on the verge of losing the support of the newsroom." Critics, myself included, asked whether this piece would have been written and edited in this particular way if its subject were...

The Washington Post's Erik Wemple asks the New York Post's "Bag Men" to sue the paper for libel: So journalists at the New York Post should be extra appreciative of the First Amendment these days. No one can revoke their journalistic licenses for their most heinous act of last week -- publishing a cover photo of two guys at...

On this day 105 years ago, Edward R. Murrow, one of the forefathers of American broadcast journalism, was born. Murrow first came to prominence with his CBS radio reports from London during the Blitz. In the 1950s, he moved into the new medium of television, and pioneered TV news formats like newscasting, anchoring, and documentary host/producer. His series of TV...

Longtime Hartford Courant reporter Bill Leukhardt lives in Danbury, the town adjacent to Newtown, CT. So on December 14, when it became clear that something was amiss at a school there, his editors gave him the address on the scanner asked him to look into it. "No one said Sandy Hook school--I had no idea," said Leukhardt (who, full disclosure,...

At last comes a story in a major news outlet that explains in people terms what exactly the Chained CPI will or won't do for the family budget. The New York Times deserves a CJR laurel for its Saturday "Your Money" piece by Tara Siegel Bernard who showed how the alternative method of calculating cost-of-living...

We're more than 20 years into the mainstream Web era—20 years!—and Congress is finally seriously considering force retailers to collect sales taxes online, ending a loophole that has given online-only retailers an unfair advantage over physical retailers. Thanks to a catalog company's 1992 Supreme Court victory, states can't require retailers that don't have a physical presence within their borders to...

Operation Paraquet: On April 24, 1982, after a three-day delay caused by bad weather, British forces invaded South Georgia, one of the southern Atlantic islands, including the Falklands, that Argentina had suddenly seized after a long diplomatic dispute. After some uncertainty and debate, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had ordered the force to the islands, the start of a turning point...

It's a bad sign when the biggest news on Earth Day is an animated Google doodle of nature, wherein a blue stream flows from a snow-covered mountain pass into a fish-filled lake surrounded by trees and fields--yet that was the best that most outlets could muster on Monday, the 43rd anniversary of the environmental holiday. It's sad. As...