CJR Daily

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...

The New York Post reports that Goldman Sachs complained to Bloomberg that its reporters were spying on it via the company's famous terminal: In one instance, a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm -- noting casually that he hadn't logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time, sources added....

On this day seven years ago, legendary New York Times executive editor Abraham Michael "A.M." Rosenthal died at the age of 84. Rosenthal was a journalist for the Times for over half a century, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for international reporting. He served as managing editor from 1969-77, executive editor from 1977-88, and was a columnist from1987-99. During...

Two years ago, with statehouse bureaus taking huge cuts in a contracting media landscape, National Public Radio designed the StateImpact project to fill the reporting void while experimenting with a new model of local-national public media collaboration. It works like this: NPR member stations joined forces to report on a significant policy issue in their state. Florida, Indiana, and Ohio...

I'm still trying to reattach my jaw after reading this op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal today. It's shameful even by the dismal standards of that page. In Defense of Carbon Dioxide The demonized chemical compound is a boon to plant life and has little correlation with global temperature. Breaking! Plants like CO2. The numbskullery on display here was...

We've pointed out before that major news organizations are failing to connect the tax dots--between the sequester-caused cuts to the budget of the Internal Revenue Service and the country's reduced ability to collect enough tax revenue. Not to mention the connection to tax fairness. And we've pointed out that there is no shortage of news pegs for getting into this...

I've spent the past two months on the conference circuit. I spoke to groups of journalists in San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Alaska. And I'll confess something to you: Even though I love working in media and mostly love the other people who do, too, it got to be really depressing. Question after question focused on limitations, ranging from...

The New York Times is good to go page one with a story on a fascinating lawsuit in Georgia that alleges racial discrimination... in favor of Mexican guest workers. But as Congress weighs immigration legislation expected to expand the guest worker program, another group is increasingly crying foul -- Americans, mostly black, who live near the farms and say they...

Television broadcast journalist Myron Leon "Mike" Wallace was born on this day in 1918. During his 60-year career in broadcasting, Wallace interviewed a slew of prominent newsmakers, from Malcolm X in 1964 to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006. The program with which he was most associated was CBS's 60 Minutes. Wallace was one of the news show's original correspondents...

Needless to say, the kidnapping case in Cleveland has garnered a ton of media attention now that the three women -- Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michele Knight -- have been recovered from the house in which they were kept prisoner for a decade. But before it became a national story, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Regina Brett was on the...

I wrote this last week about the South Louisiana newspaper war: "It will also not have a hard time poaching talent from the Picayune and its layoff pool." "It," being The Advocate, the Baton Rouge-based daily that is walking through the door opened by the Times-Picayune's retreat in its own hometown. The exodus has already begun—in a big way. The...

Last month's closure of the Egypt Independent, a weekly newspaper and website, was a setback for progressive journalism in the region, but it has dealt a blow to coverage of environmental issues in a country still wrestling with major development questions in the wake of its revolution. Launched in 2009 as an English-language edition of the privately owned Arabic daily...

Nautilus, a new science magazine whose first issue appeared online April 29, has New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye, one of the beat's veterans, feeling a bit a nostalgic. In a review on Monday, he wrote: Many science writers at The New York Times, including me, hatched their careers working at a wave of glossy monthly science magazines that were...