CJR Daily

Photo Credit: Matt Richter Two men lift a waterlogged piece of furniture up and out of a flooded living room. A woman walks down from her Manhattan apartment to the street below to spontaneously direct traffic because the lights aren't working. A group of kids peer over the edge of a church balcony onto the organized...

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: Is your social media editor destroying your news organization today? --Probably Boston bomb victim in photo helped identify suspects -- Minutes before the bombs...

At 8:52am today, the official Boston Police Twitter feed posted this message: "#MediaAlert: WARNING: Do Not Compromise Officer Safety by Broadcasting Tactical Positions of Homes Being Searched." The Boston cops had just come through a deadly night in which they had engaged in a gunfight with the two suspects in Monday's Boston Marathon bombings. One suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev,...

Saturday marks the second anniversary of the deaths of the photojournalists Tim Hetheringon and Chris Hondros, friends and colleagues who were killed in a mortar attack by Qaddafi forces while covering the Libyan civil war. Both photographers left behind remarkable legacies--a look at either of their catalogs provides an intimate, humane view of virtually every major conflict of the 21st...

BOSTON, MA -- Last night was possibly the biggest, most confusing news night in Boston history. Around 5:15pm, the FBI released two photographs of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. Five and a half hours later, two men allegedly robbed a 7-11 in Cambridge, MA. Around the same time an MIT police officer was shot and killed in his...

Last night was one of the wildest nights of news I can ever recall. With Boston already on edge in the wake of the bombing of the Boston Marathon, the two suspects fingered by the FBI on Thursday set off on a rampage. First, news came of the murder of an MIT police officer, which looked like a possible...

At some point, you even have to hold the tabloids to account. That point is now with the New York Post, which has exhibited reckless and appalling journalistic judgment this week in its reporting on the Boston Marathon bombing. First the paper reported early in the developing story on Monday that 12 people had been killed in the blasts. It...

On this day in 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected the 265th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, after the death of Pope John Paul II. He reigned as Pope Benedict XVI for eight years, amidst criticism and controversy, before abdicating the papacy just weeks ago. For a look at how this transition was covered, dip into the...

In this year's American Society of News Editors, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and Scripps Howard competitions, Fort Lauderdale's Sun Sentinel was runner-up for its gripping series exposing widespread reckless speeding by off-duty cops and the death and injury it caused in South Florida. So how did the Tribune Co.-owned Sun Sentinel emerge this week with the 2013 Pulitzer Prize...

Californians might be forgiven for being puzzled about the merits of their state's ambitious high-speed rail program. The sprawling, multibillion-dollar project has been portrayed as a boondoggle that will never be completed, and as a much needed infrastructure initiative that will lead a statewide economic resurgence--sometimes almost simultaneously. Within the last few weeks, for instance, the San Jose Mercury...

We don't know yet who planted the Boston Marathon bombs. Maybe it was a crazy loner. Maybe it was someone affiliated with a right-wing militia group. Maybe it was Islamic jihadists (The Week has a nice rundown of the current theories). In a knowledge vacuum, though, the public will speculate that acts of terror arise from the group they...

CBS News's MoneyWatch is good to take a hard look at life for workers in the retail industry, which not only pays abysmally but keeps workers in part-time positions with unpredictable hours: ...the use of "flexible" labor practices is making life difficult for millions of retail and other employees. Employers are not only keeping a lid on hourly wages,...

On April 18, 1930, during what was supposed to be the scheduled news bulletin, BBC Radio announced, simply, "Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news." Piano music followed for the remainder of the newscast. Would that journalists now could exercise such even-keeled discretion.

Andrew Sullivan announced in January that he was taking his blog, The Dish, from its home at The Daily Beast and striking out on his own, using a metered content model to encourage regular readers to support his efforts. CJR interviewed him for our most recent issue, where he discussed his goal of raising $900,000. A month ago,...

Alexis Madrigal asks whether The Wall Street Journal's paywall is responsible for its turning away from longform journalism. That one's easy: No. The Atlantic writer looks at the decline of longform journalism at The Wall Street Journal, which Dean Starkman and I (both alums of the paper) have been writing about for, oh, more...

Six European countries are stepping up the heat on Google to comply with the continent's strict privacy policies, a year after the company announced that it had merged its data collection for some 60 of its applications.  Led by France, the six regulators are saying that Google has refused to change its policy despite repeated requests to do so....

On Monday, President Obama quietly signed a bill repealing the major provisions of the much-touted ethics law known as the STOCK Act. Passed in 2012 after a 60 Minutes report on insider trading practices in Congress, the STOCK Act banned members of Congress and senior executive and legislative branch officials from trading based on government knowledge. To...

Last week, Tumblr CEO David Karp announced the company was dissolving Storyboard, the editorial staff it had hired a year earlier to write stories about Tumblr. "What we've accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on," Karp wrote on Tumblr's staff blog. On Wednesday morning, Karp...

DETROIT, MI -- Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs was one of the last hires of the Cleveland Plain Dealer during its hiring spree in the early 1990s. She had been recruited from the Dayton Daily News, and she arrived in Cleveland to cover suburban communities. She later became a metro columnist and then a minority affairs/general assignment reporter. Looking...

Stop me if you've heard this one: Old man goes to shul, prays: "Dear God, just once, let me win the lottery." Silence. Flies to Jerusalem, goes to Wall: "Dear God, just once, let me win the lottery." Nothing. Takes bus to Sinai, scrambles to top: "Dear God, ...." Sky darkens, thunder, voice booms out: "Nu? Meet...