CJR Daily

It's pretty clear by now that elite media, in their news columns and opinion pages, have had a big hand in shaping the debate over Social Security and Medicare. Ask any man or woman on the street, and many will say that something must be done about these programs, though they're not sure what. The press, the politicians, and...

In the real word, big conspiracies are hard to maintain. People talk. Disagreements develop. Word tends to get out. But sometimes widespread conspiracies really do develop and go on for years. How do those get started and how do they go undetected for so long? Take a look at the mind-bogglingly enormous Libor scandal. How did as many...

Sometime between the end of March and the end of April, an Ohio transgender woman was brutally murdered--she was stabbed repeatedly and then tied to a concrete block and cast into a pond. She was left with no clothes below the waist, perhaps to shame her. This crime is heartbreaking and vicious. You would think it could not get worse....

During the 2012 elections--and ever since--coverage of campaign finance has focused heavily on the role of "dark money": the unlimited donations directed to nonprofit groups and trade associations that are not required to disclose their donors. Countless reports by journalists and transparency advocates have sought to trace the origins of dark money donations. Almost as frequent are the efforts to...

On an evil day, 35 years ago today, a sinister pair of hands typed and sent out the first ever unsolicited bulk commercial email message--later to be known as "spam." Gary Thuerk, then a marketing manager for the now defunct computer company Digital Equipment Corporation, sent out a single mass email to 393 recipents on ARPANET (an earlier version of...

The emergency department (ED) is not only the most inappropriate and expensive place to deliver primary healthcare, it's a gateway to unnecessary hospital admissions for people who could be better served in the community. For people with chronic conditions--such as diabetes, asthma, and hypertension--proactive monitoring and management of medication regimens and physical exams is especially important to prevent both avoidable...

There's new vigor at the 108-year-old National Audubon Society, a nonprofit environmental group focused on birds, which is in the process of rolling out a more cohesive, mission-driven strategy for the 21st century. On Tuesday, the society announced that it had hired industry vet Mark Jannot to run its award-winning magazine, Audubon, and revamp its content and communication...

It's May Day, and Henry Blodget is celebrating -- if that's the right word -- with three charts, of which the most germane is the one above. It shows total US wages as a proportion of total US GDP -- a number which continues to hit all-time lows. Blodget also puts up the converse chart --...

Francine McKenna asked a good question on Twitter the other day about Wall Street Journal coverage of Sheldon Adelson's Las Vegas Sands: Is it okay for the reporter Kate O'Keeffe to cover Adelson while he's suing her for libel? The short answer is yes, and it's worth unpacking why. Back in December, the Journal published a story about...

One of the truisms of digital journalism, and one that happens to be true, is that mobile is a big part of the future of news, if it isn't the future. The latest Pew "State of the Media" report goes on at length about the migration of news to mobile in a section titled, aptly, "Digital: As Mobile Grows...

Last month, the Digital Public Library of America introduced its discovery portal to the Internet. It invited users in, to search through the "wealth of knowledge" collected there from libraries, museums, and archives across the country. There are pictures, collected by the Environmental Protection Agency, of the pollution that covered the country in the 1970s, movies of civil rights...

Jessica Bennett worked for seven years at journalistic stalwarts like The Boston Globe, the Village Voice, and Newsweek. But after years of sleeping on couches when she went on reporting assignments and watching her friends take buyouts, she was ready for a change. So she accepted a job as executive editor of Storyboard, an independent journalistic publication housed within...

Founded in 1885 by Clark W. Bryan, Good Housekeeping was purchased in 1911 by the Heart Corporation, which still owns it today. The women's magazine features articles tailored to "women's interests," along with recipes, diets, and works of fiction. The magazine also includes product testing from The Good Housekeeping Institute, which stamps products it deems worthy with its "Good Housekeeping...

The local news in Florida is likely full of "truth is stranger than fiction" tales all year round because it's always warm down there. Further north, though, the cold weather keeps a lid on the crazy (except in Maine, where it's winter for so long that residents just strap on their Stabilicers and get on with it)....

Covering Obamacare poses big challenges for journalists, from piercing government spin and deciphering GOP rhetoric to unraveling and simplifying the complexities of insurance. Today we begin a series of posts that aims to help reporters, editors, and the public understand what this law is really about and how it is being implemented. Will insurance premiums go...

I'm not you, babe When Thatcher passed away, some tweeters who opposed her politics celebrated using the hashtag #nowthatchersdead. However, the unfortunate lack of capitalization led many to mistakenly think that pop star Cher had died­--they read the hashtag as "Now that Cher's dead." The campaign originated at the site IsThatcherDeadYet, whose final answer, YES,...

(Illustration by Daniel Chang) If you've spent time with anyone under 25 recently, you will have noticed that they get their news from their friends on their phones--much of it from social-media feeds. At the same time, more and more journalism shops that underwrite enterprise reporting are starting to lock their wares behind paywalls....

Editor in chief's note 'The journalism community deserves diversity, but why aren't we getting it?" asked Farai Chideya, moderator of CJR's April 3 panel about race, class, and social mobility at the Newseum in Washington, DC. Many thanks to the ACLU for supporting the event, and to Farai and her fellow panelists Raquel Cepeda, Gene Policinski, Richard Prince, and...

Betting man Kushner bought the Register cheap and is investing in it heavily, including one of the biggest hiring sprees in newspaper history. Will it pay off? (Jeb Harris / Orange County Register) Rob Curley, one of the more prominent digital journalists of the last decade, had just about had it with newspapers. Tired of laying people...

The damage done A study by Andrew Wakefield, right, helped fuel media attention to the vaccine-autism story, until Brian Deer exposed his work as deeply flawed. (Left: Courtesy of Brian Deer; Right: Anthony Devlin / Associated Press) In 1998, The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals, published a study by lead author Andrew Wakefield,...