Columbia Journalism Review back issues from May 2006:
On context.(mainstream media)(Editorial)
May 01, 2006 ... AIDS Lewis Lapham, who recently stepped down as editor of Harper's magazine after twenty-eight years, has long displayed a special disdain for the mainstream press. In the May 2005 issue, he wrote: "Far from being scornful of the messages blown through the trumpets of doom, the ...
Philadelphia story.(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2006; ... Michael Shapiro has put together a superb short history of the decisions and oversights that have brought The Philadelphia Inquirer to the position it finds itself in today (CJR, March/April). While Shapiro's vision is comprehensive and his understanding of the impact of editing decisions ...
Memoir methods.(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2006; ... Samuel G, Freedman says that a few years ago at a writers' conference I "let slip" that I had "fabricated" a number of scenes in my memoir, Fierce Attachments (CJR, March/April). He's wrong on both counts: I didn't let anything slip, and I never said I had fabricated. I did say that in my ...
Our poverty, ourselves.(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2006; ... Re: Voices: November/December 2005. Once again, both the Columbia Journalism Review and its writers conflate race, class, and poverty, while ignoring gender and the powerful role it plays, This remains true despite the fact that 90 percent of the adults receiving Temporary Aid to Needy ...
Discounting Wal-Mart.(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2006; ... Many Darts to CJR for the Liza Featherstone commentary on the four Wal-Mart documentaries (CJR, January/February). Featherstone is far from the disinterested party CJR should seek for speaking out for what is right, fair, and decent--as CJR styles its mission. Yes, CJR did ...
That liberal press.(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2006; ... Nicholas Lemann's insightful thoughts about balancing political views in J-schools ("On Balance," CJR, January/February) are valid and great fodder for discussion, but miss what I believe is the real core of the problem: the very concept of unfettered discussion is liberal in our culture ....
Editors' note: three cheers.
May 01, 2006 ... This is CJR'S annual Excellence in Journalism issue, in which we urge media outlets to advertise and tell the world about the journalistic awards they have won. So we would be remiss in not trumpeting some triumphs of our own. * Our May/June 2005 cover story, "Stations of the ...
Awards.(prizes in journalism)
May 01, 2006 ... The Pulitzer Prizes Prizes in Journalism PUBLIC SERVICE The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Mississippi and The Times-Picayune, New Orleans FINALISTS: The Blade, Toledo, Ohio; The Washington Post BREAKING NEWS REPORTING The ...
My mother's obit: a son reconsiders the hometown paper.(cost of obituary)
May 01, 2006; ... A few days before she died in January my mother asked me to write her obit. She had her practical side, and I am the journalist in the family after all. When the time came I wrote it up and gave it to the funeral director, who sent it on to The Kansas City Stat. The Star, in tuna, asked ...
My son's crime: an ex-reporter feels the sting of the story.
May 01, 2006; ... For most of the 1970s, I was a reporter and editor for The Evening Press in Binghamton, New York, and for several of those years I covered the police beat. I wrote crime and arrest stories daily, and some were pretty good. Following what I had learned in journalism school, I ...
Darts & Laurels.(NewsHour with Jira Lehrer, television program, Laurel Leff, WSB-TV)
May 01, 2006; ... DART to PBS's NewsHour With Jira Lehrer, for pitching too many softballs to the White House heavy hitter. On February 8, Lehrer conducted a thirty-minute interview with Vice President Dick Cheney that was notable for the subjects that never popped up. Among the more strikingly absent, ...
The poorest for the trees.(poverty and environment)
May 01, 2006; ... Last fall, the press was glowing from the accolades its post-Katrina news coverage had earned, but the editors of Grist, the online environmental magazine, were dissatisfied. They had seen plenty of admirable reporting on the suffering of the poor along the Gulf Coast, and they were glad ...
Renaissance mag.(Ted Genoways )(Interview)
May 01, 2006; ... When Ted Genoways became the editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review in June 2003, the nationally recognized poet brought big changes to the eighty-one-year-old magazine, which has published such luminaries as H.L. Mencken and Robert Frost. While continuing to publish the poetry and ...
Starting well.(writing)(Brief article)
May 01, 2006; ... A question from Robyn Packard, based in Toronto as marketing editor for the international business law firm Torys LLP: "How do you feel about using 'As well at the beginning of a sentence?" Not well. That phrase, in that place, doesn't violate any rule of grammar or ...
Hard numbers.
May 01, 2006 ... $929.000: Estimated cost of an eight-page New York Times ad from the government of Sudan, touting the country's "peaceful, prosperous, and democratic future." 45: Minimum number of op-eds in which the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has denounced the genocide in Sudan carried ...
My murder map: for a former New York police reporter, a grim landmark lurks around every corner.
May 01, 2006; ... Those of us who have lived in the same place our entire lives have maps in our heads: the grade school map, the high school map, the first job map. The little dots are layered one on top of the other as if on clear plastic, each new phase superimposed over the last one. I have always lived ...
Out of time: the author set out to teach inmates to be reporters, and ended up with a new appreciation for what it means to miss a deadline.
May 01, 2006; ... The Catskills were just breaking into color last September when I drove up to the New York State Correction Facility at Woodbourne, a medium-security prison sitting on a hillside overlooking the village. It was built of red brick by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, and from ...
The cameramen: brash and stubborn, courageous and proud. They are the underappreciated pros whom TV news can't live without.
May 01, 2006; ... It was a lazy Sunday morning in January, and I was laboring leisurely through the New York Times crossword at a Georgetown cafe when my youngest daughter tracked me down and breathlessly delivered the dreadful news. My friend Bob Woodruff--the kid brother I'd never had--had been wounded in ...
Mind games: information has always been a weapon. But in the amorphous 'war on terror,' bombs and bullets are becoming background noise in the battle to frame reality.
May 01, 2006; ... When the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, Sam Gardiner, a sixty-four-year-old retired Air Force colonel, was a regular on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, where it was his job to place the day's events in context. As the campaign wore on, and he monitored ...
Back story: what one writer did for his book, and what it cost him.
May 01, 2006; ... "Ugly," said my surgeon, shaking his head as he stared at an X-ray of my lower spine. An errant vertebra, so dangerously tilted that it resembled a bead about to break from its bracelet, was severely compressing my spinal cord--which explained why I could no longer stand up straight. The ...
Listen to this: in little more than a decade, Pitchfork has grown from a labor of love into the Web's foremost musical tastemaker.(Product/service evaluation)
May 01, 2006; ... Recently, the legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau told me one of his favorite facts about the music industry today: there are more hours of music recorded in a single year than there are hours in a year; it is literally impossible for one person to listen to everything ....
A work in progress: Gay Talese's curious new memoir extols the virtues of not writing.
May 01, 2006; ... On the morning of July 13, 1993, The New York Times published an article about a man whose wife had cut off his penis while he slept. Appearing in the Science section, surrounded by clinical diagrams and a discreet headline (ARTFUL SURGERY: REATTACHING A PENIS), it introduced its readers ...
House of games: Chris Lehmann on Do You Sincerely Want to Be Rich? And how three reporters cracked a broker's major scam.
May 01, 2006; ... As any follower of the grim judicial endgame of the Enron affair knows, the investment world can morph, at its speculative outer limit, into an empire of sandcastles. Fabulous sums of shareholder value wash away with the brutal ebb tide of a market correction, and before you know it, some ...
Buy a TV, breathe deeply: a sober look at how the coal industry spins 'clean' coal, then pursues business as usual--foul the air, buy influence.(Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy )(Book review)
May 01, 2006; ... BIG COAL, THE DIRTY SECRET BEHIND AMERICA'S ENERGY by Jeff Goodell Houghton Mifflin, 320 pp. $25.95 In early January, Americans were exposed to a dose of reality TV, delivered by a group of men who daily risked their lives to feed the nation's appetite for iPods, Blackberries, ...
The Man Who Invented Fidel: Cuba, Castro, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 01, 2006; ... THE MAN WHO INVENTED FIDEL: CUBA, CASTRO, AND HERBERT L. MATTHEWS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES by Anthony DePalma Public Affairs 308 pp. $26.95 The title suggests that this might be still another dismemberment of beat-up old Herbert Matthews of The New York Times, in his grave for ...
Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 01, 2006; ... HORACE GREELEY: CHAMPION OF AMERICAN FREEDOM by Robert C. Williams New York University Press 424 pp. $34.95 There was only one Horace, but there have been many biographies. This new one comes, refreshingly, from outside journalism. It was written by a veteran historian whose ...
Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 01, 2006; ... WOMEN AND THE PRESS: THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY by Patricia Bradley Foreword by Gail Collins Medill School of Journalism/Northwestern University Press 355 pp. $22.95 paper Patricia Bradley, a communications professor at Temple University, seeks to sail through more than 250 years ...
Crime Scene Investigation: L.A.(Desperate Networks)(Book review)
May 01, 2006 ... On Wednesday night, November 10, 2004, Leslie Moonves and several of his top executives sat in the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. They were attending a dinner, a fund-raiser for a Jewish charity. Moonves and his guests had just settled down at the table ...
D.C. Spokeswomen don't wear plaid.(Washington D.C. journalists' style sense)(Excerpt)
May 01, 2006 ... Several days later, I headed up to the 0600 operations meeting with Rumsfeld, Myers, and other senior military and civilian staff. As people shuffled for caffeine and seats, the SecDef came in and headed over to the coffee wearing a bright red fleece vest and a rich purple and red tie. It ...
The dance of the bold-faced names.(Brief article)
May 01, 2006 ... Before the ball, friends and security experts had told Truman that he had to provide a secret entrance at the hotel so that his celebrity guests could evade the photographers and the reporters who were expected to congregate en masse outside the Plaza. Truman obligingly made the ...
Desperate measures.(Charles McGrath)(Excerpt)(Brief article)
May 01, 2006 ... In Shawn's latter days, in the early eighties, he began training Charles McGrath as his possible successor to the top--a better candidate, I believed, than the previously tapped Jonathan Schell or Bill McKibben, whom Shawn had been forced to abandon, to his great distress, when faced with ...
Tea and sympathy in China.
May 01, 2006; ... When bird flu hit the Chinese city of Tianjin in February 2004, I went there on assignment for Kyodo News with two friends from a Hong Kong newspaper. We wanted to report on the mass poultry graves and quarantines being used in China to control the disease. About twenty minutes into our ...