Columbia Journalism Review back issues from May 2008:
Opening shot.(Iraq War)(Brief article)
May 01, 2008 ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Spend a moment with Maria Calle, above, over the coffin of her son, George Delgado, private first class. He was killed in Iraq in late March. It is hard to know, since several soldiers died around that time, but Delgado may have been number four thousand ...
Who will tell us? Journalism is losing its reporters.(Editorial)
May 01, 2008 ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Read through the coverage of any presidential campaign and you will invariably find instances in which the conventional wisdom was turned on its head. Yet there is a sense that the conventional wisdom about the current contest has been especially wrong ....
Secret file sharing.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2008; ... Eric Umansky's "Lost Over Iran" (CJR, March/April) provides some useful cautions about the need for journalistic care in describing the Bush administration's conflicts with Tehran, particularly in covering the Iranian nuclear program. We share his concern. That's why we found it disturbing ...
Of Shepherds and Poynters.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2008; ... Douglas McCollam's piece, "Somewhere East of Eden" (CJR, March/ April), is the most accurate account I've read explaining why Nelson Poynter's St. Petersburg Times model can't save other newspapers. "Ownership must be willing to give the newspaper away," McCollam noted. "It's very rare ...
Watch that gotcha.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2008; ... Most readers would agree with Dean Starkman's thesis in "Red Ink Rising" (CJR, March/April), that most business articles overlook the effect of skyrocketing credit-card rates on consumers, but I think that Starkman's methods under mined his point. He operated the way 60 Minutes does on ...
From CJR.org: notes from our online readers.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2008; ... DID JOHN McCAIN SAY that it was fine with him if the U.S. were in a "war" in Iraq for a hundred years? No, reported CJR'S Zachary Roth in "The U.S., Iraq, and 100 Years," but that's sometimes Barack Obama's version of it. Roth exhorts journalists to hold Obama accountable every time he ...
Cheer smear.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 01, 2008; ... Liza Featherstone's story "Happy All the Time," (C JR, March/April), which compared Fox Business to CNBC, was an appalling exercise in yellow journalism. I warned both Featherstone and your fact-checker that I was reluctant to talk to the Columbia Journalism Review because of your obvious ...
Editor's note.(Editorial)
May 01, 2008; ... WE'RE PROUD TO welcome three new contributing editors to the Columbia Journalism Review: * Julia M. Klein is a freelance writer for such outlets as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, and others. She spent seventeen years as a ...
The Pulitzer Prizes.(AWARDS)
May 01, 2008 ... Journalism PUBLIC SERVICE The Washington Post Finalists The Charlotte Observer; Newsday BREAKING NEWS REPORTING The staff of The Washington Post Finalists The staff of The Idaho Statesman; the staff of The New York Times ...
The Lukas Prize project.(AWARDS)(Brief article)
May 01, 2008 ... Co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. J. ANTHONY LUKAS BOOK PRIZE Jeffrey Toobin for The Nine (Doubleday) ...
John B. Oakes Award.(AWARDS)(Brief article)
May 01, 2008 ... DISTINGUISHED ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISM The Times Picayune of New Orleans for "Last Chance: The Fight to Save a Disappearing ...
John Chancellor Award.(AWARDS)
May 01, 2008 ... EXCELLENCE IN ...
The Mike Berger Award.(AWARDS)
May 01, 2008 ... EXCELLENCE IN HUMAN-INTEREST REPORTING ...
The 2008 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award winners.(AWARDS)(Brief article)
May 01, 2008 ... CBS News for 60 Minutes: "The Mother of All Heists" Chicago Public Radio, Alix Spiegel, and PRI for This American Life: "Which One of These Is Not Like the Others?" Florentine Films/Hott Productions and WETA-TV, Washington, D.C., for Through Deaf Eyes on PBS ...
2008 National Magazine Awards.(AWARDS)(List)
May 01, 2008 ... GENERAL EXCELLENCE Under 100,000 circulation Print Finalists Aperture The Georgia Review Metropolis The Virginia Quarterly Review 100,000 to 250,000 circulation Mother Jones ...
Name-dropping.(Currents)
May 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The New York Times rarely refers to rock stars such as Alice Cooper, Moby, and Elton John by their birth names. With few exceptions, Vincent Furnier, Richard Melville Hall, and Reginald Dwight get free passes on their alter egos, as do the likes of ...
Outsourced Edit?(Currents)
May 01, 2008; ... RAJESH KUMAR, A TWENTY-six-year-old with tight jeans, long black hair, and a gold earring, drags a small black-and-white image of a pointing butler's glove across the flat screen of his Mac. He's designing an advertisement for the Star Tribune, a newspaper that publishes halfway around the ...
Mission revisited.(Currents)
May 01, 2008 ... ON MAY 1, 2003, PRESIDENT Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and told the world: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that ...
Darts & Laurels.
May 01, 2008; ... DART to the Ottawa Citizen for a little Canadian logrolling. When the Canwest conglomerate launched a proprietary wire service and relocated the anchor of Global National, its nightly news program, to Canada's capital city, the Citizen flooded the zone. On its front page, the paper ran a ...
The devil in the details: polls reinforce reporters' stereotypes about evangelicals.(LEARNING CURVE)
May 01, 2008; ... MY NEW YORK FRIENDS CONGRATULATED ME FOR MY "BRAVERY" WHEN I headed off to cover evangelical supporters of Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign in Iowa shortly before Christmas. I grew up in Virginia at a time when the state's Christian right was gaining strength, but have spent most of ...
Worse than it seems: drilling down to the rotten foundation of the economic crisis.(Q&A/THE AUDIT)
May 01, 2008; ... WITH THE ECONOMY APPARENTLY ALREADY IN RECESSION, GAS PRICES NEAR record levels, food prices rising, and inflation generally gaining momentum, economic issues are moving to the center of the presidential campaign. Political reporters have been forced to learn the financial crisis on the ...
Saved by the shield: a reporter recalls his legal crucible after the Chiquita story.(ON THE JOB)(Chiquita Brands International Inc.)
May 01, 2008; ... TEN YEARS AGO THIS MONTH BEGAN A PERIOD OF MY LIFE THAT I HAVE COME to call my season in hell. It was a prolonged horror of court hearings and depositions following the collapse of The Cincinnati Enquirer's investigation of Chiquita Brands International. But like all calamities, it ...
Lost Media, Found Media: snapshots from the future of writing.(THE AMERICAN NEWSROOM)
May 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If there were an ashram for people who worship contemplative long-form journalism, it would be the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. This March, at the Sheraton Boston Hotel, hundreds of journalists, authors, students, and aspirants came for the ...
The Future of Reading: kindle isn't it, but a serialized, socialized, smart book is coming.(Amazon Kindle)(Product/service evaluation)
May 01, 2008; ... The title of a 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts was "Reading at Risk." The follow-up, released in November 2007, upped the ante. "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence," placed the consumption of Moby Dick up there with questions of poverty and health ...
Shop Stewards: Der Spiegel's employee-owners gave their boss the boot. Now they must prove they can revive the venerable German magazine.(Stefan Aust)
May 01, 2008; ... Stefan Aust, the longtime editor of Germany's leading newsweekly, Der Spiegel, was on a boat trip near the Indonesian island of Ambon when he learned that he was out of a job. Although Der Spiegel's circulation numbers were good, many of its journalists thought there had been a decline in ...
My year in the trenches: a veteran editor goes back to square one, and learns something new.
May 01, 2008; ... It was a store-bought cake with a row of candles and a message in sugary script. Excited young voices filled the room in a third-floor apartment at the crest of the hill that rises behind New Hampshire's statehouse. As the candles were lit, one of the party's hosts quieted the crowd and ...
Love thy neighbor: the religion beat in an age of intolerance.(ESSAY)
May 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the Gospel of Matthew, it doesn't take long for the author to show his readers two different sides of Jesus Christ. One minute Jesus is sitting on a mountain, delivering a powerful sermon to a presumably rapt audience: "Blessed are the meek, for they ...
Best face forward: at the Newseum, a troubled industry looks good under glass.(ASSESSMENT)
May 01, 2008; ... AND WE THINK TODAY'S REPORTERS HAVE IT TOUGH. Picture this: To land a job, the journalistic aspirant known to history as Nellie Bly agrees to feign mental illness in order to uncover abuses at the notorious asylum for women on Blackwell's Island. In a new "4-D" version of this ...
What We Sow: the maddening folly of our man-made pension crisis.(While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis)(Book review)
May 01, 2008; ... While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis by Roger Lowenstein The Penguin Press 288 Pages, $25.95 OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF ...
Pulitzer's Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism.(Book review)
May 01, 2008; ... Pulitzer's Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism By Roy J. Harris Jr. University of Missouri Press 473 pages, $39.95 IT IS POSSIBLE THAT HARDLY anybody would remember Joseph Pulitzer--he died in 1911--had he not attached his name ...
T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880-1928.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 01, 2008; ... T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880-1928 Edited by Shawn Leigh Alexander University Press of Florida 320 pages, $65 T. THOMAS FORTUNE (1856-1928) was the leading African American journalist of what is ...
Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are.(Brief article)(Book review)
May 01, 2008; ... Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are By Rob Walker Random House 320 pages, $25 THE MARCH 10, 2008, ISSUE of The New Yorker included a story, "Raj, Bohemian" by Hari Kunzru, a young London novelist. The narrator of ...
America's think tank: politics warps a new history of the mysterious RAND Corporation.(Book review)
May 01, 2008; ... Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire by Alex Abella Harcourt 400 pages, $27 RIDICULED IN DR. STRANGELOVE (AS the "Bland Corporation"), castigated by Pravda (as the American "academy of science and ...
Getting bit.(THE RESEARCH REPORT)(sound bites)
May 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ANYONE WHO BUYS THE BELTWAY complaint that television news reporting shrivels both politics and public discourse has two new reasons to worry: sound bites are getting shorter and video reels are getting longer. That means less talk of policy solutions and ...