CJR Daily

When you tell your friends that you took a swim yesterday, did you say you “swam” yesterday or that you “swum” yesterday? Oh, come on. Everyone knows that the past tense of “swim” is “swam.” You’d use “swum” only as a past participle, usually in the sense of taking another step farther back in time: “I had swum only once...

Just wanted to make sure you saw this great A1 story in the Journal on Saturday. Reporter Michael M. Phillips tells the tale of the subprime mortgages crisis through a single ramshackle homestead in Arizona. It's just about note-perfect. There are a lot of things to like about the story, including the superbly written lede: The little blue...

It's a pattern familiar to the point of cliché: an international crisis—or, to be slightly more precise, a crisis that takes place in a foreign country—occurs, and in its aftermath, American media outlets produce think pieces considering how the media performed in covering said crisis. These articles will almost always find that the mainstream coverage was somehow wanting. They will...

Twitter accounts at CNN and Fox News were apparently hacked earlier today resulting in a couple of especially candid faux-Tweets (one "from" CNN's Rick Sanchez and one "about" Fox News's Bill O'Reilly.) Could be part of a phishing scheme, per Twitter's blog.

Behold yet another casualty of the digital age: the printed photograph. And, with it, the little ritual of memory previously so familiar to those of us born before 1995: popping the full roll of film into that little black-plastic canister, taking it to the photo shop, waiting--and waiting, and waiting--for it to be developed...and then, once handed the bright-papered envelope,...

As one of the most secretive presidential administrations in history gets ready to close up shop, it’s closing a few more things—records. Over the past few months, some federal agencies have issued rules that would eliminate public disclosure of information—or, in some cases, make it more difficult for requestors to get information. While the federal Freedom of Information Act regulates...

Dion Nissenbaum, Jerusalem bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, reports that "the Israeli military has once again barred the first small group of international reporters from getting into Gaza" even as "more and more journalists continue to arrive every day in hopes of" doing just that. "For the moment," Nissenbaum writes, "the only comprehensive coverage coming out of Gaza is...

Early this morning MSNBC's Tom Costello filed a report from outside the Sidwell Friends School, awaiting the Obamas. It was, as far as these things go, a fairly standard report --almost sensitive, even, in that Costello twice conceded that this must be a "scary experience" for the Obama girls. Here is how Costello's MSNBC colleagues reacted to the report: JOE...

From the AP's report on Sasha Obama's first day at Sidwell Friends school: Sasha carried a Trans by JanSport pink, magenta and gray backpack and wore bluejeans and a brown jacket with a hood and her hair was pulled into two braided ponytails. From Politico: A French journalist yelled, "hoo-hoo, Malia," – presumably trying to get their attention...

Bloomberg has a story on the lack of lending that Michael Lewis and David Einhorn slapped Henry Paulson around for here (bottom of the page). Although the government has committed more than $8.5 trillion to energizing the economy, and the Fed cut a key lending rate almost to zero, banks haven’t made it easier to borrow....

From the Baghdad Bureau blog at the New York Times, part 1 of a http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/01/world/middleeast/20090101_iraq_photogjnl/index.html ">conversation between Stephen Farrell (a Times Baghdad correspondent) and photographers Joao Silva, Max Becherer and Franco Pagetti, "who have covered every phase of the Iraq conflict." A slide show with some stunning photos accompanies the conversation. (On whether right now is...

It's only Monday, but I'm pretty confident this piece in The New York Times yesterday will be the must-read of the week. Journalist Michael Lewis and hedge fund manager/author David Einhorn teamed up to crank out, with the gift of nearly a page of space in the Week in Review section, a cogent and easy-to-read synopsis of what's wrong...

From today's New York Times: In its latest concession to the worst revenue slide since the Depression, The New York Times has begun selling display advertising on its front page, a step that has become increasingly common across the newspaper industry. CBS News gets first crack at the Times' A1 (from the ad copy: "At a time when there...

The Journal reports out the "serial regulatory failures" that allowed Bernard Madoff to perpetuate the bigges Ponzi scheme in history. And in a particularly nice catch, the paper finds Obama's nominee for SEC chairwoman, Mary Schapiro, has some explaining to do: The failure to stop Mr. Madoff also is an embarrassment for Mary Schapiro, the Finra chief who has been...

Before Christmas, we urged the press to cover the community meetings called by Obama’s health chief Tom Daschle in order to hear ordinary citizens’ opinions about medical care. Many news outlets, from The New York Times and The Washington Post to the Queens Chronicle and the Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, West Virginia, did just that. Session organizers ran through...

Early in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, the poet Robert Lowell tells Mailer that he thinks of him as “the finest journalist in America.” One writer’s compliment is plainly another’s backhanded insult. Mailer had a lifelong ambivalence about his reportorial, as opposed to his novelistic, work, considering fiction to...

1. Suicide Watch "Correlation doesn't equal causation" is one of the most helpful ideas that journalists can borrow from the social sciences. A major event, like the current financial crisis, ends up being used as a news peg for every story under the sun, but often it can be a too-good-to-be true explanation for a much more complicated...

Several months ago, I received a phone call from an editor at a major U.S. newspaper. He explained that his paper’s Web site had been hosting blogs for roughly a year, but staff had recently realized that they were without a corrections style for blog posts. Understandably, he wanted to get something in place as soon as possible. Every...

1) Vulgus, Schmulgus Bill Kristol used precious column space in the NYT to write unproductively and misleadingly about a Peggy Noonan column critiquing Sarah Palin. We wanted to set the record straight. 2) News Hog(wash) Michael Tomasky's essay in the New York Review of Books on the presidential candidates' respective media strategies was sharply written,...

1) The Great Man Theory and Hank Paulson The press often seeks out and artificially creates a Big Man in times of crisis, a hero who will save us all (see Rudy Giuliani/George W. Bush, September 2001) from disaster. As capitalism teetered on the precipice in September, the press rallied around Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson of all people, and...