American Journalism Review; AJR

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In May, Jefferson County interim President Steve Theriot filed a defamation suit against a bunch of anonymous commenters and asked NOLA.com to give him the identities that go with 11 user names. In April, Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold sued the paper for $50 million for violating her privacy after it published a story linking a number of controversial comments on the Plain Dealer Web site to her e-mail account. Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of th...

Letters

Editor Enlightened Editors Thank you for Arielle Emmett's timely discussion ("Too Graphic?" Spring) regarding the myriad disturbing images made in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating earthquake of January 12.

Determining the Future of Local News in D.C.

Brady, a former executive editor of washingtonpost.com and Allbritton's president of digital strategy, says the new operation is determined to figure out how to make local online news a profitable venture and to reimagine the relationship among reader, blogger and news organization, with heavy aggregation and partnerships with area bloggers key parts of his strategy. Instead of sending out one reporter who can interview only a few people, he asks, why not pull in news feeds from other source...

A Web-Centric Approach to Traditional Journalism

In a two-month experiment, Google partnered with the New York Times and the Washington Post to marry "Google's purely Web-centric sensibility and the journalistic sensibility" of the newspapers, says Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations for the New York Times Co. The union created one destination page for each of nine test storylines, from the Washington Redskins to swine flu to health care reform. The pages, which are similar to Living Stories, not only have incre...

Take 2

Metro Suicide Program Running Behind Schedule (Washington Post's Express) Not in the USA They Aren't Conservatives Talking with Liberal Democrats (deck of a New York Times story on efforts to form a coalition government in England) Brutal Headline of the Month Kaplan College-Test Company Selling Loser Newsweek Magazine (Wonkette's take on the Washington Post Co. putting the struggling newsweekly up for sale) An Appropriate Headline for So Many Stories The Road Ahead Is Uncertain and Likely Di...

Cliché Corner

(New Republic) "Or, if Kahne has a one-off sponsor for next year, would companies be willing to make the sponsorship and promotional investment for a short-lived venture?" (SceneDaily.com) "Right now, we have no evidence that it is anything other than a one-off, but we are alerting state, local officials around the country, letting them know what is going on."

Great Minds...

(Washington Post) "The most obvious antecedent for this enticing combination of black comedy and suspense is the Coen brothers' 'Blood Simple/ but The Square' has a more basic, classical charm that recalls moody 1940s-era noirs such as 'Double Indemnity' and countless others." (indieWIRE) "The rest of The Square' calls to mind the skin-tight dread of the Coen brothers' 'Blood Simple.'" (Boston Globe) "The Square' isn't as perfectly wound a film as 'Blood Simple/ but it was also made by two br...

A Commitment to Investigative Reporting

The director of the state Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy said the twin bills that clarified coalbed methane ownership did not give the board the authority to determine ownership. The state has, however, allocated money to increase the two-person staff responsible for monitoring payments by energy companies into the escrow accounts and to build an online database to improve the state's ability to monitor compliance and to provide the public with access to ownership information.

Capital Flight

After an explosion killed 29 coal miners in West Virginia in early April, the Washington Post and the New York Times quickly produced lengthy exposés detailing a plethora of safety breaches that preceded the nation's worst coal mining disaster in a quarter century. Networks and cable television news outlets certainly have reporters in Washington, but they concentrate on politics and the story of the day out of the White House, the Capitol and the most visible departments, such as Defense, St...

Abandoned Agencies

To do that, AJR selected departments and agencies that deal with everyday issues such as food safety, taxes, airline policy, the economy, veterans' benefits and workplace rules. [...] we contacted press secretaries in numerous departments and agencies to find out which news outlets they thought were covering them regularly.

Looking Up

[...] the nation's third-largest newspaper chain is experiencing double-digit growth in display ads online, and a partnership with Yahoo!, part of a consortium of newspapers, is bringing in millions of dollars. [...] the bucks have never really come pouring in through news sites - even though the audiences did. [...] storytelling (which includes the messages of ads) suffered.

Going Respectable?

What's more, the paper doesn't say which stories were generated by payments, or how much the sources were paid (the amount depends on a number of factors, Levine says, including the tipster's willingness to attest to the information in court if the Enquirer is sued). [...] it's impossible for a reader to determine which sources were motivated by a desire to inform and which were motivated to say extraordinary things by a payoff. The Enquirer's legal issues are arguably greater in the United...

Playing Defense

Reporters have traced vice rackets in the United Kingdom to the Kosovar Albanian mafia, money laundering by Eastern European crime families to Cyprus and the tiny country Liechtenstein, and heroin from Afghan poppy fields transported through the Balkans to Bosnian diaspora communities in Germany and Scandinavia. The project was founded in 2007 by Drew Sullivan, a former investigative reporter for the Nashville Tennessean and advising editor to the group, and Paul Radu, field editor for OCCRP...

Beneath the Tattoos

[...] today's teens and young adults do things that freak out their elders: According to Pew's survey, Millennials care far more about being good parents, having successful marriages and helping others than they do about being rich or famous.

Let the Sunshine In

The network later admitted it had staged a crash to make it appear that a GM truck's gas tank had exploded on impact. Ross was not directly involved in the GM story, and planting an incendiary device and faking one shot are not lapses of the same order of magnitude.

Bold, but Not Always Convincing

[...] she never fired the jammed weapon, and, as she told another writer, "I didn't kill nobody." [...] he offers page after page of striking evidence that plenty of panic occurred: 15 people treated for shock at a single New Jersey hospital, 20 families with their possessions descending on one police station, 875 phone calls to the New York Times, multiple church services disrupted by people claiming towns had been "wiped out" or "the end of the world has come."

Challenging the Incumbent

Rupert Murdoch, chief of the Journal's parent company, News Corp., has sought to broaden the Journal's national appeal since acquiring it in 2007, adding substantial coverage of politics and other general-interest news. [...] the Journal is among the few dailies to show circulation growth in recent reporting periods.