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Emily Wax didn't hesitate when a rebel leader offered her a lift in a stolen Land Cruiser crammed with grenades, automatic weapons and mortar shells. Three sharpshooters, perched on the roof, scanned the desolate desert landscape as they moved toward the death zones. Her relentless lobbying with the Sudanese Liberation Army had paid off. To get to the rebel encampment and waiting escort, the...

Recent opinion polls show declining respect for the news media and a growing belief among many Americans that reporters have little regard for ethics. High-profile journalism scandals involving ethical lapses at CBS News, The New York Times, USA TODAY and other media outlets have fed the public's distrust of reporters. Just this week, a survey of 112,000 high school students found that 36% say...

Information wants to be free -- as long as you don't have to pay the people who dug up that information. While the Net has long been associated with free things -- free e-mail, free personal Web pages, free searches -- the news business has been repulsed by the notion that their hard-won scoops and journalism should be given away for free. But the newspaper business has had little choice but to...

In November 1969 Paul Branzburg, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, spent a few days hanging out with two local men for a story about how they planned to clear $5,000 making and selling a batch of hashish. The resulting article, THE HASH THEY MAKE ISN'T TO EAT, ran in the paper’s November 15 edition. In it Branzburg, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia...

This is the month that Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, limps off into the sunset, leaving behind a lot of large, disappointed media companies. It’s not how the movie was supposed to end. Back in June 2003 Powell proposed loosening the rules of ownership so that big media could get even bigger, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit sent him back to the drawing board. Then, this...

Jonathan Harr, the author of A Civil Action, spent eight harrowing years plowing through a stack of legal documents as high as a three-story building, and nearly went broke in the process. Posing what he calls "the dumbest questions in the world," Richard Ben Cramer conducted more than 1,000 interviews to research What It Takes: The Way to the White House. For Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble...

Before the management at Forbes.com decided last July to insert paid advertisements into the very text of stories, there were no meetings with the entire editorial staff to discuss the change, and not everyone even knew that the ad scheme, called IntelliTXT, was going to begin. "We were not forewarned," says one journalist, who asked to remain anonymous and claims to have learned of the ads from...

By incorporating several vehicles that can encompass print, online, broadcast and geo/demographic targeting, newspapers offer creative, viable solutions for their recruitment advertisers. In order to use these platforms to best effect, however, it is critical that both publishers and recruiters understand how consumers incorporate various media resources into their job search process. To explore...

"Just this once, the big news of the day isn’t in the papers. It is the papers." January 29th is going to be observed every year as ‘Indian Newspaper Day,’ as per the summons of the Indian Newspaper Society. This is the day when the first newspaper was born and spun into print. The creatives furnished for the occasion are hard-hitting and compelling. Instances maybe an expanse of empty white space...

Technology that allows advertisers and readers to better connect continues to drive economic changes in the news business. The Internet hammered the newspaper classified business over the past decade, and now new technology for placing display advertising on Web sites promises to challenge remaining news industry business models. Many journalists don't give much thought to what happened on the...