News

We've been here before. Too often. There was Ruth Shalit, the young New Republic writer who was Washington journalism's It Girl in the mid-'90s, until she imploded with a couple of high-profile plagiarism episodes and a powerful but error-riddled assault on the Washington Post's approach to race. Then there was Stephen Glass, also of The New Republic, whose stories, packed with amazing, dead-on...

The angels of the public interest, with large pink wings and glittering halos, descended on Michael Powell this fall, five years after he had, somewhat sarcastically, first invoked them. That was back in April 1998, when Powell was speaking to a Las Vegas gathering of lawyers. Only a few months had passed since his appointment to one of the five spots on the Federal Communications Commission, and...

Twenty-four of us had come together on a Saturday in January to form a public journalism society. About midway through this charter meeting of the Public Journalism Network, Chris Peck, editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, put his hands a foot apart and announced in somber terms that public journalism is on the verge of being "book-ended," with his right hand representing the movement's start...

New York, May 27, 2003– Just before noon on April 8, 2003, journalists covering the battle of Baghdad from the balconies of the Palestine Hotel looked on as the turret of a U.S. M1A1 Abrams tank positioned about three quarters of a mile away on the Al-Jumhuriya Bridge turned toward them and unleashed a single round. The shell struck a 15th-floor balcony of the hotel, fatally wounding veteran...

Close on the heels of the personality-led campaign launched in February this year, Mathrubhumi has launched a new campaign aimed squarely at driving its circulation up. "While the earlier campaign was to demonstrate the equity and trust enjoyed by the newspaper, this time we are directly working on driving circulation," says Sajan Abraham, managing director, Maitri Advertising, the agency handling...

One could call it the ripple effect. Dainik Bhaskar announces its imminent entry into Ahmedabad, Gujarat; old-timer and regional player Gujarat Samachar unleashes a revamp exercise and now, Sandesh, the third angle in the triune is readying itself for battle royale. The 80-year old paper with a readership of 49.64 lakh, according to round 10 of the Indian Readership Survey or IRS, has plans to...

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemns the threat issued yesterday by the militant group Tehrik-ul-Mujahideen against journalists working "against the freedom struggle" in the disputed territory of Kashmir. The organization is one of more than a dozen armed groups fighting against Indian rule in Kashmir, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan. The rebel group's statement was...

This February, I attended my first Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference, in the great media incubator of San Francisco. It's impossible to walk a single block of that storied town without feeling the ghosts of great contrarian media innovators past: Hearst and Twain, Hinckle and Wenner, Rossetto and Talbot. But after twelve hours with the AAN, a much different reality set in: never...

The growing power of Weblogs, or "blogs," has hardly gone unnoticed. Bloggers have been credited with helping to topple Trent Lott and Howell Raines, with inflaming debate over the Iraq war, and with boosting presidential hopeful Howard Dean. Suddenly, it seems, everyone from Barbra Streisand (whose site is a lefty clearinghouse) to guy-next-door Bruce Cole (a San Francisco foodie whose blog is...

Trying to describe The Morning News (themorningnews.org) makes a journalist yearn for a new, Web-focused edition of the AP Stylebook. The site is not a blog, insists Rosecrans Baldwin, the News's twenty-six-year-old editor, since it uses different voices. Nor does he like the term 'zine – "a word that implies things that don't have advertising, get photocopied, and show up in music stores."...