Newsworthiness

Paris Hilton gets more press in the New York Times than the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. This is according to Matt Thompson, a reporter working for the Poynter Journalism Institute, who reports that a search of the Lexis-Nexus news database shows that between May and June this year the New York Times gave about 10 000 words to stories that mentioned Darfur and "at least 17 000 words to stories...

What do the managing editors of America’s newspapers talk about when they get together? Readers, and why there are fewer of them than there used to be. At the Associated Press Managing Editors convention in Louisville this fall, Topic A was declining readership. Stuart Wilk, the past APME president and associate editor of The Dallas Morning News, delivered a keynote speech that spoke of various...

What prompted me to write this article was an item on the BBC website that exemplified all that is fundamentally wrong with the corporation’s coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The item, entitled "Settlers move into east Jerusalem" from March 31 this year, describes "angry demonstrators", "clashes between local Palestinians and police", and "angry Palestinians…throwing stones at the new...

You have probably noticed by now that journalism is being phased out. Our once noble calling is increasingly difficult to distinguish from things that look like journalism but are primarily advertising, press agentry, or entertainment. The pure news audience is drifting away as old readers die and are replaced by young people hooked on popular culture and amusement. We used to think the young...

It will be interesting, now that the presidential campaign is over, to see if the nonfiction bestseller list gets back to its usual diet of biography and history and sex. Surely the Swift Boat guys will float away and the Kitty Kelleys and the Lies and the Lying Liars will hibernate for another four years. Or will they? Maybe a taste for partisan prose and image has taken hold. The number of...

Journalists have been making history. In big, fat volumes. It’s getting harder and harder these days to tell the difference between books of history and books of journalism. Dozens of current or former journalists – like David Halberstam, Anne Applebaum, David Maraniss, Melissa Fay Greene, Richard Kluger, Stanley Karnow, and Robert Caro – have been writing meaty books about events they may not...

For many journalists, the proper relationship between government and the news media begins and ends with the First Amendment’s charge that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." In this view, government is an adversary of the press – a source of censorship at worst, corruption and disinformation at best. Paul Starr’s profound and illuminating The...

As Iain Calder tells it triumphantly in The Untold Story, his memoir of thirty-three years at America’s best-selling supermarket tabloid, most of them at its helm, "The National Enquirer changed the face of American journalism." That journalism, which in his analysis had gotten "dull and gray," suddenly began to boil under the competitive pressures of the Enquirer. The press’s purview widened from...

I once worked for a newspaper that covered a place where nothing ever happened. Or so I thought. The paper was called the Suburban Trib. It was born in 1967 and died in 1985 when its parent, the Chicago Tribune, shut it down and posted guards at the doors. We covered the suburbs. We were young and eager and bored beyond all imagining. Most of us did not own homes or have children or in any way...

At 4 a.m. in the January freeze of the Rocky Mountains, producers and hard-luck interns started scraping the snow off the two-story platforms for the camera crews. Soon reporters bundled in parkas scrambled from the warmth of rented mobile homes to shiver in the cold, waiting to report that in just a few hours Kobe Bryant would stroll into the Eagle County Courthouse for another pretrial hearing...