Newsworthiness

Objectivity, the guiding principle of the U.S. media, stands accused of undermining the press’s ability to challenge the Bush administration as it rushed to war in Iraq. We were too worried about balance, the argument goes, so concerned with giving all sides a say that we neglected our adversarial role. The British press, meanwhile, which is much more comfortable expressing its political leanings...

You wouldn't necessarily think that Cheré Coen, with 20 years of newspaper experience plus a stint at a magazine's Web site, would find herself writing briefs, plugs and promos most days, with maybe the future of newspapers riding on her work. Luring readers through teasers and tidbits makes up a central part of Coen's job as "readership editor" of the 70,000-circulation Bakersfield Californian...

This is more of a rule than exception these days. Celebrities of various dimensions have this tendency to adorn the cover pages of publications - be it in a general interest or special interest magazine, newspaper pullout or special section, or the hundred-odd capsules on TV every week. The reason? Quite, simply, their commercial value. However, if one were to draw on the same idea and focus on a...

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...

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...

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...

Journalism – unlike literature, theater, art, music, film, or situation comedy – has never had much of a canon, a reasonably well-accepted collection of great works. This is lamentable. It leaves us, as we read the latest dispatch from Washington or a war zone, without models that might help us understand what such a dispatch might be. It allows us to mistake an interesting feature in the Times...

Linda Greenhouse got it right, I thought. In an interview in May about the Jayson Blair disaster that was quoted in The Wall Street Journal on June 6, the day after Howell Raines resigned as executive editor of The New York Times, she observed: "There is an endemic cultural issue at the Times that is not a Howell creation, although it plays into his vulnerabilities as a manager, which is a top...

The fall of Howell Raines was riveting to cover but hard to watch. And with a little distance, some aspects of the story become clearer. Among them is the realization that Jayson Blair was just a supporting player. Exactly five weeks passed between the resignations of Blair and Raines, but the discovery of the reporter's deceptions wasn't the first act in the drama. In retrospect, it was the...

Chris Hedges was sprinting down a road in the Gaza Strip, just ahead of some young Palestinians carrying Molotov cocktails whom he had been interviewing, dodging bullets fired by Israeli soldiers, when he concluded that he could no longer be a war correspondent. It was at this moment, in the fall of 2000, after twenty years of being shot at, shelled, bombed, ambushed, and taken prisoner, that...