Newsworthiness

Scenes from the front lines of the American Liberal Media Expeditionary Force’s campaign to rout the forces of conservatism: CNN, which right-wingers have been known to call the "Clinton News Network," chooses as its lead commentator for George W. Bush’s spring 2002 Middle East policy speech . . . Pat Robertson. On the crucial Manhattan front, New York magazine fields as its sole national...

The crime thundered across the airwaves and onto the newsstands. On April 19, 1989, a young, white investment banker, jogging in Central Park, was bludgeoned, raped, and left to die. The police soon charged a marauding group of Harlem teens with gang rape. The tabloid headlines pumped fear into horror. WOLF PACK'S PREY, announced the New York Daily News, in its first of many page-one stories....

The last time Rem Rieder asked me to do a story for AJR I was standing on the side of a grumbling volcano in Ecuador. But the eruption had blown far to the northwest in Los Angeles with the last belch of the Chandlers' Los Angeles Times as it fell to Chicago's Tribune Co. This time I was hacking my way through a mangrove forest--well, hacking the way aging journalists do it--on the edge of the...

As a one-man bureau covering a county outpost for Greensboro's News & Record, Ethan Feinsilver was always looking for The Story. He was willing to grind out dailies, but he came to the North Carolina paper to tackle more ambitious things, stories with some depth. He thought he found one in a press release from a local community college. The release announced a continuing education course, "North...

Sharon Peters is a recidivist editor. She devoted half a career to helping run newsrooms, then sidestepped into consulting. Now, after eight years, she has relapsed and resumed the newspaper life, much smarter, she hopes, for being gone awhile. Peters believes she learned a lot about editing during her time away, and she plans to act on those lessons now that she has a second chance, born again...

GOOD WORK: WHEN EXCELLENCE AND ETHICS MEET By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, William Damon, and Howard Gardner Basic Books 288 pages. $26.00 This intriguing book offers important insights for journalists, who all too often wrap themselves in their own cocoons, reveling in a specialness that sets them apart from other professionals. In an unusual collaboration that has lasted for five years and promises...

In the early summer of 1995, in a cramped, cluttered newsstand in Greenwich Village, I purchased my first copy of Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life. The headline grabbed me: "Inventing Wills: How an Ex-Jesuit, Sometime Professor Became America's Heavyweight Know-It-All." I was intrigued that Lingua Franca's writer, Adam Begley, had somehow convinced the brilliant and irascible Garry Wills...

Shortly after the hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thousands of Palestinians poured into the streets in the West Bank city of Nablus to celebrate by honking horns, handing out sweets, and firing their guns into the air. The demonstrators may not have represented the sentiment of the majority of Palestinians, but the protest was a newsworthy event, and...

It has become the post-September 11 cliché to say that the attacks on New York and Washington changed everything. But clichés have their kernels of truth. Journalists and industry-watchers say that the events are making newsroom managers more aware of the need for hard news. Coverage of foreign events, government agencies, and the like is suddenly in the forefront, and infotainment has receded, at...

The classroom chatter faded as she read her "what makes me tick" essay. It was a journalism exercise I'd asked the high-school students to do to get them thinking about why people behave the way they do, how they acquire their personalities and quirks. As journalists, they'd be doing that, so I had them start with themselves. This particular student wrote about a terrified young woman who found...