CJR Daily

Culled from CJR’s frequently updated “Must-reads from around the Web,” our staff recommendations for the best pieces of journalism (and other miscellany) on the Internet, here are your can’t-miss must-reads of the past week: Obama's war on leaks undermines investigative journalism -- "[T]he most militant I have seen since the Nixon administration" The New York Times told me to take...

On Thursday, the Williamson Daily News in southern West Virginia unleashed a spirited and somewhat bizarre attack on an unnamed TV news station in an editorial, accusing it of coverage that was "irresponsible at best, defamation at worst." Though the editorial didn't actually identify the target of its ire, the newspaper was referring to a May 20 report by WCHS,...

AUSTIN, TX -- At 7:30 pm Eastern time on May 16, Erin Burnett turned toward the camera in CNN's New York studio and teed up the next story: "The people of West, Texas, have been waiting for a month to find out what caused the horrific fertilizer-plant explosion that killed 15 people and leveled much of their town. Today, state...

There's been a diversity of gay news this month covered in the major media, from the rash of NYC hate crimes against gay men, to the story about a Texas lesbian couple forced apart because of a morality clause in one of the partner's divorce papers, to yesterday's Boy Scout vote to allow gay youths membership. But too often, the...

I've been following the Amazon tax-avoidance story for years now, and I haven't seen it better-told than it is on the cover of the new Fortune. Peter Elkind and Doris Burke get nearly 6,000 words to tell the story, and though it's a bit of a clip job, it's a very good clip job (ADDING: I should say "clip job"...

The extraordinary case of academic fraudster Diederick Stapel followed the typical narrative of a scientific scandal. A professor of social psychology at Tilburg University, he became a star researcher in his native Netherlands and abroad after years of eye-catching experiments on human behavior, such as a 2011 study published in Science that found a rubbish-strewn environment brought out racist behaviors...

FAIRWAY, KS -- On May 15, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the state Capitol in Lincoln, NE, to protest the filibuster that has blocked a bill expanding Medicaid to 54,000 new patients in the state, in accordance with the federal Affordable Care Act. The demonstrators knew what they were protesting against. But they didn't know exactly whom. Here's the situation:...

A writer I greatly admire, Ta-Nehisi Coates, once offered this exercise in understanding what it's like to produce a weekly opinion column: "Spend a week counting all the original ideas you have. Then try to write each one down, in all its nuance, in 800 words. Perhaps you'd be very successful at this. Now try to do it for four...

When Republican Scott Brown faced Democrat Martha Coakley in a January 2010 special election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, he was criticized by Coakley and other Democrats as being too conservative. But was he really a conservative at all? Media coverage at the time frequently bought into the claim that Brown was a conservative, which coincided with some of the...

The bulk of the IRS scandal press coverage has been seriously devoid of the kind of context that tells readers how and why the targeting of Tea Party groups was almost certainly not a Nixonian plot from the Oval Office to intimidate political opponents. So it's great to see ProPublica's excellent piece showing why the scandal is way, way over-hyped...

According to a recent Pew study, 16 percent of adults online use Twitter -- 8 percent daily. I'm pretty sure most of that 8 percent are journalists. Journalists love Twitter, whether using it for writing, conversation, or fighting. And I love to watch--and judge--the sparring. If you see a #JournoTweetFight that you think merits inclusion, please give me a heads...

DETROIT, MI -- About three weeks before the May 21 mayoral primary in Pittsburgh, an attack ad against a leading Democratic candidate, city councilmember Bill Peduto, hit the air. "We need a mayor for all of Pittsburgh. Not just Bill Peduto's neighborhood," the ad's narrator intones. Negative ads are nothing new, of course, but this one was unusual. It was...

Like everyone else this week, I was transfixed by the tragedy in Moore, Oklahoma. The devastation was quick and, in some neighborhoods, complete. I streamed local coverage of the event from KFOR and over the course of Monday afternoon noticed a narrative was developing. News outlets were looking for good, positive stories to report just a few hours after the...

Just about everyone in Washington agrees that the IRS's blanket targeting of Tea Party groups by keying on words in their titles was, at best, misguided. But that doesn't mean that every Tea Party organization that found itself under the IRS microscope was wrongly targeted--a nuance sometimes lost in the coverage. Take True the Vote , a project of the...

The Motley Fool's Brian Richards posts a fascinating look inside the pump and dump world of penny-stock promoters, reporting how the hype machine worked in the case of a shell company called Goff Corporation. Richards describes Goff as "a social recruiting-company-turned-Colombian-gold miner," which should have been enough to scare off any investor with a light on upstairs. Fortunately for penny-stock...

CopyrightX, an online course run out of Harvard this spring as part of the EdX program, was unusual in a couple of ways. It might not strictly be called a MOOC--a massive open online course--because it wasn't open. More than four thousand people applied, and enrollment was capped at 500. Half of the selected students were women. There were equal...

Elizabeth O'Brien's May 15 Marketwatch piece on proposed changes for Medicare is one of the best I have seen since the government's health program for elderly and disabled people surfaced last year as a likely target for the federal budget axe. It still is a target, and that makes O'Brien's effort all the more important. Her story acknowledges an aspect...

Frustrating as they may be, every journalist wonders at some point about the identity of his or her most devoted online hecklers, but The Climate Desk's James West and Tim McDonnell just couldn't let it go. Citing research that found that "uncivil discourse" in social media and comments sections can have a polarizing affect on consumers of science news, and...

In Oklahoma, particularly in the springtime, dangerous weather is a part of life. And so are the local TV news stations in my home state. Chances are good that the bottom corner of your TV screen come May has the familiar map of the state covered with red, yellow, and green Doppler radar images on loop denoting the severity of...

COLUMBIA, SC -- The State newspaper, South Carolina's capital city daily in Columbia, gave uncharacteristically prominent play Sunday to the influence that ex-lawmakers and other public officials have as they lobby their former colleagues at the State House. "At least 66 former lawmakers, legislative staffers and state regulators have registered to lobby the Legislature in the past two years, according...