Publisher
Search Results for: Columbia Journalism Review
The Last of the Live Reviewers: An Interview with Nate Chinen
Posted by 
Matthew Kassel
Matthew Kassel 
Fabrice Coffrini / Keystone / AP, Pantheon Books
Matthew Kassel | Longreads | August 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)
Jazz has changed a lot over the past 100 years or so of its existence, but it has never been as stylistically varied — or more packed with practitioners — as it is at the present moment. That’s a good thing for listeners, who now have many points of entry if they are new to the music and don’t necessarily want to start with a record that was cut 50 years ago. Mary Halvorson’s slashing guitar, for example, may appeal to more punk-minded listeners. The pianist Robert Glasper’s Dilla-esque grooves are a good gateway for hip-hop fans. And the tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s sweeping, spiritual-minded albums are a potential attraction for jam band aficionados. There’s a lot going on.
And yet, at the same time, there are probably fewer people writing about modern developments in jazz than ever. While niche magazines like JazzTimes and DownBeat are still going strong, there is scant jazz coverage in mainstream music publications (which tend to treat jazz like a novelty item), and the New York Times no longer runs weekly live jazz reviews (a recent development). Nate Chinen was, in fact, the last person to review jazz shows on a regular basis there, a position he left in 2017 after a dozen years contributing to the paper. He is now the director of editorial content at WBGO, the Newark public radio station.
In his new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, Chinen draws on his experiences as a former newspaper critic, attempting to make sense of what’s been going on in jazz over the past few decades. It isn’t an easy task, and he does a good job collating a whole lot of material, pulling on interesting threads and adding context for readers who may not be all that familiar with the reasons why Wynton Marsalis was — and still is, to an extent — a polarizing figure. Mostly, Chinen approaches jazz on its own terms. He describes what the music sounds like now and conveys to readers where modern jazz artists are coming from. In doing so he’s created a book that is truly of its time. Read more…
Is Journalism a Form of Activism?
Posted by 
Danielle Tcholakian
Danielle Tcholakian Portrait of journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells, 1920. (Photo by Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)
Danielle Tcholakian | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4,071 words)
Last weekend, as March For Our Lives protests took place all across the country, the student co-editor-in-chief of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School newspaper said on the CNN show “Reliable Sources” that journalism is a form of activism.
I was not surprised to see her quickly criticized on Twitter. Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal tweeted that the belief the student espoused is what’s “killing trust in our profession,” adding in a second tweet that the mentality the student shared “is more common among younger journalists.”
But I was surprised to see how many journalists came to the students’ defense, agreeing that journalism is a form of activism. They were highly respected, solid, investigative journalists. Los Angeles Times writer Matt Pearce asked, “Does anybody think that even the fairest and most diligent of investigative reporters wrote their horrifying stories hoping that nothing would change?” The Washington Post‘s Wesley Lowery asserted, “Even beyond big, long investigations, journalists perform acts of activism every day. Any good journalist is an activist for truth, in favor of transparency, on the behalf of accountability. It is our literal job to pressure powerful people and institutions via our questions.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The New York Times Magazine and arguably one of the greatest living reporters today, quoted Lowery’s tweet, agreeing with it. Read more…
Why Quotas Still Don’t Work for Journalism
Posted by Danielle Tcholakian
Danielle Tcholakian (Jonathan Torgovnik / Getty Images)
Imagine you work in an industry where accuracy and precision are hugely important. Your work is scrutinized by an ever-growing field of critics eager to catch any misstep, and if you get something wrong it has the potential to do people serious harm.
Your job often requires making dozens, if not hundreds of calls to obtain or even just verify a single fact. You spend your days wheedling information out of people who don’t want to provide it. You pore through mountains and mountains of documents which may only include one salient fact buried deep in a dense bog of data. Often these documents are difficult to find, or require the assistance of lawyers to access — lawyers you personally can’t afford and your higher ups may not want to pay for.
Now imagine this industry is failing at being a viable industry. People in a different department than you are supposed to be responsible for that aspect — business, finances, the bottom line — but your department creates the product that is being sold. When “innovators” are brought in to come up with dynamic ideas, they pin them on you. There’s nothing to suggest the product is broken or failing, and everything to suggest that the means by which money is made from the product is the problem, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the innovators. They have figured out how to track how your product is consumed — do we have the metrics on that? — and so they are going to use that information to suggest changes to how you do what you do.
What Columbia University’s Investigation Reveals About the Rolling Stone UVA Rape Story
Posted by 
Mark Armstrong
Mark Armstrong Columbia University’s School of Journalism has released its report investigating what went wrong with Rolling Stone’s story of a rape at UVA, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Among its conclusions:
Rolling Stone’s senior editors are unanimous in the belief that the story’s failure does not require them to change their editorial systems. “It’s not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things,” Dana said. “We just have to do what we’ve always done and just make sure we don’t make this mistake again.” Coco McPherson, the fact-checking chief, said, “I one hundred percent do not think that the policies that we have in place failed. I think decisions were made around those because of the subject matter.”
Yet better and clearer policies about reporting practices, pseudonyms and attribution might well have prevented the magazine’s errors. The checking department should have been more assertive about questioning editorial decisions that the story’s checker justifiably doubted. Dana said he was not told of reporting holes like the failure to contact the three friends or the decision to use misleading attributions to obscure that fact.
Stronger policy and clearer staff understanding in at least three areas might have changed the final outcome:
Pseudonyms. Dana, Woods and McPherson said using pseudonyms at Rolling Stone is a “case by case” issue that requires no special convening or review. Pseudonyms are inherently undesirable in journalism. They introduce fiction and ask readers to trust that this is the only instance in which a publication is inventing details at its discretion. Their use in this case was a crutch – it allowed the magazine to evade coming to terms with reporting gaps. Rolling Stone should consider banning them. If its editors believe pseudonyms are an indispensable tool for its forms of narrative writing, the magazine should consider using them much more rarely and only after robust discussion about alternatives, with dissent encouraged.
Checking Derogatory Information. Erdely and Woods made the fateful agreement not to check with the three friends. If the fact-checking department had understood that such a practice was unacceptable, the outcome would almost certainly have changed.
Confronting Subjects With Details. When Erdely sought “comment,” she missed the opportunity to hear challenging, detailed rebuttals from Phi Kappa Psi before publication. The fact-checker relied only on Erdely’s communications with the fraternity and did not independently confirm with Phi Kappa Psi the account Rolling Stone intended to publish about Jackie’s assault. If both the reporter and checker had understood that by policy they should routinely share specific, derogatory details with the subjects of their reporting, Rolling Stone might have veered in a different direction.
Interview: ‘Poor Teeth’ Writer Sarah Smarsh on Class and Journalism
Posted by 
Julia Wick
Julia Wick Julia Wick | Longreads | November 7, 2014 | 11 minutes (2,674 words)
“I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes.” That’s the first line of Sarah Smarsh’s essay “Poor Teeth,” which appeared on Aeon earlier this month. Like much of Smarsh’s work, “Poor Teeth” is a story about inequity in America. It is also a story about teeth, hers and her grandmother’s and also the millions of Americans who lack dental coverage.
Smarsh has written for Harper’s, Guernica and The Morning News, among other outlets. Her perspective is very much shaped by her personal experiences: She grew up in a family where most didn’t graduate from high school, and she later chaired the faculty-staff Diversity Initiative as a professor at Washburn University in Topeka. I spoke with her about her own path to journalism and how the media cover issues of class. Read more…
NPR Amps Up: Can Vivian Schiller Build a Journalism Juggernaut? (2010)
Posted by 
Longreads
Longreads NPR Amps Up: Can Vivian Schiller Build a Journalism Juggernaut? (2010)
Schiller has animated the place with the energy of renewed ambition, a rededication to producing serious journalism. Her strategy rests on three pillars: expand original reporting at the national and local levels; provide free access to public media content regardless of platform; and serve audiences of all backgrounds and interests. To do all that, she wants to work in partnership with NPR’s member stations as well as independent producers and some of the new nonprofit journalism units springing up around the country.
By Jill Drew, Columbia Journalism Review
‘Women and Girls Were Not Jumping Up and Down to be Interviewed’: Rukmini Callamichi on Interviewing ISIS Sex Slaves
Posted by 
Sari Botton
Sari Botton Rukmini Callimachi. Screenshot via Charlie Rose.
Columbia Journalism Review has an as-told-to account of New York Times correspondent Rukmini Callimachi’s experience reporting a page-one story that ran in March of 2016, which bore the headline “To Maintain Supply of Sex Slaves, ISIS Pushes Birth Control.” Callimachi talks to CJR‘s Elon Green about various aspects of getting the story, spending time with the victims, and earning their trust.
Being a woman was helpful. I say that with caution, because some of the most revealing and sensitive stories on rape have been done by my male colleagues: Jeffrey Gettleman on male rape in eastern Congo and Adam Nossiter on the rapes inside of a soccer stadium in Guinea, for example. Both stories put important issues on the map. But I could get these girls to open up by telling them, Somebody very close to me, in my own family, was gang-raped as a teenager. I was raised with her story. I’d tell them they should not suffer any shame for what happened to them. It was not their fault. I tried to make it clear to them that what they’re about to describe is something quite personal to me, given my family’s history, and I do not come at this with some morose curiosity.
Callimachi also discusses her process as a writer.
I tend to fight. I think I’ve been a pain in the butt for some editors. Because writing is so hard for me, when I find a formulation that I love — moments of inspiration usually happen when I’m going on a run; I’ll have an ah ha! moment — it’s painful when editors cut that very thing. I know that the editing is obviously a very important step in what we do. It’s why The New York Times is what it is. So I am trying my best to push less and to be less attached to the specific phrasing.
I don’t editorialize. Sometimes people ask why I don’t condemn ISIS. Why don’t I say this is terrible? I’m like, Are you kidding me? Why would I need to say that, when it is so transparently terrible, right? It’s so obviously horrible and what do I, Rukmini, this writer from America, have to add by saying, This is awful? I think that gets in the way of the narrative.
Congratulations, You Now Own a Newspaper
Posted by 
Krista Stevens
Krista Stevens ALASKA, UNITED STATES - 1994/01/01: USA, Alaska, Inside Passage, Skagway, Main Street. (Photo by Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)
At Columbia Journalism Review, Lauren Harris reports on the gritty determination of Melinda Munson and Gretchen Wehmhoff, a duo who became the owners of the Skagway News in a give-away. The pair, who are taking the paper into the modern age, are committed to making the publication a success — despite the effects of Covid-19 on a tourist town dependent on visiting cruise ships to survive.
IN 2019, LARRY PERSILY, owner of the Skagway News, announced that he would give away his local Alaskan publication to a person or a pair demonstrating journalistic skill, self-motivation, grit, and—above all—affectionate dedication to the quirks and quiddities of rural small-town reporting. National news outlets picked up the story as a sort of lark, emphasizing the remote and small-town nature of Skagway, the rarity of the giveaway, and then, in a few short lines, the challenges of sustaining critical local news coverage. In such stories, Persily was a Willy Wonka figure, courting a successor.
Among the applicants were Melinda Munson and Gretchen Wehmhoff, teachers in the Anchorage area who cowrote a blog for Alaskan families. Munson and Wehmhoff envisioned a dream job not unlike that conjured in headlines: the freedom to write and the promise of a place in a tight-knit community. Over the course of months, Munson and Wehmhoff had several intense phone interviews with Persily; for some, they met in a room in the school building with the lights off, to avoid drawing the attention of their principal.
Persily took over the paper’s management in 2019, working from Anchorage—a distance of nearly eight hundred miles from Skagway, which he quickly came to believe was too far.
“You gotta be part of the town,” Persily says. “You gotta go to the basketball games. You gotta be a trusted part of the community.” He discounted applicants who envisioned doing the job “for a couple years” or who wondered about how much they could contribute annually to an IRA. “Small-town papers need small-town editors,” he says. “I wanted an owner who was going to live there happily ever after.”
GRETCHEN WEHMHOFF AND MELINDA MUNSON make a winning pair. Wehmhoff is garrulous and lively; Munson is eloquent and tempered. Munson writes and edits, in addition to managing childcare and remote schooling for six kids; Wehmhoff does everything else. Each shows an obvious faith in the other’s capabilities.
“Gretchen is a Renaissance lady: she can do layout, ads, business,” Munson says. “When Gretchen writes, she spits it out on the paper, then hands it to me to edit.”
“I wipe up a little bit of the spit,” Wehmhoff responds.
The Silencing of #MeToo Reporting in Germany
Posted by 
Seyward Darby
Seyward Darby Ulf Wittrock / EyeEm
Two journalists documented 30 cases of alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by an HIV doctor in Germany; many of the testimonials came from vulnerable gay men who were working in the sex trade or who had only recently immigrated to the country when they sought medical care at the doctor’s clinic. A criminal investigation had been launched against the doctor, who had also pledged not to see patients alone for the time being. The journalists published their findings — only to be forced to take them down. They hadn’t made errors, nor had sources recanted. As Caitlin L. Chandler documents in a feature for Columbia Journalism Review, the reason events transpired as they did is because the doctor, Heiko Jessen, and his attorney, Jony Eisenberg, exploited German media law, which is notably different than America’s:
In criminal trials, German law presumes innocence unless a guilty verdict is handed down by a judge. This is similar to the US legal system; however, in Germany, the presumption of innocence is also applied to press coverage. While the media is allowed to report on criminal trials—which are considered to fall within the “social sphere”—the law protects suspects from media coverage deemed to stigmatize them unfairly before a verdict is reached. For example, the media is rarely allowed to publish photos of someone in custody, unlike the “perp walks” commonly publicized in the US.
Before publishing the Jessen story, BuzzFeed and Vice consulted a German legal doctrine on “suspicion reporting” that outlines four criteria journalists must comply with: the article must make the public aware the person could be innocent; the journalists must have substantial material evidence in addition to reporting that a trial is ongoing; the suspect must have ample time to respond to the allegations, and their response must be included so that the story is balanced; and a person’s name can only be printed if there is an overwhelming public interest.
Eisenberg, clad in a leather jacket, railed against the journalists in a court hearing, calling them liars and muckrackers, and he attacked the alleged victims, emphasizing that they were drug users and sex workers. He won over the judges, who made a ruling on the basis of the “suspicion reporting” doctrine:
The judges said that BuzzFeed had met three of the conditions: it had enough evidence to publish; Jessen had been given adequate time to respond to the allegations; and the case was in the public interest. But on the fourth criterion—the obligation to maintain presumption of innocence—the judges said the journalists had failed. Precisely because the articles had presented such a massive amount of detailed evidence against Jessen, the judges said, no reader could come to the conclusion that he was innocent. The reporting was “not balanced.” They dismissed the consistent inclusion of words like “alleged,” calling such phrasing cosmetic, even though it is widely used by journalists both within and outside of Germany. Finally, the judges took issue with the story’s style, calling the level of detail provided about the assaults “voyeuristic.”
As Chandler details, the legal saga took more turns after that ruling, but the question at the heart of it stayed the same: Was the German legal system doing more harm than good?
You must be logged in to post a comment.