Characters abounded in the first newsroom I worked in. There was the gruff managing editor, who paced around our desks at deadline and growled: “File the story! You’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic!” Then there was the aggressive and … Read more
Heather Martin remembers how angry she was at the media after surviving the 1999 Columbine High School shooting as a 17-year-old senior. Journalists “bombarded” traumatized teens with cameras and microphones as they looked for their families and friends, crowded memorials … Read more
The Virginia Press Association has awarded an annual prize for “editorial leadership in the community” since 1988, recognizing one newspaper in the state for crusading editorial writing each year. That is, it did until last year when no award was … Read more
What answer does ChatGPT, the program that can generate text or answer questions based on prompts, give when you ask it why journalism is so often used to train generative artificial intelligence? ChatGPT will tell you that the news is … Read more
My college roommate gets her news from a talking fish on TikTok. And she’s not the only one. The “Talking Fish News” has 325,000 followers, and it is one of many accounts playing off of the beloved SpongeBob SquarePants … Read more
Farooq Ahmed used to be on Twitter a lot. The D.C.-based science journalist and novelist posted plenty of hot takes, diving into wide-ranging discussions of the day’s most pressing events with pithy humor. He even invented a hashtag, #mybrownass, for … Read more
This month has been brutal for journalism jobs. The Los Angeles Times laid off 115 employees. Time announced layoffs that the magazine’s guild said amounted to 15% of staff. Univision announced 200 layoffs and Conde Nast folded the … Read more
As the new year begins, many journalists are watching for updates on the rollout of money from Press Forward, a coalition of organizations that have pledged more than $500 million to support local news with a goal of … Read more
The past year has been a difficult one for a free and independent press. An unprecedented number of journalists and other media workers have been killed in the war between Israel and Hamas. A Wall Street Journal reporter was imprisoned … Read more
I’ve covered these COPs (to be more specific, Conferences of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change) across four decades; they are simultaneously the world’s stage for talking about the most serious crisis our species has ever … Read more