Columbia Journalism Review

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. “I know we’ve had some big polling misses in primaries recently, and that has everyone on edge,” G. Elliott Morris, a journalist and pollster who writes a Substack called Strength in Numbers, told me. Polls showed wide leads for progressive candidates in some key Democratic primaries over the summer: Abdul El-Sayed was predicted to win Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary by double digits but only eked out a victory.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. For years, ESPN wanted nothing to do with sports gambling.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. In June, Debbie Hiott, the general manager of KUT, an NPR affiliate licensed to the University of Texas at Austin, was invited to a meeting with Anita Vangelisti, the interim dean of the Moody College of Communication, and handed two letters. One offered her the option to resign; the other summarily fired her. Hiott took the latter. “You’re going to have to fire me,” she remembered saying.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Toward the end of The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s new film dramatizing the run-up to, and aftermath of, the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” in 2021, Jeff Horwitz, a Journal reporter played by Jeremy Allen White, meets with a brash company press officer, played by Billy Magnussen. Horwitz arrives with a notebook full of questions. He is hoping to hold the company to account for the harms it has perpetrated against individuals and democracy at large.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. When The Atlas, a digital newspaper, launched earlier this year, it billed itself as “the new samizdat.” The term recalls the dissident networks that distributed forbidden news and literature in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and ’60s, evading the censors.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. “Your heartbeat quietly shapes how your brain processes information.” So went the headline atop an article published in Science magazine in June, with the byline Caroline Williams. The piece was removed three months later, after editors discovered that the author was an impostor—not Caroline Williams, the established freelance journalist based in the United Kingdom, but someone who had adopted Williams’s name and clips.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. We don’t often dart Fox News in this column, mainly because it can feel a bit obvious. But this week marks the network’s thirtieth anniversary, which presents an occasion to take stock of its legacy and influence. Amid many celebrations at Fox this week, Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive officer, rang the NASDAQ closing bell.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. On September 18, Theodore Boutrous Jr., a prominent appellate and media lawyer, was preparing to take a vacation. Boutrous, a partner at the firm of Gibson Dunn, had been busy representing the New York Times in its lawsuit over access to the Pentagon. Now his phone rang: David Vigilante, the head of legal for CNN, needed to talk. Via Truth Social diktat, Donald Trump had just banished CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. In 1996, at twenty years old, Christa Pike was sentenced to death for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, her classmate at a job training camp in Knoxville, Tennessee, just over a year earlier. Three decades have passed since the conviction, but the story remains relevant: Last week, the State of Tennessee botched its execution of Pike, who survived two lethal injections, and the case became national news again.

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. “I’m a twenty-five-year-old who just bought my local newspaper, and here’s my first edition,” Evan Newton posted to his TikTok account this summer. Newton, from rural Monticello, Georgia, had just bought the weekly Monticello News, where he’d previously been an intern, and made himself the editor and publisher.