Reading List

pVirginia Heffernan’s Twitter bio once described her as “something like a critic.” Her reluctance to fully embrace the title is understandable, given that most of what passes as technology criticism today tends either towards gadget reviews or curmudgeons bemoaning the loss of what makes us human. Somewhere along the line, critical writing about technology became […]/p

pIn Liar’s Poker, his 1989 seminal account of trading, Michael Lewis has a chapter called “From Geek to Man.” Here’s what he says about “geeks”: “A geek is a circus performer who bites the heads off live chickens and snakes. Or so says the red American Heritage Dictionary.” When Lewis arrived at Salomon Brothers in […]/p

pCJR · Introducing Red Pen: A Grammar Podcast   There’s a famous scene from the final season of The Wire—y’know, The One With the Newspeople—where cub reporter Alma Gutierrez, new to the show’s (thinly) fictionalized version of the Baltimore Sun, receives a crash course in the paper’s lofty lexical standards: “Gutierrez!” her editor shouts across […]/p

pEver since Elon Musk completed his $45 billion takeover of Twitter last month, there has been a steady stream of users, including a number of journalists, signing up for Mastodon, an open-source alternative. No one controls Mastodon—or rather, everyone controls their own version of it. There are thousands of servers running the software, and each […]/p

The Wall Street Journal's stubborn conservatism.

Yesterday, we published a report that explores journalists’ experiences with and views of newsroom social media policies. Below are five responses to the report written by journalists and media scholars. Each of these focuses on a specific issue raised in the report, including legal considerations (Victoria Baranetsky), online harassment (Michelle Ferrier), representation (Leonor Ayala Polley), audience trust (Benjamin Toff), and objectivity […]

Six Americans logged their news consumption over the course of a day and, in doing so, probed their habits and perceptions.

Over the weekend, the Union Leader, a newspaper in Manchester, New Hampshire, endorsed Joe Biden for president. “We have found Mr. Biden to be a caring, compassionate and professional public servant,” an editorial in the paper read; President Trump, by contrast, “is not always 100 percent wrong, but he is 100 percent wrong for America.” […]

Wednesday is production day at the Point Reyes Light, a weekly newspaper based in the town of Inverness, just over an hour north of San Francisco along the bucolic, switchbacked coastal roads of West Marin County. In the middle of the Light’s skylit newsroom, lined with heavy wooden desks and filing cabinets containing years of […]

The story of contemporary Colorado journalism can be told in two acts. In the first, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post are locked in one of the late twentieth century’s wildest newspaper wars, which ended in 2009 with the Rocky’s demise. In the second, a fragmented media landscape of upstart publications is galvanized […]