Category: News industry

Censorship of student media is pervasive across the United States, despite the lack of substantial qualitative data to confirm a recent uptick in cases, media scholars and researchers say. Interviews with student journalists, media advisers and media law researchers found that they’ve been censored or have witnessed student media censorship either as a bystander or …

Continue reading “‘Growing hostility’ between student media and administrators”

This article was published in the International Monetary Fund’s Finance & Development magazine in September 2019, Vol. 56, No. 3 In 1971, whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg discovered the so-called Pentagon Papers and spent countless nights photocopying over 7,000 pages before delivering them to The New York Times and The Washington Post. Four decades later, when an …

Continue reading “Investigative journalists play a key role in bringing corruption to light”

“You aren’t going to understand it,” the spokesman at Virginia’s top education agency told me during our third phone call. His comment came two weeks after I had submitted a public records request to his agency, part of a project I had planned both to report and to use as training. Prior to that call, …

Continue reading “Educating Emma: One intern’s lesson in investigative reporting”

In Tom Reid’s standalone media literacy class at Swampscott High School, teenagers sat in a semi-circle on couches, dissecting an episode of Black Mirror called “Nosedive.” In that episode of the Netflix science fiction thriller, students examined the pros and cons of social media sites and apps that allow people to digitally rate one another …

Continue reading “States legislating how to help young people find real news”

When Capital Gazette Editor Rick Hutzell, the keynote speaker at the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, described those who died in a shooting that devastated his newsroom a year ago, I looked around the room and saw their faces. The five who died were reflected in the 1,350 journalists eating lunch in the ballroom …

Continue reading “Keep going? Resilient reporters stay the course”

False news stories outweigh melting ice caps, rising seas and soaring temperatures on many Americans’ list of threats facing the country, according to a report published today by the Pew Research Center. More Americans call “made-up news and information” a “very big problem” for the country than identify issues such as climate change, racism and …

Continue reading “Americans more concerned about made-up news than climate change”

By design, local news outlets cover a variety of topics that help Americans stay in touch with their communities. From weather to high school sports to morning traffic, local news reporters are tasked with informing how citizens lead their day-to-day lives. And while Americans continue to consume that news on a regular basis, audiences are …

Continue reading “Local news is in trouble, but most Americans don’t know it”

She uncovered the flaws behind the bail-bond system for a National Public Radio program “Bonding for Profit,” and spent a summer gutting fish in Alaska, so NPR correspondent Laura Sullivan is no stranger to investigative journalism or personal challenges. Her latest venture: the world of television documentaries as the PBS FRONTLINE correspondent for “Business of …

Continue reading “NPR’s Sullivan enjoys ‘digging down’”