To fact check is to assure readers, writers, and editors that great care is being taken—even if that care is, on some level, still superficial. A perfectly checked article, after all, can still be fundamentally wrong about its assumptions or conclusions.
Has our investment in debunking worked?
My last story for the paper, a profile of local celebrity Carson King, was my most widely read—because it provoked a national controversy. The series of events it triggered also cost me my job.
At Newsweek, the headline can dictate the news, instead of the other way around.
The major tech companies have been exploiting "on background" with us journalists for too long — it's become a scourge, and it's time to unite to destroy it.
The world of Goldberg's internet is a weird and wild one, full of rumors and paranoia.
Florida has no monopoly on strange events, drug addiction, or mental illness, the lifeblood of the form. What it does have is strong public records laws that make obtaining mugshots and arrest reports easier than in many other states (including California and New York, which aren't known for their lack of eccentricity, either).
Of necessity, I had to undo a foundational teaching from my journalism education: be as specific as possible.
In retrospect, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti's March 2014 memo to staff, titled "Is History Repeating Itself?" reads like an extended challenge to the rule that every headline ending with a question mark can be answered with a "no."
If it were a relationship, we'd call it gaslighting, but it's a profession, so we call it PR.
While journalists reading the story were as riveted by the disclosures as anybody else, they also had an insider-media question: Why had the story run in The Atlantic at all?
Twenty years ago, when I was a senior editor at Premiere magazine, I worked with reporter John Connolly on "Flirting With Disaster," an article about sexual abuse and harassment involving powerful executives at New Line Cinema.
This week, as a long-predicted collapse seemed to hit digital media, we saw a few of the tried-and-true ways managers use to explain to employees why they're laying them off.
As always, the lists reflect what's happening in the world.
"Leserbindung," the bond between reader and journalist, is the value that Der Spiegel, the German weekly news magazine, now finds itself desperately trying to salvage.
Musicians and the writers who cover them are both working in technologically unique and financially fragile economies. Although the two industries can now distribute their core product online at little to no cost, lower barriers to participation have not translated to better financial health.
In the past two years, the onslaught of attention to gymnastics has empowered athletes to speak out — several cite journalism as helping make their whistleblowing possible — but it has not necessarily improved media relations with the sport's institutions.
A violent white supremacist rally reshaped a city's idea of itself. Has the local press changed?
The past and future of America's black press.
I pitched a story about an influential Brazilian painting to NPR. After listening to a work sample, my editor had reservations: "I worry that show producers might not like your accent," he wrote.