Digital media faced its toughest year on record. What comes next is for journalists to decide.

To paraphrase Tolstoy’s line about unhappy families, all countries are complicated in their own way. Iran’s tricky for the unpredictable nature of reporting there. You could be thrown in jail, like...

Five years ago today, The Guardian began publishing a series of stories that would change the way the public viewed their online lives. “The National Security Agency is currently collecting the...

The week after Thanksgiving, a package published by the Miami Herald made national headlines. Julie K. Brown, an investigative journalist at the paper, reported that, in 2007, lawyers for Jeffrey...

On June 9, the Intercept began publishing a series of investigative stories that sent shocks through Brazil. The pieces appeared to supply evidence that Sergio Moro, Brazil’s Justice Minister and the...

INTRODUCTION: ‘I realized early on I had two jobs’ The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel,...

After former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee this morning, Chuck Todd managed to demonstrate, with uncharacteristic brevity, his basic misunderstanding...

Last Wednesday, having spent nearly a month of vacation trying to avoid the news, I could avoid it no longer and turned on CNN. The images on the screen, of insurrectionists invading the Capitol in...

Ken Klippenstein is not a meme. Well, he’s not just a meme. The DC correspondent for The Nation is probably best known to the general public for starting (and winning) a Twitter fight with billiona...

In 2016, television networks claimed ignorance about how their imbalanced and overly simplistic coverage, which essentially treated Donald Trump as the star of a reality show, influenced the presid...

This summer, more than 500 journalists, many of whom are people of color, signed an open letter calling for changes to US media coverage of Palestine. The letter faulted news outlets for hewing to an...

The PBS anchor discusses his upcoming special featuring Ben Bradlee, the importance of public discourse and how to handle untruths from politicians.

Ryan Kelly went to downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12 for one last assignment before leaving his staff photographer job at The Daily Progress. On that final workday, the 30-year-old...

A bare-chested, wild-eyed white man in bearskin furs and a horned helmet stood at the podium of the Senate chambers, his fists raised in triumph, as fellow Trump-supporting rioters laid waste to the...

On June 9, the Intercept began publishing a series of investigative stories that sent shocks through Brazil. The pieces appeared to supply evidence that Sergio Moro, Brazil’s Justice Minister and the...

When OpenAI, an artificial intelligence startup, released its ChatGPT tool in November, it seemed like little more than a toy—an automated chat engine that could spit out intelligent-sounding...

Ken Klippenstein is not a meme. Well, he’s not just a meme. The DC correspondent for The Nation is probably best known to the general public for starting (and winning) a Twitter fight with billiona...

Most journalists think they are good at dealing with stress. But they are not.  “Things like addiction problems, high anxiety, promiscuity and PTSD are pretty much ubiquitous,” says Anna Mortimer, a...

The president of the United States is acting like a drunk driver, and the press needs to cover him that way. He demonstrated last week a callous disregard for those around him—most critically, those...

Could it be that the press, especially the US press, is finally waking up to the climate story? It’s been 30 years since Bill McKibben rang the warning bells about the threat of man-made climate...

The Interview

Great reporting is how the “failing” New York Times has answered (and benefited mightily) from the president’s attacks. But the paper’s former executive editor warns of the pitfalls of the Trump bump.

In recent days, we saw significant movement in a case involving federal charges under the Espionage Act against an individual alleged to have mishandled highly sensitive official information. Julian...

“This is what I was wearing 23 years ago when Donald Trump attacked me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.” With those words—and an accompanying image—on the cover of New York magazine, E. Jean...

Yesterday, the news cycle threw a test at Norah O’Donnell as she anchored her first broadcast as host of CBS Evening News. President Trump’s racist tweets about four Congresswomen of color remained a...

Laura Jackson’s husband, Charlie, died on May 17, in a veteran’s hospital in North Carolina, from complications related to COVID-19. At the time, Jackson, who is forty-seven, hadn’t seen Charlie in...

Since last week, the discovery of a batch of classified documents at an office used by Joe Biden between his spells as vice president and president—and then of further batches at Biden’s home in...

When journalists want to talk among themselves about something difficult, the anonymous Google Doc seems to have become the mechanism. First there was the “Shitty Media Men” document, which was...

My life with heavy metal, Tucker Carlson, NPR, and strong opinions

The American journalism community fancies itself a completely neutral estate, the poster child for objectivity. But this conceit is, at best, ahistorical. Like all things, the modern press corps was...

In May, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed up at Tim Burke’s home in Tampa, Florida, and seized several computers, hard drives, his cellphone, and other equipment that he uses as...

Some reporters mine data. Carole Cadwalladr mines people.

At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and...

A bare-chested, wild-eyed white man in bearskin furs and a horned helmet stood at the podium of the Senate chambers, his fists raised in triumph, as fellow Trump-supporting rioters laid waste to the...

Footage of the January 6 Capitol insurrection revealed hundreds of references to 1776—in signs and in speeches, on t-shirts and hats and stickers. “1776” was chanted in the Capitol halls by leading...

Seth Abramson’s viral meta-journalism unreality

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf left office in January with a tremendous, if overdue, parting gift for the girls of Liberia. During her final hours in office, Africa’s first woman elected head of...

Any woman who has spent more than a couple of hours on Twitter has likely experienced some form of casual harassment or even outright abuse—and these attacks are even more likely if the woman in...

On Monday afternoon, Mariel Padilla, a master’s student at Columbia Journalism School, sat around a table with classmates, listening to Professor Giannina Segnini lead a discussion about email...

Yesterday, after weeks of rapid advance as US forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban took Kabul, the capital. Ashraf Ghani, the president, fled the country; the US relocated its embassy staff...

Last year, a week before the end of winter on Staten Island, a blue pickup truck backed into a silver Cadillac Escalade parked outside a tasteful, expensive house with a swimming pool in the backyard...

Seven and a half years ago, journalism began a tortured dance with Donald Trump, the man who would be the country’s forty-fifth president—first dismissing him, then embracing him as a source of...

In late January, after wrapping up his annual State of the State speech, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum (R) headed out to meet the press. Only two reporters awaited him: the North Dakota Monitor’s...

In April, Neha Dixit, a journalist in India, received an email from a professor at Northwestern University. The subject read, “Fixer needed.” The message: “My colleagues and I are working on a story...

On Sunday night, CNN aired a one-hour special on the president’s lies. It was a special report presented by Jake Tapper. What is the impact, he asked, of all the president’s lies? And what would...

When “minority affairs” become the center of coverage

By 11am on Wednesday, dozens of protesters had assembled outside the headquarters of Fox News, in midtown Manhattan. In the shadow of the glass and stone towers that line Avenue of the Americas,...

Early in Ghosts of Karabakh, a documentary about the 2020 Karabakh War, journalist Jake Hanrahan interviews a young Armenian soldier stationed at the frontline. A blasted-out tank and bare winter...

Twitter may not have the same globe-spanning reach as Facebook, but one group of professional users has adopted it en masse: journalists. The lure of an always-on, news-heavy social network that...

Years of complaints from colleagues and freelancers preceded the recent departure of a New York Times photo editor

Last week, a British judge ruled that Julian Assange could not be extradited to the United States, finding that he would likely be subjected to conditions of confinement so harsh he’d be at grave...

How journalism got so out of touch with the people it covers

Among the many browser tabs I toggled between yesterday in nervous anticipation of a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial were two video livestreams. One showed a static, unfocused close-up of the...

Former Twitter employees finally get severance offers after months of waiting, only to find them unsatisfactory. Twitter helps drive political mayhem in Brazil. Elon Musk says that Twitter will soon...