Today the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University released a massive report on digital journalism, and the main theme derived from the 139 page document is that journalists need to understand the business side of things much more than they do now.

While the report stops short of explicitly stating that media companies need to find out what advertisers like and have writers direct their pens (keyboards, whatever) in that direction, it does say that journalists should be more educated about what drives ad dollars, and adjust on the fly. Bill Grueskin, a dean at Columbia and a co-author of the report, tells The New York Times:

We’re not suggesting that journalists get marching orders from advertisers. We are suggesting that journalists get a much better understanding of why so many advertising dollars have left the traditional news media business.

Read more

When the attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords happened, the Arizona Republic, a newspaper with a little over 300 staffers, had to race against time, as well as a tidal wave of national outlets, to report on the incident. Randy Lovely, the paper’s Vice President and Editor, spoke to the Columbia Journalism Review about how it dealt with the incident.

Lovely discusses the chaos that came with the false report that Giffords was dead, saying that because they couldn’t confirm where the report came from, it made the paper even more cautious about what information it released. Lovely also says that the advent of social networking has posed new obstacles to newspapers when breaking news:

Read more

The Columbia Journalism Review just happened to catch some similarities between an October 2008 cover for The Economist and a May 2009 edition of The Atlantic. Besides the typeface, the pictures on the covers are almost identical: both show the shadow outline of man peering over the edge of a cliff, you know, to symbolize how much trouble our economy is in.

But it’s a total coincidence, Atlantic art director Jason Treat told CJR:

“I actually hadn’t seen the Economist cover when we designed this, so I wasn’t even aware that they had arrived at the same design solution…I only wish I had seen the Economist cover first…(I) would have revised it to distance it aesthetically.”

We believe Treat when he says it was an honest mistake: this is fundamentally different from the Newsweek/Runner’s World photo rights issue going on right now. If anything, the only thing both The Atlantic and The Economist are guilty of here is using the worn cliché to represent the financial crisis.

Everybody’s On Edge –Columbia Journalism Review

Yesterday, the Columbia Journalism Review held a conference entitled “Beyond the Newsroom: Traditional journalistic skills in a nontraditional world” with panelists Michael Calderone from Politico, David Banks of Civic Venture and Encore.org), New School professor and former Associated Press correspondent Clara Hemphill, Charles Sennott of The Global Post and Paul Steiger of ProPublica.

So with these veteran reporters speaking about new media endeavors, did anyone produce a new perspective on web journalism or its potential lucrativeness?

Read more

The CJR Daily‘s Paul McLeary demanded Tuesday that The Associated Press stop dragging its feet and provide evidence that a source they quoted, Iraqi police Captain Jamail Hussein, exists. (The Iraqi government and U.S. military had denied it.)

Today, the AP obliges:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — The Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media.