ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism site, obtained and then published details of the tax returns of billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, and Michael Bloomberg. Their reporting echoed across the internet, but did it really justify stealing people’s private information? “ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the…
Forbes has a vast network of 1,500 contributors; only some are paid. The site announced it will now pay contributors $250 a month and drop the ones who are least popular. How will that affect quality? As it turns out, not much. A bit of background: Just about anyone could get to be a Forbes…
Huffington Post is changing its name to HuffPost and will now focus on telling stories of the powerless. What does that mean? I’ve read the piece from Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen and I’m still trying to figure it out. I think she is confused, and writing about things when you are confused results in a muddled…
The Trump era is a rough time for journalists. No matter how much they’re provoked, if they show too much bias and disrespect, they could lose their jobs, even for a single tweet. That’s what happened to Julia Ioffe at Politico, and it’s a revealing case study. I’ll get to what Ioffe did in a moment….
Should business writers write like journalists? Some journalist habits — like never burying the lede — make perfect sense. But if you imagine you’re Woodward and Bernstein, you’re deluded. Learn which journalistic conventions will make your writing better, and which will ruin it. Journalist habits that business writers should adopt Journalists and business writers share…
If you opened your New York Times on Friday, you got the impression that the Justice department was opening a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton. Actually, it isn’t. After the newspaper recognized its errors, it papered over the original article and headline with passive voice. You’d expect this sort of innuendo from outlets with a conservative…