Dan Froomkin, deputy editor for Nieman Watchdog, has just been fired from his main job as writer of the online White House Watch column for the Washington Post. Dan will do just fine. He is talented, immensely productive, has sharp insight, good ideas and is a total self-starter. The unanswered question is, why was he [...]

What would you do if you — and your 32 camera crews — were granted unparalleled access to the White House for a day? And then you had two full hours of prime-time TV to fill? There are many mysteries you might try to explore. How does President Obama actually make decisions? What if anything [...]

Frank Rich’s take in the May 10 Times on the plight of the newspaper business concluded that, if the public wants in-depth news content, it will have to finance it. In Rich’s words, “…the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no [...]

The White House Correspondents Association annual dinner, which takes place tomorrow night, is an orgy of self-congratulation, the ultimate black-tied manifestation of the dangerous coziness between Washington’s journalistic elites and the people they cover. Its defining moment came in 2006, when attendees responded with stunned, sullen incomprehension as comedian Stephen Colbert delivered a magnificently brutal [...]

CURATOR’S CORNER Attached to the personal statement in the file of a Nieman Fellowship applicant for the class of 2010 is this note of explanation concerning his “evolving situation.” He had been offered a buyout from his company, he said, and had decided to accept it. He and his family would be moving back to [...]

President Bush’s final press conference, Jan. 12, 2009: Q. Mr. President, in recent days, there’s been a fair amount of discussion in legal circles about whether you might give preemptive pardons, pardons in advance, to officials of your administration who engaged in anything from harsh interrogation tactics to perhaps dismissing U.S. attorneys. I’d like to [...]

Via Romenesko, I see Google CEO Eric Schmidt telling Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky that he wants to help newspapers survive – he just doesn’t know how. “What if the newspaper industry does go down?” Lashinsky asks. Schmidt replies: “To me this presents a real tragedy in the sense that journalism is a central part of democracy. [...]

In its most recent wave of Gannett-mandated cuts, the Des Moines Register ended a century-old tradition — one readers most identified with — and gave walking papers to Brian Duffy, one of the few editorial cartoonists in the paper’s 105 years. For more than 100 years the editorial cartoons of Jay (Ding) Darling, Frank Miller [...]

Journalists play fast and loose with “truth.” That’s not a complaint from a loser in the November election. It comes instead after reviewing several journalism codes and statements of ethics. The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists calls upon its members to “Seek Truth and Report it.” The Radio Television News Directors [...]

This great and compassionate man was a “writer’s writer” and a “reporter’s reporter” — someone we all vainly hoped to emulate in his vision and passion for the average man and in the care he took to encourage young writers. He was 96 when he died, and yet it seems way too soon. His voice [...]