journalism Archives - Page 5 of 11

The Whistleblowers

Time magazine named three women its Persons of the Year for 2002: Sherron Watkins of Enron, Coleen Rowley of the FBI and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom. Each first raised the problem inside her own organization.

Watkins, an Enron vice president, wrote to chairman Kenneth Lay that the company’s accounting methods were improper. Rowley, an FBI staff attorney, wrote to Director Robert Mueller that the bureau had “brushed off pleas” from its Minneapolis office to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui. Cooper told WorldCom’s board that the company had hidden “$3.8 billion in losses.”

Time called them “women of ordinary demeanor but exceptional guts and sense.” Cooper said: “I’m not a hero. I’m just doing my job.”

Dewey Defeats Truman

On election night in 1948, the first edition of the Chicago Tribune went to press with the headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Harry Truman won. On November 4 he held up a copy at St. Louis Union Station. The photograph became famous.

The printers who ran the Tribune’s typesetting machines had been on strike. The paper’s substitute method forced it “to go to press several hours earlier than had been usual,” before most states had reported results. About 150,000 copies were printed before the headline was corrected.

Grading the Teachers

In August 2010 the Los Angeles Times began publishing ratings of about 6,000 Los Angeles teachers by name. The ratings measured how much each teacher’s students gained on standardized tests, a method called value-added.

The reporter Jason Felch said that “individual teachers really matter.” Hundreds of teachers protested, and the union leader called for a boycott of the paper. The National Research Council had warned: “Too little is known about the accuracy of these methods to base high-stakes decisions on them right now.”

Bitter Pill

On February 20, 2013, Time published a cover story by Steven Brill, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.” Brill read hospital bills line by line. One patient was charged $1.50 for a single 325-milligram Tylenol tablet. Brill noted that a hundred cost about $1.49 online. An alcohol pad was billed at $7.

The prices came from the hospital’s chargemaster, “a list – six-, seven-, 10,000 items long of everything the hospital provides.” Brill found that the uninsured were the only patients asked to pay those prices.

Very Normal to Fade

Alison Green writes the workplace advice column Ask a Manager. In November 2025 a reader wrote about a close friendship with a former coworker. “I can let the friendship naturally fade, but I feel guilty,” the reader wrote.

Green answered: “It’s actually very normal for work friendships to fade once you’re no longer colleagues.” She gave the reason. When you no longer have work in common, “there often isn’t enough of a connection to keep the relationship going.”

The Obameter

Just before Barack Obama took office in 2009, the fact-checking site PolitiFact launched the Obameter to track his more than 500 campaign promises. Each promise was rated as kept, broken, compromise, in the works, or stalled. A year later, PolitiFact counted 91 promises kept, 33 compromises, 87 stalled and 14 broken.

The Obameter

PolitiFact tracked 533 of Barack Obama’s campaign promises over two elections. Each promise received its own rating: Promise Kept, Compromise, Stalled, In the Works or Promise Broken. Promises that were too vague were left out.

A 30 Percent Chance

On the morning of the 2016 presidential election, Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight gave Hillary Clinton about a 71% chance of winning, and Donald Trump about 29%. Trump won, and many commentators said the forecasters had got it wrong.

Silver disagreed. “We had him with a 30 percent chance, and that’s a pretty likely occurrence,” he said in 2017. “I don’t think people have a good intuitive sense for how to translate polls to probabilities.”

Behind the Newspaper

Dahinter steckt immer ein kluger Kopf. There is always a clever head behind it. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has used this advertising slogan since 1961. Since 1995 its campaign has shown well-known people photographed behind the open newspaper. In 2010 one of them was Joachim Gauck.

The paper itself has had no editor-in-chief from the start. A board of publishers sets its line. In 2009 the board had five members. When the paper turned 60 that year, one of the publishers, Berthold Kohler, said it would celebrate quietly. Uns selbst zu feiern ist noch nie so recht unsere Art gewesen. Celebrating ourselves has never really been our way.

Why Women Still Can’t Have It All

In 2012 Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman to serve as director of policy planning at the State Department, wrote in The Atlantic about why she left that job. “Juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”

Her article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” became “one of the most-read pieces in the magazine’s history.”