This is the adapted text of the Hedy Lamarr Lecture Meyer delivered at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on October 3. The lecture was also sponsored by Medienhaus Wien, a think tank based in Vienna, Austria. Philip Meyer is Emeritus … Read more
Journalism is an escape artist. For the generation raised on Watergate, that lesson landed hard. The most powerful men in the world could not shut a story down. They lied and conspired, then bullied … Read more
Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation provides a framework to understand how businesses grow, become successful, and falter as nimble start-ups muscle in on their customers. It’s a familiar story, one that has played out in the steel and auto industries, among others. Now Christensen, in collaboration with 2012 Nieman Fellow David Skok, has applied his analysis to the news industry. Their goal in this issue's cover story, “Breaking News,” is to encourage news executives to apply the lessons of disruption to the media industry as a means of charting new paths to survival and success. Read more
Foreign policy has taken a back seat in the U.S. presidential election, especially the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But reporters should at the very least press Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on a related domestic issue: the treatment of veterans. So asserts Kennedy School lecturer Juliette Kayyem, who notes that neither candidate is addressing the challenges facing those who bore the heaviest burden of war. Read more
1946 Robert Manning, an influential editor of The Atlantic Monthly, died of lymphoma at a hospital in Boston on September 28th. He was 92. Read his obituary … Read more
The Obama administration is operating amid unprecedented secrecy—while attacking journalists trying to tell the public what they need to know. Read more
