Columbia Journalism Review

The press’s press

The most distinctive institution in media criticism is the one that watches the watchdogs. The Columbia Journalism Review, founded in 1961 under Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (Poynter), describes its mission as being “the intellectual leader in the rapidly changing world of journalism” and “the most respected voice on press criticism,” shaping the ideas that make media leaders and journalists smarter about their work (Columbia Journalism Review).

What the reference profiles don’t lead with is how CJR adapted when the industry’s own accountability tools died. By 2019, the public editor — the journalist whose job is to serve as the voice of the news consumer — was nearly extinct: ESPN had ditched its public editor in 2018, the New York Times in 2017, the Washington Post back in 2013. CJR’s answer was to hire four outside public editors of its own, assigned to the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, and the Washington Post (NPR Illinois (NPR transcript)). Editor-in-chief Kyle Pope argued that social media was “a very, very, very inadequate” substitute: managements don’t respond to Twitter hubbubs, so “the paper or the network never has to actually defend itself or say why they did what they did” (NPR Illinois (NPR transcript)). His diagnosis was that public trust in media was collapsing exactly as outlets were huddling inward — “the wrong thing to do” (NPR Illinois (NPR transcript)).

“Breaking Right”: the Journal under Murdoch

CJR’s sharpest work in recent years is its special report “Breaking Right,” an investigation of the Wall Street Journal under Rupert Murdoch built on interviews with roughly fifty current and former staffers (Columbia Journalism Review). The spark was the December 2020 Joseph Epstein op-ed mocking Jill Biden’s doctorate — but the report’s substance is the long war between the newsroom and the opinion section. In July 2020, more than 280 newsroom employees signed a letter to publisher Almar Latour complaining about a “lack of fact-checking and transparency” on the editorial page (Columbia Journalism Review). Reporters told CJR that sources wouldn’t talk to them because “they don’t trust that the WSJ is independent of the editorial page” (Columbia Journalism Review).

The report traces the conflict to Murdoch’s 2007 acquisition of Dow Jones for five billion dollars — and to his promise, in an email to then-editor Paul Steiger, that “what is on the Opinion pages will never be allowed to flow into the news pages” (Columbia Journalism Review). Under editor Gerard Baker, reporters described editors sanding down copy, killing or delaying reporting unflattering to Trump, and a “quest to find negative stories on the Hillary side” in 2016; after Baker’s 2018 departure, the same newsroom produced the Pulitzer-winning series on Trump’s secret payoffs to women that triggered criminal inquiries (Columbia Journalism Review). CJR’s verdict: the Journal had “demonstrated its willingness to reflect a version of reality that its core right-leaning audience wishes to see” (Columbia Journalism Review).

Axios’s “devil’s bargain” with OpenAI

CJR turned the same critical lens on Axios, a much younger outlet, in its investigation of the three-year deal under which OpenAI would bankroll the startup of thirteen Axios Local newsletters and give Axios staff free access to its enterprise AI tools — while Axios, in turn, let OpenAI train its models on Axios’s published coverage (Columbia Journalism Review). Critics saw it as “a devil’s bargain, enabling an 852-billion-dollar Silicon Valley giant to choose local journalism’s winners and losers while burnishing its own ailing reputation” (Columbia Journalism Review). CEO Jim VandeHei called it financial pragmatism — “at the end of the day, if someone’s going to pay you for content, you say: Well, how much are you going to pay me?” — and declared that “AI will save local news” (Columbia Journalism Review).

What CJR documented, more than the business case, is the opacity: the exact amount OpenAI pays is undisclosed, and the deal is “silent” on the editorial firewall — VandeHei said both sides simply assumed Axios would “write what we write” (Columbia Journalism Review). The investigation also notes the human cost of the model it examines: one reporter covers two counties — an area larger than Rhode Island — with every local byline his own (Columbia Journalism Review).

A review that shrank its print and kept its bite

In 2015, CJR cut its print schedule from six issues a year to two, arguing the shift would “better align our resources with our mission” (Poynter). Then-editor Liz Spayd wrote that print readership had been steadily declining while online visits were up 35 percent, and that “continuing to spend so many resources on print is, regrettably, limiting our ability to invest fully in digital” (Poynter). CJR survived the same contraction that killed its counterpart, the American Journalism Review, which folded that year after first cutting its print editions (Poynter).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim anything about CJR’s current editors or board — the masthead could not be verified to citation standard and is not asserted. It does not take a position on whether the Axios–OpenAI deal is good or bad for journalism; it reports CJR’s findings and the critics’ framing. It does not treat CJR’s characterization of the Journal or Axios as established fact — they are the review’s investigative conclusions, attributed to it. It does not assert the precise publication dates of the “Breaking Right” or Axios–OpenAI pieces.