Reporters covering the slayings

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It was the kind of case one might expect to find in Philadelphia to the south or New York to the north, but the slayings of four young men over a few sweltering days in July became one of the biggest and most tragic stories to come out of the bucolic Bucks County suburbs in years. It began when Thomas Meo, 21, Mark Sturgis, 22, and Jimi Patrick and Dean Finocchiaro, both 19, vanished seemingly without a trace in early July. Cops arrested Cosmo DiNardo, a hulking 20-year-old with a history of bizarre behavior, and searchers started combing a tract of farmland owned by DiNardo’sRead More →

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These are relatively good times for the nation’s top two newspapers, The New York Times and the Washington Post. As I wrote recently, both have snagged a series of scoops on the Trump administration in what is shaping up as an old-school newspaper war. Some are calling it a new golden age of journalism. This journalistic excellence has paid off in more ways than one. Both papers were awarded hard-news Pulitzers for 2017: the Times for tough reporting on Vladimir Putin, the Post for digging into Trump’s charitable giving. And the aggressive newsgathering is also boosting the bottom line. Both papers reported spikes in digitalRead More →

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For many, the steady drumbeat of news about the scandal-plagued Trump White House is downright depressing. Indeed, a Google search of the phrase “Trump depressing” turns up nearly 800,000 results, from Jane Goodall lamenting the president’s climate change policies to Alec Baldwin threatening to ditch his hilarious Trump impersonation next season on “Saturday Night Live” because it’s too, well, you know. (“If everything stays the same in the country as it is now, I don’t think people will be in the mood to laugh about it come September,” Baldwin says.) The Atlantic calls this “the great liberal depression,” and it’s prompted one satirist to createRead More →

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The other day, I went on a road trip. Not too far, just a couple of hours across a stretch of the vast east-west expanse we call Pennsylvania, a journey from the burbs north of Philly to Hershey, where my students, journalism majors at Bucks County Community College, would attend a luncheon to receive the awards they’d won, in a statewide competition, for their work on the college newspaper. On the drive, I got a chance to catch up with a student I hadn’t seen in a few months, one who had transferred recently to Temple University. James, I’ll call him, has one of thoseRead More →

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As a journalism professor at a community college where the student newspaper is still just that – a paper – people sometimes ask me why we haven’t followed the lead of some other colleges by eliminating our print edition and going all-digital. The answers to this question are key to understanding how the news business really works, as opposed to how some would like us to think it works. Needless to say, it has a lot to do with money. What do I mean? Well, a group of people whom I call the digital zealots have been telling everyone for the better part of twoRead More →