News Media

Garrett Graff is a magazine journalist who writes about politics, technology and national security. One of his areas of expertise: Robert Mueller, the former director of the FBI appointed in 2017 as special counsel to oversee the federal government’s investigation into possible Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.

The skills and knowledge needed to be a journalist in the United States keep growing as shrinking newsrooms try to do more with less. A new study of job ads suggests media outlets now want journalists to be more innovative, demonstrating expertise in areas such as web development, audience analytics and Python, the computer programming language.

A case study comparing two community newspapers finds that the paper more focused on audience metrics published fewer stories about civic issues, used fewer sources and let reader traffic guide news judgment to a greater degree than the paper that viewed analytics as a secondary consideration.

Journalists often make mistakes when reporting on data such as opinion poll results, federal jobs reports and census surveys because they don’t quite understand — or they ignore — the data’s margin of error.

Eric Rimm, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, wasn’t expecting to become a celebrity/villain overnight.

But you can’t go after french fries and not expect to catch a bit of flak.