Articles Written By Brendan Fitzgerald
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Profiles
Press Rewind
What one journalist learned by vicariously sitting in on David Carr’s master class—with only his teacher’s reputation, extant syllabus, and students’ recollections to guide the way.
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Profiles
The Combination Lock Test
A man dies, leaving behind, among other things, a combination lock. Opening it may just prove the existence of the afterlife.
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Press Pause
Feeding the Beast
What should readers demand from their reporters? Find the shadows. Examine the complex problems. And captivate us. Journalists from Slate, Deadspin, ProPublica, NPR, and more on what readers should expect.
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Press Pause
Explaining the Inexplicable
Readers of science reporting often find their heads spinning. Some of the science reporters do, too. A look at how the best of them make inexpertise an asset.
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Press Pause
The Best Ways to Ask Questions
On a March day in 2002, Walter Cronkite, Mikhail Gorbachev, Iggy Pop, and Donald Trump were all in the same New York City studio, on West 15th Street. The reason? Each...
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Press Pause
Checking Facts Like Freddie and Eleanor
For 45 years, Freddie Packard worked for the New Yorker as a “checker,” and for two decades he ran the magazine’s fact-checking department. Packard knew at least...
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Press Pause
Finding Boundaries to Cross
I spent my first day as a news editor circling a 750-acre farm in Virginia, where the body of a college student had surfaced months after she’d disappeared...
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Press Pause
One Person’s Version
Andrew Kitzenberg’s Twitter account had been dormant for a month when Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev began exchanging shots with the police outside his apartment. As the two Boston...
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Press Pause
How to Headline a Tornado
If good journalism leads us out of the woods, then bad journalism can strand us in the dark with our questions. Our series on healthy news consumption continues. On May 21,...
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Press Pause
Edward Snowden and Exploring Terra Incognita
The best journalism creates understanding where the world has created questions. When we confront the unknown, good journalism brings events, witnesses, storytellers, and an audience into a seamless line of...
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Fact-Checking
Here There Be Monsters
A professor teaches his students skepticism by instructing them to create hoaxes with the web as their laboratory.