In print newsrooms I’ve worked in, certain colleagues were acknowledged as having better or worse news judgment. The “news values” taught in journalism school weren’t referred to explicitly. News judgment was like charisma; you had it or you didn’t. In digital newsrooms, there is temptation to swing the other way, reducing story decisions to consultation

Two things I learned as a business journalist: One, business news can be deathly boring. Two, the best fix is to tell good stories. That’s why anyone teaching a class on entrepreneurialism would be smart to use the first season of “StartUp,” the podcast from Gimlet Media. Gimlet is the brainchild of Alex Blumberg, a

Sure, I said, I can teach the Business of Publishing. Granted, all I remember learning about it in college was that libel is expensive, so it’s cheaper to be accurate. But I was a financial journalist for years. And, like every journalist of my generation, I got a crash course in the finances of journalism

The assignment for the students — in their first college journalism writing class — was the kind I remembered from my own student days. I gave them facts about a fire: who saw it first, where it happened, when, damages, etc. They had to write a first paragraph, a summary “lede.” The summary lede is

Dear English teachers of North America: Stop it. Stop teaching the repetitive, boring five-paragraph essay. Stop telling yourself that you teach a writing class, not a grammar class. And to this list of sins a new one can be added, according to the Wall Street Journal: Stop telling your students to stop using “said.” “There