Stories

Technophobes, beware! The following post gets pretty deep into the weeds…
When the Iowa Independent launched version 2.0 more than a year ago, we were Iowa’s only major news site built on the open-source Wordpress blogging platform. Since then, other prominent news organizations have followed suit, including the (Cedar Rapids) Gazette and Radio Iowa.
Wordpress, which was [...]

The Cedar Rapids Gazette has been awarded the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for deadline reporting for its coverage of the floods of 2008.
The award, given out annually by the Society of Professional Journalists for excellence in journalism, will be presented during the SPJ Convention and National Journalism Conference August 27-30 in Indianapolis, Ind.
On his [...]

Not everyone reacted to the recent changes at the Cedar Rapids Gazette as skeptically as I did.
One prominent ‘metajournalism’ blog, sponsored by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, has only good things to say about the newspaper uber-modern, polydextrous news machine and its newly minted ‘Information Content Conductor.’

Amid the personnel changes at the Cedar Rapids Gazette comes an announcement that the company’s core product, its print newspaper, will be shrinking over the coming months.

The world of online journalism seems to have a buzzword for everything, and I must admit that even I have trouble keeping up with all of them.  Today I learned a new one that really threw me for a loop.
It turns out that the title I have held for nearly two years — “Managing Editor” [...]

In his Sunday column, Cedar Rapids Gazette Editor Steve Buttry said leadership has been lacking at all levels of government in response to the natural disasters that devastated the state last summer, leaving citizens out in the cold and on their own as they try to rebuild their lives.

Cedar Rapids Gazette Editor Steve Buttry published a blog post Sunday lamenting the fact that traditional news outlets often fail to credit one another for stories they pick up, repurpose, or in some cases simply regurgitate from other sources.  Buttry cites a tweet from Des Moines Register reporter Daniel P. Finney complaining that KCCI took [...]