Maddy Crowell

Jun 26, 2024 | cjr.org | Maddy Crowell

For the new election-focused issue of CJR, Maddy Crowell writes about an array of “new left-leaning digital ventures—different from one another in approach, but all claiming to have arisen out of a shared discontent: with the country facing the prospect of a second Trump presidency, something about the traditional mechanisms for delivering information to the American electorate was broken.” The most popular among them—with billions of views on its YouTube channel—is MeidasTouch,...

Jun 10, 2024 | cjr.org | Maddy Crowell

Barbara Hawkins—a grandmother from Arizona who is a registered independent—discovered the MeidasTouch Network eighteen months ago, when she was between books, scrolling idly on YouTube. Until then, her news diet had been the “old reliable mainstream media,” she told me, but she’d been getting fed up. “It’s rare to see mainstream media doing anything except treating this election cycle as business as usual,” she said.

Jun 10, 2024 | cjr.org | Josh Hersh |Betsy Morais |Susie Banikarim |Maddy Crowell

It’s another election season, and we’re in reruns. Donald Trump, the first convicted-felon former president, is carrying on at rallies as ever, repeating the word “rigged.” Joe Biden, America’s oldest president, is mostly staying home, also as before. The world rages with war; stateside, democracy feels imperiled. “We’re just kind of over it,” Noemi Peña, a twenty-year-old from Tucson, told the Wall Street Journal in March.

Jun 15, 2023 | internazionale.it | Maddy Crowell

Un attacco informatico è come un brutto raffreddore. Comincia con un’infezione da virus e finisce con un senso di profonda debilitazione. Alla fine del 2012, poco dopo l’uscita di un articolo su uno scandalo di corruzione che vedeva coinvolto l’ex primo ministro cinese, la redazione del New York Times è stata vittima di un attacco particolarmente aggressivo.

Apr 17, 2023 | cjr.org | Maddy Crowell

Getting hacked is very much like catching a nasty flu. It begins with an infection of malware—malicious software that spreads across a network—and ends with a feeling of deep enfeeblement. In late 2012, not long after the New York Times reported on a corruption scandal involving China’s former prime minister, the newsroom got a bad case. AT&T, which maintains the Times’ servers, notified the company that suspicious activity had been detected on its network.