Brendan Fitzgerald
Columbia Journalism Review
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Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Brendan:
Where Darkness Surrounds Violence
After January 6, when pro-Trump insurrectionists and far-right extremists invaded the Capitol, Timothy Snyder, a history professor and the author of On Tyranny, warned of rising domestic terrorism at a time of declining local news. “If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive […] → Read More
The daily grotesque
Warren Craghead drew the Trump news cycle for four-and-a-half years. Today is his final day. → Read More
Intimidation is a form of violence
Earlier this week more than twenty thousand people, many of them armed, converged on Richmond, Virginia, to protest legislative efforts meant to reduce gun violence. Those efforts include a one-per-month cap on handgun purchases; universal background checks; and limits on firearm possession in public spaces, to be determined by local governments. The Virginia General Assembly […] → Read More
Q&A: Michael Mann on coverage since ‘Climategate’
Michael Mann’s work as a press critic began in earnest a decade ago. Ahead of the 2009 international climate-change summit in Copenhagen, hackers stole email correspondence between Mann and other climate scientists from a computer server at the University of East Anglia. Climate-change deniers used portions of the emails, freed from context, to attack the […] → Read More
Susan Orlean on archiving her life, nearly quitting books, and not keeping up with her subjects
Susan Orlean’s stories reveal what one reviewer called “the grandeur of the miniature.” She pursues her discrete subjects—a devastating library fire, a seemingly immortal dog, Girl Scouts and 10-year-old American boys and “All My Children”—to their surprising limits. In her books, one finds a collection of knowledge to rival The New York Public Library Desk […] → Read More
Charlottesville One Year Later
A violent white supremacist rally reshaped a city’s idea of itself. Has the local press changed? → Read More
NYT Magazine’s Rita Dove on what poetry might grant unsuspecting news readers
RITA DOVE FEELS MOST ALIVE AFTER SUNSET. “It’s blissfully quiet during the night, in terms of the chatter that comes from the world,” she says. “I know that I’m not going to be disturbed.” The New York Times Magazine recently appointed Dove—the author of numerous poetry collections and the recipient of many national awards, including […] → Read More
Charlottesville got trolled. Reporters didn’t cover it.
THE CITY OF CHARLOTTESVILLE launched an online survey in March to solicit new names for Emancipation and Justice Parks. Until recently, the two public spaces bore the names of Confederate generals, whose recently unshrouded statues still stand in their respective parks as gifts of the Jim Crow era. Emancipation Park was the site of the August […] → Read More
What can we learn from decades of NRA editorials? Ask this guy
FOR THE JULY 2002 ISSUE OF AMERICAN RIFLEMAN, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre wrote an editorial opposing efforts by a bipartisan group of US senators to close the gun show loophole. LaPierre’s editorial frames the gun show legislation as an identity issue, one shared by the NRA and its supporters. Would-be gun owners are “peaceable […] → Read More
Lessons from covering climate change in America
Climate change eludes easy coverage. The impact of global warming looks different in every community; so do the human factors that raise the Earth’s temperature. “Nature, we believe, takes forever,” journalist Bill McKibben wrote in 1989’s The End of Nature, before he explained how that belief misleads us: Our sense of an unlimited future, which […] → Read More
Lessons on covering race and racism after Charlottesville
JENNA WORTHAM RECENTLY RETURNED to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the first time in more than a decade. Now a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, Wortham lived in Charlottesville for years until her graduation from the University of Virginia in 2004. “The campus is absolutely beautiful,” Wortham told her colleague Wesley Morris on an episode […] → Read More
The outrageous editorial by a Charlottesville daily that preceded violence
ON AUGUST 10, the Charlottesville Daily Progress published an editorial in anticipation of a rally that attracted hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and racists—many of them armed—to the recently renamed Emancipation Park. More than once, the editorial asks, “How did we get here?” By way of an answer, the Daily Progress editorial board assigned […] → Read More
A nonprofit newsroom rescued its local newspaper. Now it wants to expand.
Brian Wheeler ran Charlottesville Tomorrow for about four years before he considered himself a journalist. When the nonprofit newsroom launched in 2005, Wheeler—the organization’s executive director and only full-time employee—strived for something low-tech and high-impact. He began with a blogging platform and an email list to help residents stay abreast of local elections and development […] → Read More
They weren’t the first to probe police shootings. But Tampa Bay Times wanted to ‘do it better.’
BEN MONTGOMERY SPENT MORE THAN two years gathering use-of-force reports from Florida’s nearly 400 law enforcement agencies. He wrote personal checks to cover the costs of record requests, and amassed a six-foot stack of documents that detailed six years of police shootings throughout the state, more than half of them fatal. “Nobody tracks these,” Montgomery told […] → Read More
Serial, Mystery Show, and why listeners want to be in on the investigation
Starlee Kine formally launched her detective career this summer when Gimlet Media released Mystery Show. During the podcast’s six-episode first season, Kine uncovered the stories behind a vanished video store and an inscrutable lunch box. She tracked down... → Read More
Serial, Mystery Show, and why listeners want to be in on the investigation
Starlee Kine formally launched her detective career this summer when Gimlet Media released Mystery Show. During the podcast’s six-episode first season, Kine uncovered the stories behind a vanished video store and an inscrutable lunch box. She tracked down... → Read More
Serial, Mystery Show, and why listeners want to be in on the investigation
Starlee Kine formally launched her detective career this summer when Gimlet Media released Mystery Show. During the podcast’s six-episode first season, Kine uncovered the stories behind a vanished video store and an inscrutable lunch box. She tracked down... → Read More
Serial, Mystery Show, and why listeners want to be in on the investigation
Starlee Kine formally launched her detective career this summer when Gimlet Media released Mystery Show. During the podcast’s six-episode first season, Kine uncovered the stories behind a vanished video store and an inscrutable lunch box. She tracked down... → Read More
Serial, Mystery Show, and why listeners want to be in on the investigation
Starlee Kine formally launched her detective career this summer when Gimlet Media released Mystery Show. During the podcast’s six-episode first season, Kine uncovered the stories behind a vanished video store and an inscrutable lunch box. She tracked down... → Read More
Serial, Mystery Show, and why listeners want to be in on the investigation
Starlee Kine formally launched her detective career this summer when Gimlet Media released Mystery Show. During the podcast’s six-episode first season, Kine uncovered the stories behind a vanished video store and an inscrutable lunch box. She tracked down... → Read More