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The $20,500 Ceiling

Columbia’s journalism school paused its midcareer degree three months after Washington capped what America will lend a journalist. The timing is the story. The email went out on a Thursday afternoon. On October 1, 2026, Dean Jelani Cobb told alumni of the Columbia Journalism School’s Master of Arts program that admissions were paused for the coming cycle. The message landed in the inboxes of people who had paid six figures for the degree it described. The school, Cobb wrote, had begun “a critical evaluation” of the M.A. curriculum, and the pause would give the review “the focus it deserves.” The school’s admissions page now carries the same message and dangles a future “relaunch” for anyone willing to wait.

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The Viking Funeral and the Us of Us

On the last Saturday of August 2019, in a valley that had already lost the assembly plant and the regional medical center, the daily newspaper of Mahoning County, Ohio, printed its final edition. The Vindicator was a hundred and fifty years old. It had celebrated its sesquicentennial the week before it died. The announcement had come on June 28, in a letter signed by the publisher and the general manager, members of the family that had owned the paper since 1887, and the record of the letter is exact about the cause: the paper was hemorrhaging money, the family had looked for a buyer, and there was none. The letter’s close is in the record too. “It is with broken hearts that we say goodbye and a final thank you.”

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The Unsigned Newsroom

The byline entered American journalism as a punishment, and it arrived in the mud. On January 26, 1863, Major General Joseph Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac, a force that had bled itself white at Fredericksburg six weeks earlier and was deserting into the Virginia winter by the hundreds. The press corps trailing the army was in worse moral shape than the army. Correspondents wrote from hotel bars and Washington parlors, inflated skirmishes into battles, buried defeats, manufactured quotes, and signed none of it. Hooker’s predecessor had already begged the War Department for relief. “As it is impossible for me to ascertain with certainty who these anonymous writers are,” George McClellan wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “I beg to suggest that another order be published holding the editors responsible.”

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