Story Lab: January 9, 2011 - January 15, 2011

Is Google becoming less useful?

Consultants, gurus, and all manner of pitchsters have made fortunes manipulating Google search results for clients, but now a quiet backlash is brewing. Users report that their searches often turn up meaningless results and that real information is harder to...

By Michael S. Rosenwald  | January 14, 2011; 12:36 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (23)
Categories:  Build-A-Story  
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Story pick: Looking for Mr. Stud

I'm going to wrap up the week's story picks by highlighting a nice piece about horse sex -- and money. A front page story in today's New York Times, by the great horse writer Joe Drape, focuses on a champion...

By Ian Shapira  | January 14, 2011; 7:35 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)
Categories:  Story Picks  
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Story pick: Chronicles of Loughner

In the scramble to trace a portrait of Jared Loughner, the alleged gunman in last weekend's Arizona shootings, the three major newspapers -- The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post -- came out swinging today...

By Ian Shapira  | January 13, 2011; 8:08 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (1)
Categories:  Story Picks  
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Story pick: Four lives, one YMCA

In a small city like Tucson, perhaps it was bound to have happened: three victims of this past weekend's shooting and their assailant all used or had some tie to the same YMCA. The Post's Amy Gardner interviewed lifeguards and...

By Ian Shapira  | January 12, 2011; 10:36 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)
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Inside the story of 'Music Where We Live'

As the deputy editor on the Post Magazine, I like stories where there’s a kind of built-in tension right from the start; where someone wants something that goes against obvious logic. And that’s exactly what we have in “Music...

By David Rowell  | January 11, 2011; 10:24 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)
Categories:  How I got that story, More on the story, The inside story  
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Story Pick: The toppling of Saddam's statue

On April 9, 2003, the world watched live on television one of the biggest spectacles of the Iraq War, the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square. In a story this week in The New Yorker,...

By Ian Shapira  | January 11, 2011; 8:15 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)
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Story pick: Arizona's political climate

This weekend's shooting in Tucson reminded me of two great stories about Arizona that appeared in Harper's magazine last year and in The New Yorker in 2009. Both stories provide detailed context to anyone unfamiliar with Arizona, its politics, and...

By Ian Shapira  | January 10, 2011; 10:23 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (3)
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