Lyz Lenz

Michael Sitrick will be your best friend and your worst enemy. Michael Sitrick notices when you got a fact wrong in your story. He won’t yell at you, though. He’s good that way. Michael Sitrick always takes your questions and you can just call him Mike. Mike is easy to love and easier to fear. And he heads one of the most expensive PR firms in the business, with a rate reported to be $1,100 an hour.
Michael Sitrick, 71, is a public relations puppet master who has pulled the strings behind some...

Axios, the bulleted list chimera of tech and journalism, conceived according to the premise that “Media is broken—and too often a scam,” is experimenting with a new format: “smart brevity” longform.
Confused? Megan Swiatkowski, Axios’s Associate Director of Communications, explained in an email pitch, it’s “how to go deep, but write short.”
If you are still confused, let me venture an explanation: It’s a Wikipedia article in newsletter form for the ruling class. Or, Mike Allen’s not-so Tiny L...

Ahead of the November 6 elections, CJR invited writers to spotlight stories that deserve closer scrutiny, in their states and beyond, before voters cast their ballots. Read other dispatches from “States of the Union” here.
he last time I almost died was in February. A late winter thaw had made me overconfident in the roads, and so I’d gone out in search of an abandoned pioneer church just outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. One hour into the journey and I was stuck on a dirt road, my Mazda caught ...

Tucker Carlson is shouting when he tells me he isn’t shouting. The barrage of his voice has been relentless throughout the interview.
“I don’t want to be John McLaughlin yelling at people. Why would I want to do that? I don’t need to do that,” he insists. “I actually don’t think the audience likes that. I don’t like it. But the idea that I win debates because I yell louder, it’s, like, absurd.”
“I didn’t say you win because you shouted. I just said there is a lot of shouting.”
“There is not a...

Last week, two women sat across from one another and talked about sexual assault. Neither one of them should have been there. The first woman, Christine Blasey Ford, shouldn’t have been in that seat—forced to talk about the worst night of her life—the night when, at 15, she says she was assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh. There should have been a full investigation; not a hearing. But Republicans, desperate to ram through their pick for the Supreme Court, didn’t care. It was clear from the beginnin...

The monsters are always men. They menace from the highest positions of power; they lurk in the shadows of our subconscious. At this time of reckoning ― thanks to movements like Me Too and Time’s Up ― some of our cultural monsters are being revealed. But there is a reckoning that hasn’t yet happened and that’s with women, who use their bodies and social positions as wives and mothers to mediate how we handle the monsters of our society.
These i...

There is a story we tell about America ― one that twists together the conflicting narratives of patriotism, guns and God. We tell this story every time we hold our hands over our hearts, intoning, “one nation under God,” or whenever we stand teary-eyed in a stadium honoring our troops, Blue Angels flying overhead, while someone sings “God Bless America.”
It’s there in our trucks, in the before-dinner prayers at tables in the heartland, penetrating our politics until ...

I imagine it like this: Our great-grandchildren, who are robots, are sitting in class in the bombed-out remains of Harvard University. This class is taught via hologram by an adjunct who has to cast herself into 30 classes a day just to pay her rent in bitcoin. Disease runs rampant.
The class is “The History of the Internet.” During the semester, our grandrobots will learn how we spent our time rage tweeting, memeing, GIFing, and Snapchatting our way into oblivion.
“That’s how the war began,”...

DAN BELLOWS IS JUST A GUY in Iowa who loves a good puzzle. He enjoys crosswords and riddles, and even likes to hide his kids’ Christmas presents and leave them clues for finding them. But the puzzle that’s occupying most of his time recently is the one facing local journalism: how to make money.
In early 2017, Bellows, who is the maintenance manager for the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa, took his family to Florida on vacation. While there, they visited an escape room. Bellows was hooked.
...

Lewis D’Vorkin’s ouster as editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times this week was precipitated by leaked audio of D’Vorkin threatening his staff, the hiring of a shadow editorial team, sexual harassment allegations plaguing the publisher, a vote by the LA Times newsroom to organize, the abrupt suspension of business and finance editor Kimi Yoshino, and, perhaps, even a profile in CJR that detailed D’Vorkin’s troubled legacy as an editor.
D’Vorkin’s replacement, Jim Kirk, is taking over a news...

Lewis D’Vorkin’s voice is tranquil as he threatens his staff.

I've watched the clip of Shalane Flanagan breaking the tape at the NYC Marathon over 50 times. In the video, Flanagan's face is wrenched in exhaustion and elation.

"F--- yes!" she yells, pumping her fist in the air.

Dressed in a Cubs shirt and leggings, 16-year-old Eliza Wasni walked into a Walmart in Skokie, Illinois earlier this year and stole a machete and a knife. Surveillance footage shows her moving calmly through the store—knife in one hand, machete in the other. No one stops her. Not even when she leaves without paying.

D’Vorkin’s replacement, Jim Kirk, is taking over a news...

There is a story we tell about America ― one that twists together the conflicting narratives of patriotism, guns and God. We tell this story every time we hold our hands over our hearts, intoning, “one nation under God,” or whenever we stand teary-eyed in a stadium honoring our troops, Blue Angels flying overhead, while someone sings “God Bless America.”