Last week, America's paper of record published an article on Alex From Target, a cherubic teen superstore employee who briefly became the most notorious human on Twitter before his inspirational rise to fame was co-opted by society's least upstanding citizens. The Times' story was perfunctory except for one curious part that revealed a lack of pop culture knowledge that will make any true '90s kid spit Sunny D onto his Gameboy.

Abruptly deposed former New York Times editor Jill Abramson is teaming up with Steven Brill to start a publication that has **one million dollars** to give to writers just like you in the coming year alone. How can you get your piece?

Being a good reporter often means pissing off the very person you're attempting to interview—you try to keep it civil, but sometimes, the situation spirals out of your control. When an establishment menace in a festive outfit attempted to silence a New Hampshire TV journalist last night, he handled it like a pro.

Until recently, you might have lived a life blissfully unaware of the online #Gamergate movement. But last week, computing giant Intel pulled its ads from an independent game-development site thanks to the gaming lobby. Now that major companies are taking sides, it's time to figure it out. Let us be your guides.

According to an Associated Press report, Ferguson, Mo., officials are apparently using exorbitant fees to discourage news organizations from requesting documents through the state's freedom-of-information Sunshine Law.

CNN's Don Lemon is having a tough year, and it's not getting any easier. But he's great for cautionary tales. When, for instance, he tries to have a Ferguson-related conversation about guns and mucks it all up, he offers us a chance to learn something important and improve the national conversation.

Police in Ferguson were caught on camera Sunday night threatening to mace one reporter and shoot another. At least two other journalists also claim they were arrested while following police orders.

Two reporters working out of a McDonalds in Ferguson, Mo. say they were arrested and assaulted for no apparent reason while covering the increasingly violent clash between police and protestors on Wednesday night. Both were eventually released without being charged.

Alissa J. Rubin, the New York Times Paris bureau chief who has spent much of the past decade anchoring the paper's Iraq and Afghanistan war coverage, was riding in a helicopter that crashed as it was delivering humanitarian aid to Yazidi refugees in northern Iraq today.

John Oliver's big topic on the latest Last Week Tonight was the crumbling wall between news and advertising, an invisible ethical forcefield that used to be known as the "separation of church and state."

The Associated Press Twitter account is a must-follow for breaking-news junkies. It's also a great guide to the many ways you can fuck up breaking news. Like when it reported the status this morning of an aircraft carrying the bodies of MH17 victims back to Holland:

Media attention in Gaza yesterday focused on a sudden Israeli artillery strike that killed four children as they played on the beach, in front of numerous journalists. One of those reporters, NBC's Ayman Mohyeldin, documented the aftermath in stark detail. Today, NBC pulled him out of Gaza.

BBC is instructing its editors and producers to stop striving for "false balance" by booking so many anti-science and climate-denying commentators. "Audiences should be able to understand from the context and clarity of the BBC's output what weight to give to critical voices," a company report stated.

Last week—just before the Las Vegas shootings—New York Times columnist Joe Nocera told readers that he was ending "The Gun Report," the popular daily rundown of gun violence in America he'd created in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre. The reason, insiders say, was that the Times didn't want to give his assistant a pay raise for writing it.

The late investigative reporter Michael Hastings’ much-buzzed-about posthumous novel, The Last Magazine, a thinly veiled account of his time at Newsweek (and Gawker!) in the mid-2000s, finally landed in bookstores and Amazon warehouses earlier this week. But where’s the fun in thin veils?

On Saturday, Poland's Wprost magazine published a secretly recorded conversation between two officials that revealed a recently departed minister may have been dismissed at the behest of the country's national bank head. Four days later, Polish police, prosecutors, and intelligence officers raided Wprost's office in an attempt to seize the recordings.

Last week, the New Republic accused Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-winning ex-New York Times reporter and antiwar essayist, of plagiarism. A further investigation by Gawker has found that Hedges has published writing suspiciously similar to that of left-wing hero Amy Goodman, and that he has been recycling and reselling his own old work as original writing to multiple outlets for at least a decade.

Mosi Secret, the New York Times' incredibly named "sin and vice" reporter, has found a sex club and lost his innocence. Fortunately, he also found Naiad, a willowy Columbia student who poses as a mermaid from the Hudson and does sex things, to restore his faith in humanity.

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal filed by New York Times reporter James Risen in which he argued that he should not be forced to testify in a case against former C.I.A. operative Jeffrey Sterling, who is suspected of leaking classified information to Risen. It it not yet clear, Risen’s lawyer said, whether federal prosecutors still intend to seek Risen’s testimony.