Huffington Magazine Issue 41 | Page 5

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR makers, carriers and governments. “It’s a bit like squeezing a balloon,” Jack Wraith, chairman of the UK’s Mobile Industry Crime Action Forum, tells Smith. “You squeeze it in one place and it pops out somewhere else.” Meanwhile, there’s also a painful trail of human grief. Hwangbum’s father still sleeps in his son’s bed, and his mother prayed at the scene of his shooting each day for four weeks. “It’s like he’s always beside me,” she told Smith, fighting back tears. “I miss him so much.” Elsewhere in the issue, Michael Calderone shows us how another story has continued after the election. As he reports, it’s not just the Republican Party that’s struggling to regain its footing, but conservative media as well. “While outlets like The Daily Caller, Breitbart News and the Washington Free Beacon have sprouted and, in some cases, prospered during President Barack Obama’s administration,” writes Calderone, “concern is mounting that they and others in the conservative media universe are shedding their credibility by focusing more on supposed scandals than report- HUFFINGTON 03.24.13 ing the basics of who, what, when, where, why and how.” Calderone takes us inside the conservative media world, introducing us to those who are trying to reform it, along with those being blamed for turning it into an echo chamber with diminThe spike ishing influence in in robberies the mainstream has grown so media. pronounced Robert Costa is one that police of the former. As the have coined a newly-minted Washterm for such ington editor of the crimes: Apple National Review, the picking.” 27-year-old rising star wants to focus on reporting. “Conservative journalists are recognizing that they have to offer more to readers beyond talking points and columns,” he tells Calderone. “I think that’s the evolution right now — moving toward narrative journalism, investigative journalism. It’s a growing process. There will be some growing pains.” ARIANNA