The New York Times

On Tuesday, The New York Press ran a short item on its web site reporting that had a strike involving Village Voice staffers had been averted. It was a small story, but the Press owned it from start to finish. Today, The New York Times ran a brief in its Arts section.

Here's a quote from Voice-legend Tom Robbins in the brief:

“We got a deal 3 o’clock this morning,” said Tom Robbins, a Voice columnist and shop steward for the United Auto Workers Local 2110. “We won a good victory for unions... We had a celebratory drink of a little Scotch and then went home.  read more »

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On June 22, the Times public editor Clark Hoyt had a few words for the Times’ Maureen Dowd for several primary-season columns that disparaged Hillary Clinton. "Even [Ms. Dowd], I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season."

So two days ago, current Op-Ed columnist (and former editorial page editor) Gail Collins wrote into Mr. Hoyt’s reader's response column to respond: "When the public editor laces into an opinion page columnist for making fun of a controversial political figure, it sounds like a suggestion that all of us tone things down. I hope I’m hearing wrong.  read more »

The other day, Rachel Harris of The New York Times' Paper Cuts blog, posted about some of the silly swag publishers send out to promote books since books alone are, like, so boring.

In an accompanying slideshow, Ms. Harris shows all the great junk, including a handmade mixtape, pictured above, to promote Charles Bock's Beautiful Children. "We liked the music," Ms. Harris writes. "But that's not the reason his novel was reviewed on our cover." (Sure, but how does she explain Charles McGrath's profile, Janet Maslin's review, and this "Inside the List" column about those very same tapes? Did someone send out a few collages or Papier-mâché projects to his favorite newspaper of record?)  read more »

Well, that was fast.

Yesterday, Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici honored New York Times TV Watch columnist Alessandra Stanley on 103 correction-free days. At the time, Ms. Stanley warned Mr. Bercovici that there might a correction on the horizon telling him, "I'd hate to stand corrected, but I think your count could prove wrong... There could be one coming in the next few days—[it's] still under study."

Today, The Times issues this "For the Record" correction on Ms.Stanley's column from June 19:

The TV Watch column on June 19, about Michelle Obama’s appearance as a co-host on 'The View,' referred incorrectly to her mention of her gratitude to Laura Bush after Mrs.  read more »

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Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin posts a letter from dot-com-era entrepreneur Josh Harris in which he criticizes The New York Times for knowingly promoting his company Pseudo.com even though it was "a fake company."

Actually, Media Mob isn't clear on what Mr. Harris is charging—or why he's bothering, since most of the references are to articles from 2001. But some of the articles were written by a pre-scandal Jayson Blair, which prompts Mr. Harris to ask:

Is it ethical for The New York Times to carry the banner of 'the newspaper of record' and claim journalistic integrity since it failed to thoroughly and completely follow up each and every article that Mr.  read more »

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Does Hallmark make a "Happy 103rd Consecutive Day Without Corrections" card? Maybe there's some sort of TDF "Fact-Check-Me-Up" bouquet?

There's gotta be some way to honor New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley this week. As Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici notes, Ms. Stanley, who has been the butt of many pop culture bloggers' jokes for her occasional lapses in fact checking, hasn't had a correction in 103 days.

After cataloging a few of her memorable mistakes—"All About Raymond"?—Mr. Bercovici quotes a surprisingly good-humored Ms. Stanley, who cautions him not to uncork the champers just yet: "I'd hate to stand corrected, but I think your count could prove wrong," Ms. Stanley says. "There could be one coming in the next few days—[it's] still under study."

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Two fresh takes on YouTube in today's New York Times.

On the op-ed page, Daniel Kimmage files a piece from Baku, Azerbaijan, titled "Fight Terror With YouTube" about how Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda aren't keeping up in the Web 2.0 world.

As Mr Kimmage writes:

Statements by Mr. bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, that are posted to YouTube do draw comments aplenty. But the reactions, which range from praise to blanket condemnation, are a far cry from the invariably positive feedback Al Qaeda gets on moderated jihadist forums. And even Al Qaeda’s biggest YouTube hits attract at most a small fraction of the millions of views that clips of Arab pop stars rack up routinely.  read more »

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Understandably, when a newspaper has to make deep cuts in its payroll, columns like this crunch the numbers. How many pink slips, and in what areas?

But that is arguably less important than how the remaining staffers are reorganized to fill the gaps—or not.

The big victim in the last round of cost-cutting at The New York Times: Starting this month, the Metro section’s regional desks are, essentially, dead. Local reporters who have been spared have been redirected and reassigned. Jersey general assignment reporter and poetry writer Tina Kelley will be “spending more and more of her reporting life online, busting rhymes here and there along the way,” wrote Joe Sexton, the editor, in a memo sent last week to staffers.  read more »

In a recent New Yorker essay on the subject of theodicy, James Wood wrote:

Theologians and philosophers talk about 'the problem of evil,' and the hygienic phrase itself bespeaks a certain distance from extreme suffering, the view from a life inside the charmed circle. They mean the classic difficulty of how we justify the existence of suffering and iniquity with belief in a God who created us, who loves us, and who providentially manages the world.

With this philosophical framework in mind, let's look at some of the reviews of Mike Myers' The Love Guru.

"A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious.

On Paper Cuts, The New York Times' book blog, Barry Gewen writes about Mark Bowden's recent Atlantic article about Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of The Wall Street Journal and his desire to kneecap the paper of record.

Mr. Gewen, you may recall, revealed the inner-workings of The Times Book Review at Harvard last year. Among his revelations: the names and roles of several NYTBR editors, how they choose what books to review, and some intramural gripes like "the magazine pays the salaries of all the rest of us. It makes money hand over fist. And you can see it in the physical plan.  read more »

Campbell Robertson, the dogged Times journalist who has worked his way up from office clerk to gossip reporter to Broadway-beat man, is headed to Iraq.

“We were out last night and he was picking my brain on Iraq,” said Times Baghdad bureau chief Jim Glanz in a telephone interview on June 17. “He said that people have been asking him when he’s going to Iraq. And he said he’ll go once the Tonys are over!”

In some ways, it’s unbelievable that a man who wrote a story for Monday’s Times recapping the Tonys—for instance, he wrote that the awards tried to “goose ratings” by including more numbers from Rent this year—is going to be filing with Basra and Mosul datelines before old story subjects are back from the Hamptons.  read more »

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman brings his considerable knowledge to bear on all things from the economy to intellectual property to the elections in his twice-weekly columns. But on his Times-hosted blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, Mr. Krugman also plays media critic for his own paper.

In an impassioned post titled "On Not Knowing Who," Mr. Krugman scolds his colleague Sarah Lyall for writing the following bit about British TV series Dr. Who:

The show followed the adventures of a time-traveling character whose spaceship was cunningly disguised as an old-fashioned telephone booth and who saved the universe by means of immortality, brilliance, a mordant sense of humor and an array of useful enemy-thwarting devices.

"No, no, no!" Mr. Krugman scolds. "The TARDIS looks like a police box." (TARDIS stands for "Time and Relative Dimension(s) in Space.") He even provides a Wikipedia entry to back up his claim.

"Copy editors are my favorite people in the news business, and many I know are still alive and doing what they do...

"As for what they do, here’s the short version: After news happens in the chaos and clutter of the real world, it travels through a reporter’s mind, a photographer’s eye, a notebook and camera lens, into computer files, then through multiple layers of editing. Copy editors handle the final transition to an ink-on-paper object. On the news-factory floor, they do the refining and packaging. They trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions.

"Copy editors are the last set of eyes before yours. They are more powerful than proofreaders. They untangle twisted prose. They are surgeons, removing growths of error and irrelevance; they are minimalist chefs, straining fat."— Lawrence Downes, In a Changing World of News, an Elegy for Copy Editors, June 16, 2008.

In a signed editorial by Francis X. Clines in today's New York Times, we learn that gentrification is changing the Lower East Side. While Mr. Clines concedes that this is an old story—"Hasn’t that been the case ever since this sliver of Manhattan was laid bare more than a century ago as the crammed tenement haven for immigrants?" he asks—he does seem to feel that the changes in the neighborhood are once again a pressing crisis:

As gentrification rushes in, the neighborhood is fortunate to have the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, so tourists can still walk through the way things were. A preservationist urge is also evident on the streets — from demands for tighter zoning to an “egg rolls and egg creams” block party this Sunday by The Museum at Eldridge Street.

As coincidence would have it, the blog EV Grieve recently posted a scan of Craig Unger's May 28, 1984 New York Magazine cover story "The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood." (This comes via Gothamist.)  read more »

“It’s the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first casualty of war,” said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this war, as in every other conflict, everybody lies to you. Your government is lying to you. The Iraqi government is lying. The insurgents are lying. The militias are lying. The U.S. military is lying. Even the civilians lie. Or in the best case, there’s confusion and exaggeration. The truth is the most elusive thing in war, particularly in an insurgency.”

Sixty-two months into the war, this is the language of the American journalist in Iraq. It’s not the only language; there are others: Cyclical, monotonous, brutal, strategic, hopeful. But slowly, as Iraq slips from the front pages and Web pages, today’s news starts to sound like yesterday’s; violence explodes; a spectacular military success, or failure. Casualty lists grow until they become incomprehensible, and then unreadable, unquantifiable. Against that metronomic numbness, 90 American journalists (according to a November 2007 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism) continue to work a dangerous war that becomes a harder and harder story to sell to Americans. As the American press corps gets older, wearier—and simultaneously younger and more untested as the veterans leave—there are truths that some of the reporters of Baghdad have learned about the war in Iraq.  read more »

This month's Atlantic cover story by Nicholas Carr which asks the pressing question "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?"

After examining several ways in which our brains have been rewired by our dependence on the web, Mr. Carr notes:

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed...  read more »

Paul Krugman just put up a post that's a pointed rebuttal to a statement made by Nicholas Kristof in a blog post of his own today.

Kristof argues that one of the reasons the media snoozed on the pre-invasion Iraq story is because Democrats didn't really attack Republicans on it. Without a fight in Congress, it's a tough story for the media to comprehend.  read more »

Today's award for Best Intentionally Hilarious News Story goes to The New York Times' Cara Buckley for her Metro story, "A Night Out That Became a Night In. In the Bar."  read more »

Are the deadlines at The New York Times about to change?

Moments ago, a big-bylined memo from Keller-Abramson-Landman-Geddes went out staff-wide to reporters and editors saying that, essentially, to make it easier on the digital side, copy flow at the paper needs to change.

They compare their current system to “an old-fashioned electrical utility.”

Too much copy is dumped at the same time, and the digital-side people have not a lot of time to deal with it all. No conclusions have been reached, though! So it’s time for the Times to do what they do best: setup a big committee to talk about it.

Susan Edgerley will lead, and deputies will help. Decisions will come in the “months to come.”

Full memo after the jump.  read more »

The Times has no official anonymous sourcing rules—no "two source rule" or anything like that—but they do often pass around internal documents to serve as guidelines. The paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, recently recruited some Columbia J-school students and had them take some sample papers from 2004—when Al Siegal and Bill Keller last sent out an anonymous source guideline sheet—and compare them to 2007, and they found that anonymous sources had basically dropped by half at the paper.

But reporters shouldn't feel afraid to use them! Mr. Keller sent out a "refresher course" memo last night. There are helpful tips like: "There is, on the face of it, something ludicrous about a government or corporate "spokesman" insisting on not being identified by name; we should push such sources to speak for attribution."  read more »

Longtime editor Jim Roberts is being given the title "associate managing editor" and will be added to the Times masthead. He works with Jon Landman on the digital side and his duties remain exactly the same. Here's the memo from Keller and Landman:  read more »

Rupert Murdoch spoke at The D Conference this week, and laid out more non-specific but interesting plans for The Journal.

For months, it's been speculated that Murdoch cares more about figuring out the actual structure of the paper, and then he'll get down to the dirty business of assigning the right reporters to the right assignements, and signing a few superstars.  read more »

Do not ask Katie Roiphe what she's been working on. In today's installment of "Stray Questions," on The Times' Paper Cuts blog, Dwight Garner asks the author and NYU journalism professor just that and receives this answer:

Because I can’t really answer this question I have noticed that people ask it all the time.  read more »

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It seems that Christine Quinn has two important factions to please. On one side are the 50 other members of the City Council. On the other are good-government groups and, particularly, The New York Times editorial board.

When Quinn began discussing the slush fund scandal at the City Council, The Times editorial board--a big voice in Democratic primaries for offices like, say, mayor--held out hope that Quinn could set things straight, writing, "[her] reformist zeal is still needed."

The first package of reforms Quinn announced, on April 11, would have stripped the City Council of the ability to determine how $20 million in discretionary money from the council speaker's office is spent, giving that power instead to the mayor's agencies. The Times called it "sensible" but added, "[S]he must do a lot more."

Then, council members objected. Loudly. Strongly.

So this week, Quinn unveiled another set of reforms that are more palatable to her members.

The major difference between Quinn's old plan and new plan is that the new plan leaves a majority of decision-making power with council members. The Times was not pleased:  read more »

Is Wired better than The New York Times? According to this year's Webby Awards, when it comes to Best Copy/Writing, it sure is.  read more »

Edwards spokesman Matthew Nelson just sent over this response to a question I asked about the assertion in today's Times story suggesting that Elizabeth Edwards was pressuring John Edwards to endorse Hillary Clinton:

"Unless you're hearing from John or Elizabeth themselves, and not unnamed sources, I wouldn't put much stock in it. Information is currency in politics, and there is a lot of fake currency floating around out there.  read more »

Sometimes statistics can give rise to a piece of journalism. New York Times magazine contributing writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a resident of Boston, found that 700 gay men age 29 or younger were wed in the state of Massachusetts between May 2004 and June 2007.

What resulted is a 7000-word New York Times magazine cover story, published this weekend.

This number sounds like a statistical anomaly! It certainly is.  read more »

The wingnut parade at the 112th annual New York Times stockholder's meeting, held late this morning at the Times' conference room on the other side of a birch-and-moss filled atrium from the Times' newsroom tower, was out of control. And when chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was not being harassed by pesky shareholders, he was being attacked by bugs. (He spent about a minute flailing at an insect that seemed to have emerged from his hair.) Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media was there.  read more »

At a press conference in Lower Manhattan about expanding 311, Michael Bloomberg gently tamped down the speculation that he might purchase the New York Times, saying, "I am not a newspaper person."

Bloomberg said he was "flattered" that anyone would think of him as a possible buyer.

Which is how he responded to, but didn't discourage, more than a year's worth of rumors that he would run for president.  read more »

Newsweek gives big play this week to Rupert Murdoch's early maneuvers at The Wall Street Journal. Point: He's the general who has declared war on The New York Times.

This is something we've been talking about around here for a while now, and rumors of war aside, we haven't quite heard the first shot around here.

That doesn't change much with this week's story, but there's still lots of juice here.

Here are the highlights:  read more »

When The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on April 9 that “barring a change” Katie Couric and CBS News were “likely” to part ways and that it “could” happen after the election (those are just the qualifiers from its headline and subhead), Matthew Drudge picked it up quick as lightning on the Drudge Report.

After a few hours, the story, sourced to “people close to Couric” and executives, was taken out from behind a paid firewall, and WSJ.com watched the traffic—“definitely” one of its biggest hits of the month—roll in.  read more »

Filling out the rumors floated in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, today the New York Times reports that a “wide-ranging discussion” about Katie Couric’s future took place among CBS executives back in February:

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At a little after 3 p.m. on Monday, April 7, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller grabbed a microphone and took to a landing on one of the floating red-walled staircases that climb up into his brand-new newsroom’s skylit clerestory. It was Pulitzer day, and the first time this kind of stand-up-in-the-newsroom ceremony was being observed in the new Renzo Piano-designed tower the newspaper moved into last May.  read more »

The Washington Post picked up six Pulitzer Prizes today, a record for the paper and one shy of the New York Times' record of seven back in 2002. Dana Priest of the Post nabbed her second Pulitzer in three years, winning the Public Service award along with Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille for exposing mistreatment of veterans at Walter Reed Hospital (She also won in 2006 for Beat Reporting on counterterrorism prisons).  read more »

The New York Times' Barry Bearak, who was detained yesterday in Zimbabwe, is still in jail. Catherine Mathis, spokeswoman for the paper, said that he has been "falsely" charged. She writes: "He has not been released. He's being charged, and falsely so, with passing himself off as an accredited journalist."

This was a statement sent out yesterday by the paper's editor, Bill Keller:  read more »

Ever since Obama declared his candidacy for president in early 2007, news organizations have been busy trying to piece together the significant moments in his life, especially those left unaddressed in Obama's surprisingly candid autobiography, Dreams of My Father.

And so, the young Barack Obama has become a character in the campaign. And Roger Boesche, a professor of political philosophy at Occidental College who taught two classes to the young Barry Obama almost 30 years ago, is mystified at the sudden interest of political reporters in what he has to say.  read more »

Ante up!

Now suddenly everyone is interested in Newsday. The New York Times is reporting that a Manhattan media blockbuster trio is "in discussions" to buy the Melville-based newspaper: Rupert Murdoch, James Dolan and Mort Zuckerman. Sam Zell decides who's the winner.

It sets up a satisfying auction between Mr. Murdoch (Post-owner) and Mr. Zuckerman (Daily News-owner) and Mr. Dolan, who owns MSG, the Knicks, Rangers and Cablevision.  read more »

“Being pop critic at The Times is a dream job—certainly it was mine,” the former occupant of that position, Kelefa Sanneh, wrote in an e-mail to Off the Record this week.

But a little more than two weeks ago, Mr. Sanneh left his dream job for the other dream job: a reporting gig at The New Yorker. Since March 3, when a Times memo went out announcing Mr.  read more »

Howell Raines is back.

The former executive editor of the New York Times has written his first media column for Portfolio, and it's about—surprise!—the New York Times. It will appear in the April issue that hits newstands later this week. (Online this morning.)

The article, titled "Murdoch v. the Times," examines the paper's vulnerability, particularly in the wake of Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal.

"There is no more important question in American journalism than the future of the Times, and I don't think the newspaper or the journalistic profession is taking Murdoch in particular or the takeover issue in general seriously enough," he writes.  read more »

Who would have thought that all you had to do to launch a singing career these days was hook up with the governor of New York? I mean, Tila Tequila had to steadily rack up more page views than any other artist on MySpace and host a trashy MTV dating show before people started to take her musical talents "seriously." Not so for "Kristen," a.k.a. Ashley Alexandra Dupré (birth name: Ashley Youmans), the former Jersey shore resident and aspiring songstress who recently made "The Luv Gov," well ... sing!

After the identity of the 22-year-old (or 32-year-old, by some reports) upscale call girl involved in the prostitution scandal that brought down Eliot Spitzer was revealed on Wednesday night, millions of viewers flocked to her MySpace page, on which she offered a sampling of what The New York Times described as "an amateurish, hip-hop inflected rhythm and blues tune that asks, 'Can you handle me, boy?'" (Her profile is now defunct.) The Times also reported, on its DealBook blog, that thousands of listeners have flooded the startup music site AmieStreet.com, where two of Ms. Dupre's tracks are available for purchase.

So is there a burgeoning star in our midst? Billboard asked some top A&R execs to weigh in on Ms. Dupre's prospects, and here's what they had to say:  read more »

Even the gossipy bit—Who's That Girl?!?—that all of the tabs were after all day yesterday (us too, in fact) is broken first by The Times: Spitzer's prostitute "Kristen" is in fact known as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, though she was born 22 years ago as Ashley Youmans, in New Jersey. [The New York Times]  read more »

Paterson will be a strong governor from an environmental standpoint, but he's no Arnold Schwarzenegger, according to an analysis of his record by Jerome Woody. [grist.org]

Last night, the E.P.A. announced "a modest tightening" of its smog standard, despite the unanimous call of the agency's scientists to adopt a more protective standard. [The New York Times]  read more »