Journalistic Ethics and Illegally Acquired Documents
Ed Driscoll, Jonathan Adler and Glenn Reynolds take the New York Times and other mainstream outlets to task for their decision to not republish the stolen emails from climate scientists on the grounds that they were illegally obtained and written with the expectation of being kept private. After all, these outlets famously publish illegally obtained classified national security information at ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 23, 2009 14:02
Douthat Blogging Again
A few months ago, when Ross Douthat became a New York Times columnist, I was pretty excited that the Times had chosen a fresh, conservative perspective for its editorial pages. Since then, I admit I've been a little disappointed. Douthat's columns have, by and large, been pretty lackluster--there was none of the depth, wit, or thoughtfulness that made ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 19, 2009 12:22
Limbaugh: Reporter Should Kill Himself
Rush Limbaugh has gotten everyone from Media Matters to The Guardian to Andrew Sullivan to Paul Krugman to Raw Story to FireDogLake up in arms because he allegedly suggested that a NYT reporter kill himself. Except that, to anyone familiar with either Limbaugh or the conventions of American English, it's rather obvious he was illustrating absurdity by being absurd. Here's the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 21, 2009 10:30
NYT and the Farrell Rescue
[caption id="attachment_41922" align="alignright" width="400" caption="Corporal John Harrison (left) was killed in the SAS-led operation to rescue British journalist Stephen Farrell (right), which was launched after officials received intelligence that he was about to be moved into Pakistan's tribal areas"][/caption] Tunku Varadarajan argues the New York Times has a moral obligation for getting two people killed by sending Stephen Farrell into ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 15, 2009 13:39
New York Times Malware Ads
This weekend, I got one of those fake "virus clean" popups after clicking a link to a New York Times article from Memeorandum. Apparently, I wasn't alone as there are a dozen or more posts about it today at Techmeme. The NYT itself has this Note to Readers: Some NYTimes.com readers have seen a pop-up box warning them about a virus and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 14, 2009 14:43
Charging for Online News
Stop me if you've heard this one before: A news executive has a plan to start charging for online news. The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year. Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 17, 2009 06:32
Selling Online News
Having apparently learned nothing from its TimesSelect debacle wherein, by charging a nominal fee to read its opinion columnists, the NYT ensured no one read said columns much less linked to them, the paper is floating a trial balloon of charging $5 a month to read its online edition. Michael Crowley is enthusiastic: Given that some people spend $5 per day on ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 11, 2009 07:57
Obama Approval Dropping as Hard Choices Made
As President Obama settles into his fifth month in office, his personal popularity remains high but his job approval is slipping drastically, according to a new NYT/CBS News poll. A substantial majority of Americans say President Obama has not developed a strategy to deal with the budget deficit, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, which also found ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 18, 2009 09:26
Kindle Makes Newspapers Obsolete?
Nicholas Carson points out that, "it costs the [New York] Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead." Andrew Sullivan terms this "A devastating little insight into the obsolescence of newspapers" but it strikes me as a merely ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 23, 2009 14:36
Bite Size News
Michael Scherer had an epiphany yesterday searching for a transcript of Dick Cheney's CNN interview and stumbling on nine different stories in Politico about it. What struck me about all this was not just that Politico had created a hassle for me, the reader. It was that they were doing news online smarter than the rest of the old-school organs of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 16, 2009 16:03
Douthat Moving To The New York Times
In a rare display of sound editorial judgment for the op-ed page, the New York Times has hired Atlantic editor Ross Douthat as a new opinion columnist. It's one step back for the Atlantic, but an order of magnitude forward for the country: my colleagues and I learned today that senior editor Ross Douthat will, in short order, become an opinion ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 11, 2009 15:41
Obama ‘Working the Refs’
Barack Obama is taking great pains to reach out to opinion journalists, Michael Calderone reports for The Politico, and it's paying off. After some anecdotes about Obama personally calling pundits who wrote negative things with respectful explanations of why they were wrong, Calderone observes, The communications team for President George W. Bush would have been much more likely to let the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 9, 2009 07:59
Blue Chip Penny Stocks
Barry Ritholz has a depressing list of companies the were going gangbusters quite recently and are now damned near worthless. A partial list: AIG (39 cents) Citigroup (98 cents) E*Trade (66 cents) Unisys (37 cents) Ford ($1.83) GM ($1.83) For those of us who don't buy individual stocks, here's some perspective: The bankrupt New York Times, in the dying print media business, currently sells at $4.00. Photo ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 6, 2009 05:35
The End of Print Media
Mark Dillen's precis of recent developments in the news media is staggering: The news out of Philadelphia is that there is no news — no newspapers, that is. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News have joined the swelling ranks of American print media that have gone bankrupt. Last month, it was the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. Late last year, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 6, 2009 05:23
College Grading: An ‘A’ for Effort?
College students increasingly expect to be rewarded for trying hard, Max Roosevelt claims in NYT: “Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.” He attributes those complaints to his students’ sense of entitlement. “I tell my ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 20, 2009 07:29
