The weekend’s most bizarre story is that British cancer specialist Dr. Brooke Magnanti has revealed that she is “Belle de Jour,” the pseudonymous blogger who managed to get several bestselling books and a television movie out of having paid her way through graduate school as a high priced prostitute. Jon Ungoed-Thomas for The Times.

Her identity has been one of the great literary mysteries of the decade after the publication of bestselling books about her secret life as a prostitute.

Magnanti is a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol. Six years ago, in the final stages of her PhD thesis, she ran out of money and turned to prostitution through a London escort agency, charging £300 an hour. Already an experienced science blogger, she began writing about her experiences in a web diary that was adapted into books and a television drama starring Billie Piper.

[...]

The scientist, a petite 34-year-old, has no regrets about her 14 months as a prostitute. “I’ve felt worse about my writing than I ever have about sex for money,” she said. Anonymity had become “no fun”, however: “I couldn’t even go to my own book launch party.”

Until last week, not even her agent knew her real name. A month ago she revealed her secret to her colleagues at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, who were “amazingly kind and supportive”. She was preparing to tell her parents this weekend.

Magnanti said she was working on a doctoral study for the department of forensic pathology of Sheffield University in 2003 when she took up prostitution. “I was getting ready to submit my thesis. I saved up a bit of money. I thought, I’ll just move to London, because that’s where the jobs are, and I’ll see what happens.

“I couldn’t find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn’t have my PhD yet. I didn’t have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva; and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would.”

When she could no longer afford her rent, she started to think: “What can I do that I can start doing straightaway, that doesn’t require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that’s cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in?”

Apparently, threats that an ex-boyfriend (whether of the paid or unpaid variety is unclear) would reveal her secret forced her hand.

She claims to have earned £300 a night, which I find baffling on a number of levels.   And says that her blog “will continue for a bit – I’d like her to have a happy ending.”  Which is an amusing double entendre, whether intentional or otherwise.

Her “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” blog was controversial, since it depicted prostitution as glamorous.  Since the blogger was pseudonymous,many speculated that it was a work of fiction, with some claiming the author was a man.  Presuming Magnanti’s claim to authorship is genuine, it’ll be interesting to see what the reactions are.

The Atlantic Council is sending a delegation of us out to the USS Eisenhower for the next couple of days.

Barring unforeseen access to a computer, the Internet, and free time that means no posting from me until Saturday morning.  My OTB colleagues will, however, be slavishly posting away as usual if not at a slightly higher opstempo.

The editors at Foreign Policy magazine used the occasion of the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s election as president to ask a “a group of experts” to grade President Obama’s foreign policy performance.   I was honored to be among the graders.

My B-minus was exactly in line with the consensus:  “Obama scored only an average of a B-: five As, nine Bs, four Cs, and five Ds.”

President Barack Obama inherited two unpopular wars and a global financial crisis. Despite mostly continuing President George W. Bush’s policies, he’s rebooted America’s image in the world and avoided most of the landmines. His top-level foreign policy staff — from Vice President Joe Biden to National Security Advisor Jim Jones to Secretary of Defense Bob Gates to the State Department’s Anne-Marie Slaughter — is superb. While I seriously questioned his choice of Hillary Clinton to become secretary of state, she’s mostly been solid. That said, he’s made some serious missteps on the security front with Afghanistan and Iran, and his relationship with Europe is not nearly as strong as it should be, given the warmth with which his election was received.

Afghanistan: C-. Obama carried out his campaign pledge to send more troops and to put more emphasis on the war but he quickly lost confidence and now seems mired in a struggle over grand strategy. He fired a competent general to replace him with another, presumably to double-down on counterinsurgency, and turned around three months later to question his own general’s recommendations for carrying out the obvious implications of said strategy.

Europe: B. Obama came into office with a huge popularity boost and was viewed as a breath of fresh air after eight years of Bush. But he’s fumbled the “special relationship” with Britain and has raised serious doubts in Eastern Europe. See my recent article for a detailed explanation.

Iran: C+. Jim Jones’ pronouncement that we could live with a nuclear Iran was a welcome step down from the previous talk about it being “unacceptable.” Unfortunately, the situation has been largely bungled from there, with Obama having seemingly returned to his campaign trail Pollyannaish view of the power of chit-chat.

My colleague Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, also gave him a B-minus.

President Barack Obama’s momentous election heralded a change in U.S. foreign policy and raised expectations of revolutionary developments around the globe. He certainly lifted the dialogue to a new and higher moral level and promised engagement. But progress has been evolutionary, not revolutionary, because U.S. policy is rooted in national interests that do not change dramatically with a change in the occupant of the White House. This has been difficult for people around the world to understand. Regarding the Middle East and the Muslim world in general, Obama’s rhetoric has resonated more abroad than at home. He must change the discussion at home, not just to ensure Israel’s security but also guarantee implementation of Palestinian rights within a tight time frame. On Iran and India, he missed an opportunity to give Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a larger canvas to ply his skills by handing over Iran to a separate envoy and ceding to India’s pressures to exclude that country from the important dialogue on Afghanistan. Its problems can only be solved by taking a regional approach and drawing in the major neighbors: India, Iran, Pakistan, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, Russia, and China. Restricting Holbrooke to Afghanistan and Pakistan reduced his ability to move all the chess pieces in the game.

Also, in Afghanistan, there is no savvy civilian equivalent of Gen. Stanley McChrystal representing the transatlantic view and strengthening the hand of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry with his Afghan hosts. (Paging “Dr.” Ryan Crocker!) And no Afghan voice has been brought into the discussion of the Afghan strategy. There is still time to save the situation before domestic electoral agendas take over in 2010 and then again in 2011. America’s first “global president” who promised the world an impossible dream must strive to avoid settling for the politically possible. He inherited multiple chess games and is moving from crisis to crisis at home and abroad. So, how well has he done? As my high school principal in Rawalpindi, the Rev. “Paddy” Byrne, used to pronounce on most report cards: Needs Improvement. For his high aims but relatively slow results to date, one can give Obama an A for effort but only a C+ for promised actions to date. Overall score: B-. This is an interim grade. The spring semester might produce better results at home and perhaps abroad.

Feel free to provide your grades and analysis in the comments below.

My first piece for ForeignPolicy.com, “Europe’s Obama Fatigue,” is online.

Despite George W. Bush’s defiant “you’re with us or you’re against us” public stance, he actively solicited advice and input from his NATO partners. Obama, by contrast, is saying all the right things in public about transatlantic relations and NATO but adopting a high-handed policy and paying little attention to Europe.

[...]

It would be ironic, indeed, if the Europeans started longing for the good old days of the Bush administration. But that nostalgia is closer than you might think.

Supporting arguments at the link.

UPDATE: As one might expect, this piece is generating some strong rebuttals.

Daniel Larison argues:

You cannot gauge the importance or unimportance of Europe to the United States on the largely cosmetic, superficial and procedural clashes Washington has had with various European states in the last nine months. Under the previous administration, Europe continued to be “important” to the U.S. even when major EU powers opposed administration policy in very public, dramatic ways. To the extent that Obama is losing ground with Europeans, he had far more goodwill and support to lose; in almost every European country, he continues to rate higher after the drop-off from unrealistic expectations than Bush did at almost any point. Obviously relations were and remained far more strained under the last administration than they have been so far under this one. We notice the minor clashes that have taken place because there was a widely-shared, unreasonable expectation that amity and concord with Europe would prevail under Obama.

[...]

European and especially German interests were flatly ignored by Bush when it came to handling Russia. Promises to Ukraine and Georgia of eventual membership in NATO were given over strenuous German opposition. Were European interests and opinions being heeded then? No. The missile defense ploy prompted Moscow to threaten abandoning its commitments under the European conventional forces treaty and elicited a great deal of bluster from Medvedev about targeting Russian missiles on European soil. Was European security strengthened by any of this? No. What matter then if Bush went through the motions and observed the right formalities when he was getting the major decisions wrong?

Most western European allies were not seriously consulted, nor were their objections given much weight, when the Bush administration decided to push ahead with the missile defense plan. In all of the new commentary claiming that Europe has soured on Obama, this seems not to count at all.

Judah Grunstein adds:

[I]f George W. Bush learned to listen to Europe, and in particular NATO, it was largely after he’d been chastened by the failure of the Iraq war and the 2006 mid-term elections. Up until his final NATO summit, Bush continued to talk loudly about the largely unpopular measures of NATO expansion and missile defense. He listened in the sense that he allowed the alliance — led by France and Germany — to turn him back, but it was out of weakness, not out of strength. There was no movement at all when it came to climate change, which is a major driver of public opinion here.

As for Obama’s handling of Europe, I’d agree with the characterization of his aloofness, especially with regard to the current Afghanistan strategic review. But while my sympathies would normally be with Europe on this sort of thing, I do think that Obama invited the NATO allies last April to assume greater ownership of the Afghanistan war. Given their refusal to do so, I don’t blame him for the freeze-out now. That said, Obama’s brush-off of the U.S.-EU summit is inexcusable and reflects a myopic view of the EU’s potential, especially with the advent of the Lisbon Treaty.

I actually don’t disagree with either Dan or Judah on most of these points and think some of the disagreement comes from the provocative  title the FP folks chose.  My argument is neither that the Europeans have tired of Obama or even that Bush was particularly adept at transatlantic diplomacy.  Rather, it is that Bush cared more about Europe — and particularly the UK and New Europe — than Obama and therefore invested more of himself in the relationship.

It’s true that Obama’s stance on, for example, missile defense and NATO expansion is more popular in some quarters than Bush’s.  Indeed, I prefer his approach on the latter and quibble with him on the former mostly on how the rollout was done vice the policy itself.  But the policy differences are  a reflection of Obama’s prioritizing Russia’s views over that of Europe, especially East and Central Europe.   I think Bush was ultimately wrong in his zeal to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO but it was a policy preference motivated by the stated ideals of the Alliance of “a Europe whole and free.”

Becks observes, “I suspect many Twitter memes that I find annoying (one letter off movie titles, failed children’s books, etc.) would have been quite hilarious Unfogged threads.”

The post title, “The Medium Is The Message,” is appropriate.  Several Twitter memes  (created by adding a hashtag such as #failedchildrensbooks) of the sort mentioned can be amusing if one is in the mood.  The problem is that one gets a huge stream of them from participating people one is following whether one is in the mood or not.  If the latter, then it becomes clutter — if not spam — impeding one’s efforts to glean the sort of information usually imparted by those one follows.  Conversely, a comment discussion on a one-off blog post can be — and generally is — simply skipped over by those not in the mood and once can easily stop reading once one tires of it.

On a related note, the equivalent phenomenon — the widespread adoption of silly applications — has killed Facebook for me.  Once invitations to participate in zombie wars start to outnumber useful messages from friends and others in my network, it ceases to be worth the time.

Longtime denizens of the blogosphere will recall the strange case of Jessica Cutler, the one-time Senate staffer who briefly dished sex gossip as “Washingtonienne” and launched into 15 minutes of fame. Now, she’s a mommy.

Five years ago, Jessica Cutler’s anonymous Washingtonienne blog was the hottest thing in town. Make that hotttt! So hotttt! – spicy details of the Hill staffer’s active and varied sex life — that she lost her job, won a book deal, posed for Playboy and got sued by an ex-boyfriend.

She’s now blogging under her own name (”Nobody Cares About Jessica Cutler Anymore”), but just barely — four terse posts in two months — and you have to read between the lines to figure out why: The former party girl is now a mom.

Last December, Cutler, 31, married N.Y.C. lawyer Charles Rubio, 29, in a quiet Manhattan City Hall ceremony. “I’m not pregnant!” she volunteered at the time. (Swear we didn’t ask.) But, you know, famous last words: On Aug. 22, she told us, they welcomed their first child, Jessica-Louise.

“She’s too young to be in a gossip column!” Cutler wrote to us when we e-mailed to ask. “She can wait until she grows up and writes a sex blog of her own, or whatever it is kids will be doing in the future. Blogging is already passe, so I can’t imagine.” Otherwise, she reported, the baby is smiling a lot, and sleeping through the night.

Here’s hoping Jessica-Louise does not in fact start a sex blog.

And, um, that “sleeping through the night” thing?  It doesn’t last.

Heebie-Geebie offers some sage advice on story-telling and blogging:

First, cut way more details than you want to. Cut almost everything. Cut so much that you’re staying ahead of the person listening. Only fill in extra details if they’re still fascinated and you’re going back to flesh out the situation. Second, if your audience isn’t quite captivated, don’t hang on to the point. Blurt it out right at the beginning. If they’re still not captivated, give up. If they do become interested, then fill in the details.

[...]

Blogging is very similar. It’s not about the content of the post, but about not bogging down in boring details.

I was at a blogging seminar with Matt Yglesias a while back and he said the key was to have one idea — and only one idea — per post.  I violate that rule more often than I should.

President George H.W. Bush says presidents are “entitled to civil treatment and intellectual honesty when it comes to critics” and that harsh criticism “should not be par for the course. To the degree it turns off one student or one person from serving that’s bad.”

Now, I fully agree that the 24/7/365 political combat that is the byproduct of cable news (or, as Bush puts it, “the cables”) and the Internet has corrosive effects.  So, too, does the permanent campaign that grew out of that environment. He’s right, too, that it this poisonous atmosphere has likely turned some good people away from public service.

I’m not sure what to do about any of this, however.  The First Amendment protects Americans’ right to free political expression and the nature of instantaneous communication free of gatekeepers is such that incivility is almost a given.  And, surely, the fact that some student — or, even, lots of them — will shy away from politics isn’t sufficient reason to regulate speech.

So, if Bush the Elder is merely expressing his frustration at the way things are — or even calling on people to think about the effects of their style of communication — it’s all well and good.  If he’s saying government should “do something” about it, I respectfully disagree.

MSNBC video via The Swamp

Dan Drezner observes that,

“One of the biggest mistakes traditional academics make is to take all words equally seriously.  That is to say, academics who do not write for a non-scholarly audience tend to assume that it takes an equal length of time and effort to compose a journal article, an op-ed, or even a blog post.  In reality, it’s kind of like circuit training — each activity exercises a different set of writing muscles (that said, journal articles require way more reps than other forms of writing).

He goes on to rank, by degree of effort required, 15 categories of words ranging from books for university presses to mutterings at the bar.  I might rank a few of these differently, based on my own proclivities and skillsets, but they’re about right.

But even within these categories, not all writing is created equal.  For example, I can often crank out a fairly lengthy blog post articulating a specific idea rather quickly while a seemingly no-thought roundup essay, requiring substantial research and formatting, can take much, much longer.

I’m also much more efficient at writing blog posts when I haven’t been up late watching a football game, helping get a cranky baby to sleep, awakened several times during the night by said baby, and then spent much of the morning driving to and attending a staff meeting.  But your mileage may vary.

Brendan Nyhan does a good job of documenting the spread of an Internet meme, the “2 million” figure that briefly circulated among conservative blogs about the size of Saturday’s Tea Party protest.   What’s amusing, though, is that he himself [bases his post on a Media Matters analysis that] falls for the “the DC Fire Department gave the official total of 60-75,000″ meme.   In reality, neither the DC Fire Department nor any other agency offers estimates, official or otherwise anymore.  They haven’t for years.

As best I can figure, the “60-75,000″ figure is a wild ass guess offered by one guy:

Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department, said the local government no longer provides official crowd estimates because they can become politicized. But the day of the rally, Piringer unofficially told one reporter that he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.

I wasn’t in attendance and have no training whatsoever in estimating crowd sizes.  My strong guess is that the actual figure is closer to 75,000 than to 2 million.   But the bottom line is those who sympathize with a cause have every incentive to glom on to wild overestimates and those in opposition will glom on to the lowest estimate they can.  And we’ll never know the actual number.

UPDATE: Commenter Crust points out that Brendan says no such thing.  He’s right, even though I swore I read it in the post.  It turns out that it’s Eric Boehler’s post — which is linked in Brendan’s and an excerpt of which forms the core of the post — that has the assertion I was attributing to Brendan:

According to estimates provided by the Washington, D.C., fire department, Malkin and friends were only off by 1,930,000 people. In other words, Malkin, citing fictitious press accounts, led the charge to falsely inflate the size of the crowd by 30 times. Malkin and company, desperate to dress up the tea party event as a mass movement, saw a relatively modest crowd of 70,000 GOP protesters and imagined it was 2 million strong

I had read Boehler’s post yesterday, never got around to writing about it, and conflated the two this morning. My apologies for the confusion.

A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions.

The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and the bloggers and talk show hosts aggressively pursuing an ideological agenda on-line and on TV and radio.

From birthers to tea parties to town halls and ACORN, the scandal-plagued anti-poverty group — not to mention President Obama’s speech last week to school children and the background of former White House aide Van Jones — issues initially dismissed or missed entirely by the national media have burst, if only fleetingly, onto the national agenda after relentless coverage on Fox News, talk radio and in the blogosphere.

“If it wasn’t for Fox or talk radio, we’d be done as a republic,” Glenn Beck declared Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends.” Beck, who’s aggressively pushed the Van Jones and ACORN stories, told the morning show hosts that he plans to devote his hour-long, top-rated 5 p.m. show to new undercover tapes of ACORN employees.

Last week, Big Government, a site run by conservative Andrew Breitbart, showed videos of undercover stings in three ACORN offices, where journalists posing as pimps and prostitutes were instructed by employees on how to skirt legal restrictions on housing. The tapes got big play on The Drudge Report—where Breitbart has worked—and right-leaning news outlets and commentary shows. But only after the Senate voted to cut off federal funding to ACORN on Monday did the story get more attention in the mainstream media.

ABC “World News” anchor Charles Gibson seemed caught off guard by the ACORN tapes on Tuesday when he told Chicago radio hosts Don Wade and Roma that he hadn’t heard of them, in a clip flagged by prominent conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. Gibson added that “maybe this is just one you leave to the cables.”

Gibson’s executive producer, Jon Banner, echoes that sentiment: “There’s a tremendous amount of – for lack of a better word – ‘noise’ out there. We’re not in the business of noise.”

And he’s got a point. Heck, I saw a lot of these stories percolating on the blogs and Twitter and didn’t get around to blogging about them until they were pretty developed — if at all.  And I’ve long since stopped trying to cover every major story here, going back to focusing just on topics on which I have something to say.

The problem with Banner’s argument, though, is threefold. First, even in the context of a show that gets 22 minutes to cover all the major news of the day, there’s plenty of fluff.  Usually, a good third of the show is filled with fluffy human interest stories. Second, as Jeffrey Lord notes in a tangentially related piece, there’s a pretty long history of the mainstream media gatekeepers keeping a lid on stories harmful to Democrats while running with rumors harmful to Republicans. (Although, to be fair, there are surely examples of the reverse happening.) Third — and most importantly, perhaps — is that the networks are still operating as if they’re the only game in town.  Given that there is now a reasonably mature alternative media percolating these stories to rather large, if self-selecting, audiences, the judgment as to what constitutes “news” has been democratized.  It’s simply unwise for large media outlets that claim to deliver “all the news that’s fit to print” to ignore big political stories when millions of people are talking about them.

Related to the third, because there are alternative media for the left and right, it’s now incumbent on the mainstream press to investigate the big stories that percolate in those venues to ensure that they’re shared outside of self-selected cliques and to present the story in proper context, not just the cherry picked facts touted by the partisans.  Is there more to Van Jones than youthful sympathy with Communists and having put his weight behind the Truther movement?  Is ACORN corrupt at its core or is it merely mismanaged, with a shoddy business model that invites corruption?  Are the Tea Party protesters racist yahoos marching to the tune of Glenn Beck and Freedom Works, a diverse grass roots movement, or what?  The partisan media generally lack both the resources and incentives to report these things.

Update (Alex Knapp):The Daily Show took a look at this last night, and it was both funny and took the media to task on the story:

Update 2 (Alex Knapp): For the record, it appears that at least one of the ACORN workers “caught” in this video was just playing along because she thought it was funny:

ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke is shown meeting with them, telling them that she once was an escort and got away with killing her husband.

But Kaelke insisted Tuesday she made up her story for shock value.

“They were clearly playing with me,” she said “I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.”

[...]

Since she claimed on the video to have killed her husband, two San Bernardino police homicide detectives interviewed her at the office Tuesday.

Police said they have been in contact with Kaelke’s former husbands and the homicide claims do not appear accurate.

Heh, yeah. I would say that talking with someone is generally a good indication that they weren’t murdered.

And of course, as always, there’s some question over whether the videos were themselves selectively edited to make ACORN look bad:

San Bernardino resident Jim Miller, who lives near ACORN’s office and is also featured in the video giving business advice, said he thought the “whole thing was a preposterous production.”

He said he continued talking just to learn more.

Miller, a retired businessman, said he couldn’t believe the people wanted to propose such a “ludicrous enterprise,” but continued talking to them and asking questions to see where it would lead.

In the video, the filmmakers claim they would bring underage prostitutes from overseas

Amy Schur, ACORN’s head organizer in California, said the video is selectively edited. Kaelke repeatedly said ACORN couldn’t help the fake pimp and prostitute, but that does not appear on the video, Schur said.

I have to admit, if I saw two people dressed up in ludicrous costumes asking outrageous questions, I might play along for the fun of it, too, at least just to see where it was going.

Update 3 (Alex Knapp): Whew! After reading a few other stories, it looks like Tresa Kaelke is something of a nutjob. Additionally, and just for clarification, I’m not saying that the ACORN workers in these videos are all playing along or anything like that. Just that they have a side of the story, too. I’m generally inclined towards the more conventional interpretation of the videos (as noted in the Stewart clip above.)

Scott Payne has an interesting interview with Kevin Drum on the evolution of the blogosphere since the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth circa 2002.    I joined the fray about six months later and think he’s dead on.

A couple of excerpts:

But the political blogosphere did have a bit more of a clubby feel to it back then.  Mainly, this is because we spent a lot of time talking to each other and nobody else really noticed us much.  It was sort of like joining a book club, where you talk about the same stuff as the big-time critics but it’s only between friends.

There was also a lot less expertise in the blogosphere back then.  There were a fair number of legal bloggers, and a few economists, but that was about it.  That gave the whole enterprise a very wide open feel.  We could all talk about anything we wanted to without having to contend with a bunch of genuine experts barging into the discussion to tell us where we’d gone wrong.

Indeed, one of the things that got me noticed early on was that I brought some genuine expertise (a PhD in international security and combat experience) to the debate during the run-up to the Iraq War.  Two or three years later, the blogosphere was positively overrun with people who had much more specialized knowledge in counterinsurgency, terrorism, and regional affairs than I did.

First, politics itself has gotten increasingly tribal and the blogosphere has followed along.

Second, as the blogosphere aged, bloggers started to realize that their opposite numbers were never going to change their minds.  As that became clearer and clearer, engaging with them got a lot less interesting.

That’s largely right. The exceptions, oddly enough, are mostly among the group that’s been around since those early days — most of whom have gone professional — and know one another.

I alternate between being amused and depressed when reading comments on blogs.

Of late, I’m simultaneously being lambasted by conservatives who’ve read me for years and can’t believe what an apologist I’ve become for Obama and denounced by liberals who used to respect me as fairminded and can’t believe what a stooge for the GOP that I’ve become.

Sigh.

I’m not sure whether this is proof of the old adage that being middle-of-the-road gets you run over from both sides or a function of being situationally radical.

Rebecca Ruiz of the NYT Media Decoder blog wrote a post titled “NYTPicker Revealed. A Blogger With A Cause: Us,” revealing David Blum as the anonymous blogger behind NYTPicker, that got picked up on Memeorandum. It has disappeared.   Presumably,  this is because — as The Editors inform us in a subsequent post — the information contained in said post was erroneous, based on unconfirmed rumor.

But why not, as is longstanding custom in the blogosphere, leave up the original post with an appended correction? Glynnis MacNicol:

Um, yes, except how did the post get up there in the first place? And once it was up who okay’d its removal? These are not small questions — removing a post in its entirety, particularly if it’s because of faulty sourcing on the writer’s part, is shady business indeed. And the cutesy closer is even more off-putting: “What will NYTPick.com say about using anonymous sources to out anonymous bloggers? We may find out.” Not funny. Nor should the NYT.com be looking to anonymous bloggers (even those as good as the people behind NYTPicker) to play managing editor for them. Someone screwed up here, and at this stage of the game the NYT.com should know that transparency is as important as getting the facts straight.

What’s worse, NYT pulled the post and only put up the subsequent “update” post after they’d been caught by Michael Calderone. One presumes that no such “update” would have been made otherwise.

The nature of blogging is such that, even moreso than traditional journalism, there’s a premium on speed.  I don’t expect that there will be multi-layered editing on blogs, even at NYT. So errors are going to be made.  But attempting to hide them in this manner is indeed “shady business.”

Jayvie Canono has a useful discussion about the magazine-style format that has taken the blog world by storm over the last couple of years. Among the non-technical issues he raises is this:

Will your readers like it? Maybe they would prefer that they just keep scrolling down to keep reading your posts. Maybe you should ask them when you play-test your site.

Having invested in the Thesis theme for Manzine, I’m seriously considering porting OTB and some of my other sites over at some point.  Manzine’s thumbnail-for-every-article format is too labor intensive for OTB but I like the idea of a featured post or posts followed by headlines and excerpts for older entries.

What say you?  Do you like “magazine” formats on blogs like Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, TPM, and Lifehacker?  Or do you prefer the standard blog format such as OTB now uses?  Or does it matter at all?

I’ve thought about doing this for awhile but have resisted partly because I think most people read blogs, as I do, via their RSS reader rather than directly.  But that may just be idiosyncratic to those of us who peruse a hundred or more blogs.