When I read an April 22nd blog on The Huffington Post, I got to daydreaming what Mark Twain might write if he were alive today and read what Thomas Edsall wrote:

At a time when New York Times managers are forcing all employees to take a five percent pay cut, and demanding even larger sacrifices from the NYT-owned Boston Globe, top executives of the beleaguered newspaper received substantial bonus and fringe benefit payments over and above their salaries, according to a proxy statement released on March 11.
These bonuses and benefits to top Times company executives have provoked growing resentment among Times staffers, and frank anger from Globe reporters who have been warned by Times executives that their paper will be folded if they do not come up with $20 million in pay cuts and layoffs.
On Tuesday, the Times disclosed a $74 million first quarter loss 221 times larger than the $335,000 loss in the first quarter of 2008.
According to the New York Times proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, corporate president and CEO Janet L. Robinson received a total compensation package valued at $5.58 million in 2008, up well over a million from the $4.14 million she received in 2007, and the $4.4 million she received in 2006.

If Twain were writing today, he might have the publishing prince, Arthur (“Pinch”) Sulzberger, in his plush Fifth Avenue apartment late one evening, swizzling his dry martini, and thinking it might be a good idea to know what the little folks are doing and what they are thinking about his publishing kingdom.
Pinch thinks he might call his pal, Steve Rattner, and ask him to dress down with him (take off his yellow suspenders, French blue shirt with a white collar, and John Lobb shoes and put on torn jeans, a dirty sweat shirt, and sneakers) and go bar hopping in Boston. But then he realizes Rattner is busy in Washington being the automobile czar and dealing with tone-deaf automobile CEOs who flew to Washington in private jets but then holding tin cups, begged for Federal bailouts.
Sulzberger, of course, doesn’t make the connection about being tone-deaf; he’s a prince. So he calls the square-jawed Bill Keller, his editor at the Times, because he knows Keller dresses down well and no one in Boston will recognize him.
In a grubby bar near the Globe in Boston, the two incognito executives, looking seedy and wearing scruffy Red Sox caps, belly up to the bar and order a beer. Keller fakes a Boston accent pretty well and asks a middle-aged man with a stubble who wears a smudged chambray shirt, “How about the Globe? They going to close it down?”
“Who cares,” the guy says, “Dan Shaughnessy and Bob Ryan would start a blog and I wouldn’t have to put up with all that international crap. I have to scroll down the home page of the website for ten minutes to get to the sports, so I hate the Globe site.”
“But doesn’t Boston need a newspaper?”, Keller asks. Pinch is too dumfounded to talk. He doesn’t think common folks have computers or know what a blog is.
“Are you kidding!” the guy responds incredulously. “That piece of crap is owned by the Pink Lady, the frigging New York Times, and that Yankee-loving rag owns a piece of the Red Sox. How do you like the Sox and the Globe owned by those greedy, tone-deaf morons? Do you know that those jerks asked the union and other employees to take a big pay cut when Sulzberger made over $2 million and his CEO, some broad he’s probably doing, made over $4 million.”
Pinch chokes on his beer and slinks further down on his bar stool.
“Yeah, well,” Keller replies somewhat imploringly, “isn’t better to have a job, even if it pays less, than no job at all?”
“Are you nuts? Haven’t you heard of equity theory or the ultimatum game – you know, the perception of fairness?”, the guy says with mild contempt. “People will act against their own best interests when they think they are being treated unfairly. They may go down, but they’re going to take the greedy bastards down with them.”
“Oh, OK. You may be right,” Keller says, quickly downing his beer. “Nice talking to you. Have a good night.”
“Same to you. But you’d better take care of your friend; he looks a little pale.”
“He’ll be OK when I get him back home to his castle … er, I mean, home.”
When they get back to New York, Keller gingerly asks Sulzberger how he thinks it went.
“Well, he’s only a sample of one. No one else feels that way or knows how much money Janet Robinson makes, which is irrelevant. We’ve got to cut expenses so we can pay back Carlos Slim the $250 million he lent us.” As he’s talking, Pinch picks up a bottle of gin, looks at it horrified, and says, “My God, we’re out of gin!”

William Kristol wrote his last column for the New York TimesMonday, and I’m sure every reader who appreciated good writing said, “Good riddance.”
Kristol is a triple threat as a columnist: he can’t write, he can’t think, and he is error prone. I read his first couple of columns and then an occasional one when I thought the topic might interest me. I typically found that even though the topic might have been of interest, his pedestrian, doctrinaire writing, carelessness with facts, and lack of original ideas or worthwhile insight bored and angered me before I reached the last three or four paragraphs, so I inevitably gave up.
Kristol’s banality has nothing to do with his being a conservative; it has to do with him being dumb. His ineptness is best exemplified by comparing his final column, titled “Will Obama Save Liberalism?” to a column written the next day by the Times’ well-established, brilliant conservative columnist David Brooks.
Kristol’s last column began with the following:

All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era.
Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

“All good things must come to an end?” I’ll let you guess where his head has been for 20 years.
Here’s how David Brooks began his column titled “What Life Asks of Us” on Tuesday:

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

Brooks goes on to explore the meaning of education, the philosophy of individualism, the value of institutions, and the meaning of life – no easy task – but he manages it intelligently. David Brooks and columnist colleagues Gail Collins, Frank Rich, Nicholas Kristof, Bob Herbert, Thomas Friedman, and Paul Krugman contribute to making The New York Times the best news Web site in America – truly the journal of record for the first draft of history.
But you have to wonder why Kristol, who can barely play Class A ball in the shadow of the above big-league superstars, got the column in the first place. Conventional wisdom and gossip has that it was Pinch Sulzberger’s decision. It was rumored that he wanted to have another conservative voice on the paper in addition to David Brooks. Perhaps Sulzberger thought Kristol could be a replacement for William Safire. How dumb was that?
The day after Kristol’s last column appeared in the Times, the Washington Post announced Kristol would be writing a column for that influential publication. Katherine Weymouth is the publisher of the Washington Post.
Guess what Pinch Sulzberger, Katherine Weymouth, and William Kristol all have in common? They are all three members of the Lucky Sperm Club. Arthur Sulzberger’s family owns voting control of the Times, Katherine Weymouth is the granddaughter of Katherine Graham, and William Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, a brilliant writer and intellectual, and founder and co-founder of several magazines, including The Public Interest.
We don’t really know if Pinch, Katherine, or William would have reached the pinnacles of journalism if they hadn’t all been members of the Lucky Sperm Club. But after reading William’s lousy columns, you have to wonder about the motivation underlying his being hired. As with most motivations, the reasons for his hiring were probably unconscious, but that’s the way of the world in the privileged confines of the Lucky Sperm Club.
Probably Pinch and Katherine should have read one of Irving Kristol’s quotes before they hired his son:
“The trouble with traditional American conservatism is that it lacks a naturally cheerful, optimistic disposition. Not only does it lack one, it regards signs of one as evidence of unsoundness, irresponsibility.”

I’ve always tried to associate with people who are smarter than I am because it’s the best way to learn anything. Furthermore, one of the reasons I blog is to try to create an open, public dialogue – to create a conversation, which is really what a blog should be. Following is an e-mail conversation among three smart people in response to Roger Black’s guest blog about The New York Times.
To: Roger Black
From: Jesse Kornbluth
I actually thought your piece was — between the lines — pointing less to Murdoch than to the Bloomberg model: writer as content producer, who also does radio and TV
For the Times, that’s beyond imagining.
Indeed, the utter failure of the recent Page 1 Times blast about military “experts” appearing on news shows struck me as due largely to the absence of a strong TV partnership — if not the outright failure to own important TV.
From: Paul Atkinson
To: Charles Warner
(Forwarded to Jesse Kornbluth and Roger Black)
The real story there was that Brauchli was as greedy as anyone else – he took $3-5mm of Murdoch’s money and said “to hell with the special News Overseers Committee” – he didn’t even loop them into his resignation.
From: Roger Black
To: Jesse Kornbluth
What I was getting at is that the Journal staff was acting like babies throughout, and they’re supposed to be working for a newspaper devoted to the market economy!
From: Roger Black
To: Jesse Kornbluth
[The Bloomberg Model] would have to be case-by-case, but the [best] newsroom model is blogs. Find the local equivalents of [The Times’] Sewell Chan — reporters who are tireless and smart even if they don’t get out much. Put each in charge of one of a dozen verticals. Let them write for entertainment, currency and connection to what people are actually interested in.
Then, online, hook up something to relate the vertical to the rest of the world, like “Inform” or “DayLife,” and you’re off.
The real problem in making the needed changes is the institutional mind-set [t]hat makes everyone stay in their own “industry.” But the TV guys are having the same problem. It’s like they never heard about that old Harvard Business Review story about the New York Central passenger managers thinking of themselves as “railroad men.”

The online and offline media are inundated with opinions and stories about whether or not The New York Times should have published the recent front-page story about John McCain’s alleged romance and ties to lobbyists. The medium has become the message in this brouhaha.
After two days of reading copious blogs and articles about The Times article, I’ve come away with the impression that the Gray Lady has grown old, confused, and lost its memory. Since many types of boats are named after women, I’ll extend the metaphor and suggest that the Gray Lady is a vessel that has an incompetent captain who is letting the swabbies run the ship.
This notion first came to me when I read Jay Rosen’s thoughtful (as always) blog on the Huffington Post in which he wrote, “there’s one person who would have known about the paper’s struggles with McCain and his lawyers over today’s story, and who read and approved the paper’s endorsements – or should have. That is Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher. And so to ask, ‘How does the Times endorse McCain with a story like that looming, if it believes in the story?’ is to ask, at a minimum, what Arthur thought he was doing.'” The answer, of course, is that Arthur has no idea what he’s doing.
Publisher Pinch let executive editor Bill Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson decide whether or not to run the McCain story with the befuddling headline “For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk.” A headline and story Columbia Journalism School professor and media critic par excellence Todd Gitlin mocks: “With that most vapid of introductions (so bland that my eyes glazed over on first inspection), the editors tried to muffle the dynamite that they’d awkwardly stuffed into the nth reedit of their half-exploding bombshell about–well, what was it about? (1) Intimations of an Iseman affair, or the ‘appearance’ of an affair, that his aides tried to scotch? (2) McCain’s entanglements with lobbyists who cared a good deal about what he did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee? Uncertain which way to turn, having not much of a story about (1) and (on the strength of the evidence they published) no smoking gun about (2), they squared the potato and ran with the hodgepodge.”
What were Keller and Abramson thinking? Why did they open The Times up to such criticism? I think it’s because the reporters, not the editors, run the newsroom after the editors screwed up over the Jason Blair and Judy Miller fiascoes. I suspect the reporters convinced Washington bureau chief, Dean Baquet, that the story was solid and that they would be scooped by the Washington Post and The New Republic if The Times didn’t run the story after delaying for several months.
There has always been conflict between the Washington bureau and the New York newsroom, as Gabriel Sherman succinctly pointed out in his brilliant piece in The New Republic online “The Washington-New York divide is an eternal rift at the Paper of Record: Baquet had successfully brought stability and investigative acumen to the Washington bureau; with the McCain piece, he was being sucked into his first major struggle with New York.” Yes, sucked in by reporters.
In his blog, Buzz Machine, Jeff Jarvis wrote about “Folio’s report from its conference and a speech by Meredith president Jack Griffin. The fuller context: As a result, the company invested in its interactive and integrated marketing businesses—spending roughly $600 million since 2002 on launches, acquisitions and building out its existing Web sites, Griffin said, as well as redefining its editorial hiring approach. ‘We don’t hire editors anymore,’ he said. ‘We hire content strategists.’”
What The Times newsroom needs is a content strategist to sit next to Keller and help him think strategically (something a good publisher could do, but, then The Times publisher is Pinch, the leader of the lucky sperm club, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-warner/the-media-lucky-sperm-clu_b_86560.html and not the leader of The Times). Keller has been beaten over the head so much in recent years from both the right and the left that the pounding has affected his thinking. He is trying to do good journalism, keep his angry reporters happy, stem circulation declines, and please a feckless boss – too many balls to juggle to try to be strategic.
A content strategist might have advised Keller to think about the implications and timing of running the McCain story: (1) How would running the damaging story look after The Times endorsed McCain on January 25 for the February New York Republican primary? Would it reinforce the concept that editorial and news are independent or make Sulzberger look incompetent, as Jay Rosen implied, especially when on the Opinion page of the paper’s website there still appeared pictures of Clinton and McCain, along with headlines trumpeting the paper’s endorsements long after the primary was over? (2) How would using anonymous sources make The Times look after assistant managing editor Allan Siegal’s 2004 internal report, which asked, “Can we otherwise squeeze more anonymous sources out of our pages? Can we make our attributions (even the anonymous ones) less murky? Are there some stories we can afford to skip if they are not attributable to people with names?” (from Jay Rosen’s Press Think blog)? Wouldn’t it open The Times to criticism of breaking its own rules, succumbing to tabloiditis, and getting down in the gutter with the NY Post?
A good content strategist would have advised Keller to run the story as part of The Long Run series (as The Times did) but to run it before the NY primary, just as it ran a Long Run piece on Clinton the day of the primary – it would have been logical. Also, a good content strategist would have advised Keller to run the lobbyist connection part of the story, because that was consistent with the Long Run series the paper had done about other candidates, and to kill the alleged romance, because there wasn’t sufficient evidence – no seamen-stained blue dress.
But there was no strategy. Who’s in change here?

The New York Times’ Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote a column on Sunday, November 4, titled “Civil Discourse, Meet the Internet,” in which he claimed, “How does the august Times, which has long stood for dignified authority, come to terms with the fractious, democratic culture of the Internet, where readers expect to participate but sometimes do so in coarse, bullying and misinformed ways?
The answer so far is cautiously, carefully and with uneven success.
The issue is timely because last week, with very little notice, The Times took baby steps toward letting readers comment on its Web site about news articles and editorials…”
You got your facts wrong, Mr. Public Editor. Do you read your own newspaper online? On October 12 (not “last week”), I wrote the following:
“At about 9:00 a.m. this morning the lead story on the NY Times’ website was ‘Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work,’ and just to the right a picture of a man holding a big picture of Al Gore with the caption, ‘Above, the chairman of the Nobel Committee.’ Directly underneath, in larger, bold blue type, was ‘Comment by Benjamin Toresco: ‘Discredits the Nobel Prize…who will be next year, Michael Moore?’ About forty minutes later the comment had been updated; the new one by Richard Sypher read, ‘The Nobel Committee continues its efforts of rewarding left-wing alarmists.’
I think posting these negative comments points out a huge dilemma for the Times and other online news content providers. What was the Times attempting to communicate by posting these comments and what did it communicate? Is posting comments to the lead story a good idea or a bad idea? My first reaction to the ‘Discredits the Nobel Prize’ comment was outrage. How could the Times give front-web page attention to a wingnut? How could the Times give credence to such crap?
So I went to the Comments page to see for myself. When I checked it at about 9:40 a.m., there were 258 comments. A large majority of them were favorable—praising Gore and the Nobel Committee. But many were negative, such as the comments mentioned above. One by Jack was, ‘Who is Al Gore. Never heard of him. George Bush should have won the peace prize. ‘Peace Through Strength.’ Or, ‘Al Gore is a fake. I cannot believe a person with such disregard for the truth could win this award,’ by Harold Majors. I was aghast. How long had these people been living in the state of Denial, clearly America’s 51st state?”
You also wrote in your column, Mr. Hoyt, “On Tuesday, readers were invited to comment on a single article in Science Times and on the paper’s top editorial, using a link that accompanied each. Few did because there was no promotion of the change, but as the week went on and more articles were opened to comment, participation picked up.”
Picked up last week? There were at least 258 comments on the Gore story on October 12, many by conservative wingnuts, so how does this compute with what you wrote in your Public Editor’s column, “A particularly hot topic on a blog can generate more than 500 comments — 500, that is, that meet guidelines requiring that a comment be coherent, on point, not obscene or abusive, and not a personal attack.” There were dozens of personal attacks on Al Gore on October the 12th that The Times allowed on the website, and to which I objected in my blog titled, “NY Times’ Front Page Wingnut Deniers.”
You wrote, “From Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, on down, executives and editors of The Times use similar language to describe their goal: they want the newspaper’s Web site to nurture a healthy, “civil discourse” on the topics of the day.” I agree, but the comments on October 12th did not come close to reaching that goal—too many wingnut deniers.
I’m delighted The Times is allowing comments, as they often do lead to a richer civil discourse, and I appreciate The Times’ editors’ dilemmas in editing comments. I also appreciate what you do—trying to keep The Times reporting truthful and fair. I suggest you apply those same standards to yourself and read your paper online so that you know when an editor is not being accurate in telling you last week was the first time for comments. I’d like to be able to trust what The Times’ ombudsman writes.

The New York Times’ coverage of the wildfires in Southern California on the morning of Wednesday, October 24, demonstrates why The Times’ and other newspapers’ future is on the Web.
The combination of continually updated photos, reporting, maps, and readers’ comments make the ongoing story compelling reading. The updated Web coverage is as immediate as radio and more in-depth than television, but it is the readers’ comments, a unique functionality of the Web, that elevate the coverage.
For the story about Al Gore being a co-recipient of the Noble Peace Prize, some readers’ comments posted under the lead story on the website were inappropriate because they included vitriol from conservative wingnuts, as Jesse Kornbluth and I discussed in several blog entries two weeks ago. I didn’t see readers’ comments for a week or so after that on the lead story on the website, but noticed them this morning. And today the comments posted under the lead story were appropriate and compelling. They also advanced the story—gave new information that The Times’ reports did not have.
For example, Comment #60 by Grecia: “Although, I am touch by the incredible response of volunteers I can’t overlook some of the injustices of this fire. Indeed many people are losing their homes but there are some families that are losing even more. In some Areas of Oceanside and Escondido the Border Patrol is actually asking for immigration status and taking away everyone who is not able to prove their legal immigration status. We are in a time of crisis is it absolutely necessary that government agencies reinforce divisions and spread even more fear that the one that we are facing now. To know about these incidents makes me completely crazy and disappointed with our government agencies. I think our media should not paint a polarize picture of good and bad but also recognize and be the first ones to point out the injustices that are happening to some families.”
Citizen journalism on the New York Times—the opportunity to report, interact, give feedback, build a sense of community, and connect with those who are experiencing the devastation of the fires. This is the future of newspapers on the Web, but it requires judicious editing for putting excerpts under the lead story, which The Times seems to be doing.
It may be no coincidence that this judicious editing of readers’ comments happened in the same week that The Times announced a strong, upbeat profit picture for the third quarter. The Times is figuring it out.

Yesterday, October 17, there were several stories in the media about Morgan Stanley selling NY Times stock it held in one of its funds. The stories detailed how much stock was sold, but none of them indicated who bought the 7.3 percent stake in the country’s journal of record. It’s a mystery, but I’ll make a guess.
In a blog titled “The Future: Non-Profit New?” I posted earlier this year on October 2, I wrote: “So here’s what I propose to save journalism and the news media from itself and the greed of its owners—officially and legally become non-profit organizations.” Of course Wall Street is still singing the Gordon Gekko anthem, “Greed Is Good,” louder than ever, and as newspaper profits decline, Wall Street will bail out. So who was the buyer of the Times’ stock?
Morgan Stanley’s Hassan Elmasry, managing director of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, unsuccessfully challenged the Sulzberger family’s control of NY Times. The family owned a minority of the stock but a majority of the voting stock, which Elmasry didn’t think was fair to investors. Elmasry made no headway in his nasty campaign, so he sold Morgan Stanley’s investment in the Times. Remember, too, that because of this criticism, the Sulzberger, in a fit of understandable pique, pulled took their marbles away from Morgan Stanley. So Morgan Stanley got even by selling their stake in the Sulzberger family game. But to whom?
I’ll bet Rupert Murdoch secretly bought it. Why Murdoch? Think about it: 1) He obviously believes newspapers should be kept alive as a family-owned business. 2) He obviously believes that it’s OK for a newspaper to be a non-profit organization—he’s supporting NY Post losses to the unharmonious tune of over $40 million a year. 3) But he’s smart enough to know he can never wrestle control of the NY Times away from the stubborn Sulzbergers like he did with the feckless Wall Street Journal’s Bancrofts, so he secretly bought Times stock so he could greenmail the Sulzbergers.
The Sulzbergers will have to take the NY Times Co. private sometime if they hope to keep control, and when they do, they’ll have to buy all of the outstanding stock. When they discover, after vomiting in disgust, that Murdoch owns a bundle of it, they’ll pay him at least a 40 percent premium for his stock—a bigger premium that Murdoch paid the Bancroft family.
That Rupert, he’s smart. He knew that with the Bancrofts greed would overcome pride and with the Sulzbergers pride will overcome greed, and he’ll profit on both deals.

Guest blogger Jesse Kornbluth wins the argument with this post:
“I am not in favor of stifling free speech. I say: ‘Let a thousand morons bloom.’
It’s a real estate issue. Given the value of the Times main screen, why put some brain-dead Republican operative an inch away from Paul Krugman–or even David Brooks? I’m hungry for news, and that real estate is valuable; fill it with high-protein news, or leave it blank so my aging eyes can catch a mini-rest.
Proximity suggests equivalency. The guy who thinks man and dinosaurs romped together 6,000 years ago has a right to express his opinion–just in a space where we look for opinion. But on the main screen of the Times website? Why, so it can start to look like Fox?”
I think the proximity-equals-eqivalency argument is decisive and wins. So I concede to Jesse that the comments page should have a link under a story, as it is now, so people can peruse them if they want, but that individual comments, good or bad, should not be a sub-head post under a story, as they were this morning.
I hope the Times learned something from this experience, I know I did.

At about 9:00 a.m. this morning the lead story on the NY Times’ website was “Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work,” and just to the right a picture of a man holding a big picture of Al Gore with the caption, “Above, the chairman of the Nobel Committee.” Directly underneath, in larger, bold blue type, was “Comment by Benjamin Toresco: “Discredits the Nobel Prize…who will be next year, Michael Moore?” About forty minutes later the comment had been updated; the new one by Richard Sypher read, “The Nobel Committee continues its efforts of rewarding left-wing alarmists.”
I think posting these negative comments points out a huge dilemma for the Times and other online news content providers. What was the Times attempting to communicate by posting these comments and what did it communicate? Is posting comments to the lead story a good idea or a bad idea? My first reaction to the “Discredits the Nobel Prize” comment was outrage. How could the Times give front-webpage attention to a wingnut? How could the Times give credence to such crap?
So I went to the Comments page to see for myself. When I checked it at about 9:40 a.m., there were 258 comments. A large majority of them were favorable—praising Gore and the Nobel Committee. But many were negative, such as the comments mentioned above. One by Jack was, “Who is Al Gore. Never heard of him. George Bush should have won the peace prize. ‘Peace Through Strength.’” Or, “Al Gore is a fake. I cannot believe a person with such disregard for the truth could win this award,” by Harold Majors. I was aghast. How long had these people been living in the state of Denial, clearly America’s 51st state?
But there were other offsetting comments: “Excellent. Now expect a massive political attack from the right wing,” by Larry Cunningham. And a comment by Hudson at 9:09 that expressed my gut reaction, “Why is there a comment from some wingnut global warming denier featured on the front page of the NYT website?”
Then I went to the Wall Street Journal’s website at about 10:15 where I figured I’d find some more sentiments of wingnut global warming deniers. The WSJ’s top story was about Gore’s prize, and it had a poll under the lead paragraph, “Do you agree with the choice for Nobel Peace Prize?” Guess what: Yes, 42%; No, 58%.
I went back to the NY Times website at 10:30 a.m. to see if it was continuing to post negative comments under the story. The Times now had two Comments posted, one negative (on top) and one positive, so the Times’ online editors must have had second thoughts posting excerpts from just negative comments and were trying to include some balance. It was clear editors were reading the comments and posting excerpts from some, had read Harold’s wingnut denier comment, and realized there was a problem.
I think the Times is doing a good thing by allowing comments from readers, it engages readers by giving them the opportunity for feedback and input. It transfers some of the power of the press to the people and creates a dialogue on important issues. It’s a way to expose the pulse of the people and the diversity and depth of opinions and prejudices. After thinking about it, I believe it’s good to headline some of the negative comments on a story. I would hope the Times has learned from this incidence that it needs to do more careful editing of the comments and keep some balance so that it isn’t showing just one side.
I also realize that my initial reaction of outrage that the Times would give credence to a wingnut’s ranting by headlining it under the lead story was, as typical, impulsive. And rather than being outraged, I should be grateful for the opportunity to see that Al Gore’s campaign to alert the world to the perils of global warming has merely taken a giant first step of a long, difficult journey of education. Reading the wingnut deniers’ vitriol informs me that I have a lot more to do personally, that I can’t let Al do it all, and that it’s going to be an unbelievably tough battle to pass the necessary laws and regulations needed to save the wingnut deniers’ children and grandchildren from burning up.
It’s too late to save the wingnuts, but we might be able to save their future generations—the uneducated wingnut deniers sure won’t.

Blogging is an exhilarating and humbling experience. Getting it right is cool and feeds my overfed ego; getting it wrong is humbling, which pleases my wife and kids. In my September 17, blog titled “MoveOn.org’s Petraeus Ad,” I wrote:
“I don’t believe that the Times broke its rate card for MoveOn.org, that Mathis is being candid, and that Jeff Jarvis is wrong (about cutting rates because newspaper ad revenue is down). The rate is legit and has nothing to do with newspapers offering big discounts because of ad declines. The Times, which has a pretty good sales organization, understands that lowering prices doesn’t create demand. Where else but the Times would an advocacy ad like this have such a huge impact? There is still large demand for ads in the Times by many advertisers, especially those who want to try to influence the political discussion agenda. The reason overall demand for newspaper advertising is down is because major advertisers such as automotive and financial services are cutting back, not those who want to influence the national debate. In fact, the MoveOn.org ad created demand—the Giuliani campaign bought an ad in response a couple of days later.”
So my face was as red as Rudolph’s nose when I read the NY Times’ Public Editor, Clark Hoyt’s, column this past Sunday (the 23rd) in which he wrote: “Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?
The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.”
Ooops. I thought the rate was “legit.” I couldn’t imagine the Times cutting its rates. It never occurred to me that one of its sales reps couldn’t read its Byzantine rate card. It seems that Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis doesn’t understand the rate card either. Here’s what she told BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine, as reported in his blog: “I should note here that Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed to me what MoveOn.org already said about said ad–that it cost $65,000, and that it was in keeping with the going rate for ‘open’ political advocacy ads–that is, ads for which the Times has discretion on when to run them.”
The rate MoveOn.org got was not an open rate—an open rate is the top rate an advertiser pays and for which the Times will place the ad in the section an advertiser prefers. The Times’ rate card in the Business section, under Causes and Appeal/Political, shows an open rate of $1,442 per column inch, or $181,692 for a 126-inch full page ad. The closest rate to get to the $142,083 Hoyt says MoveOn.org “should have” paid is the 20-page rate of $1,133 per column inch, or $142,758. But to earn that rate, the lowest Nationwide Weekday rate, it would have to have run or promise to run 20 pages. If you divide $142,083 by 126, you get $1,127.64 per column inch—a rate that appears nowhere on the Times rate card in that category.
This nitpicking points out several things: 1) No one, including the Times salesperson, its corporate spokesperson, or its Public Editor understands or can read the newspaper’s rate card. 2) That Catherine Mathis doesn’t know the difference between an open and a stand-by rate, which isn’t so bad because the rate card is so confusing, but it spotlights the fact the Times’ official spokesperson is probably knee-jerk defensive and can’t be trusted to be candid. This Rategate is no Jason Blair scandal, but it’s still embarrassing for the so-called journal of record—it can’t seem to keep its records or its stories straight—it looks like the Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first” routine, or even “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”
To me the rate MoveOn.org paid is not as important as the fact that the Times ran the ad with the offensive subhead. Here’s what the Times’ Public Editor Hoyt wrote: “The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, ‘We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.’ Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was ‘rough,’ he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.’”
Jespersen’s title is director of advertising acceptability and he didn’t do his job—he screwed up. He should have tried to get MoveOn.org to change the headline, as I suggested in my earlier blog. At a time when the Times is cutting newsroom jobs in response to lower ad revenue, it ought to consider cutting fat, not muscle. Pare down the bureaucracy, not reporters who create content for the paper and website. Stop paying bureaucrats to make bad decisions and utter defensive, inaccurate public announcements—it sounds like the government. Fire Jespersen and Mathis and get rid of the sales force. Google sells about five times as much advertising as the NY Times does and does it via the Internet. Computers don’t make rate-quoting mistakes and Google’s system is based on bidding—an auction—for ad space.
If MoveOn.org had been required to bid for the Monday ad it wanted, it would have paid a lot more than $65,000 for a full-page ad, as evidenced by the fact that it agreed to pay $77,000 more to correct the mistake, as reported by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. MoveOn.org probably would have paid more than $142,000 if it had to bid for it.
So I lost one—I was wrong about the Times’ “legit” rate—and I won one—I was right about not running the ad. I apologize for the error, but I’ll be glad to live with my batting average.

The plain-talking Harry S. Truman once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” The New York Times is in the heat of the media spotlight because it is America’s “newspaper of record” and is generally considered to be the best newspaper in the country, followed closely by the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. However, in terms of being able to take the heat of criticism, sometimes the Times is half in the kitchen and sometimes half out.
In the Sunday, March 11, 2007, Week In Review section, the Times’ ombudsman, Byron Calame, wrote in The Public Editor, under the headline “Reporting the News Even When a Competitor Gets There First” about the Times, The Washington Post and the scandal at Walter Reed. Calame was tough on the Times editors and asked, “Why were readers of The New York Times left without a word of news coverage of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal for six days after it had been exposed by The Washington Post? That was the question posed to me in the wake of The Post’s Feb. 18 scoop by readers thirsty for news of the poor care given those wounded in Iraq.”
Calame goes on to criticize the Times for burying the story for a week. Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, acknowledged to Calame that the paper “could have been quicker in responding to the Post’s stories.” Keller also wrote in an email in response to Calame’s questions: “The treatment of wounded soldiers at the nation’s most prestigious military hospital in time of war was worth pursuing in the Post’s wake. We are now on the story, but as far as the conditions at Walter Reed, we ended up, for the most part, covering the consequences of the Post’s work.” The Times was “slow,” Mr. Keller wrote, because the digging done by the two Post reporters over four months “was hard reporting to match” and the paper’s Pentagon reporters were pursuing other articles.
The public editor goes on to include several of Keller’s rationalizations for being slow, but concludes with this Keller quote: “The easy explanation, and one that contains a good measure of truth, is pride,” he acknowledged. “Reporters (and editors) don’t enjoy being beaten.”
Then Calame writes: “Excessive pride, I believe, is the fundamental problem. The desire to be first with the news still permeates the newsroom at The Times and other newspapers in a way that makes editors and reporters feel defeated when they have to conclude that the information in another publication’s exclusive article is so newsworthy that it has to be pursued.”
And he concludes his column with, “In February 2004, my predecessor wrote a column chiding the paper for failing to pursue the exclusives of others. During my almost two years as public editor, I have continued to see this problem that directly affects readers. The reality is that when significant news breaks — even in the form of an exclusive in a competing publication — The Times must be committed to getting on the story. Anything less seriously damages the paper’s value to readers.”
The public editor took the Times to task, properly, for burying the story and not listening to earlier criticism, thus implying that the Times’ editors say they want criticism, but then seem slough it off. But at least the Times is willing to publish the criticism—it is half in the kitchen on this.
It is half out of the kitchen, though, when it comes to criticizing Bill Keller’s boss, Arthur Sulzberger, and his family. In my February 22 blog, “Shame On You, Pinch,” I detailed the circumstances of the Ochs-Sulzberger family taking $640 million of their assets away from Morgan Stanley because of criticism of the Times management and the structure of the company’s stock. I accused the Sulzberger family of the kind of economic bullying they would not put up with for the newspaper and that the Times editorialized against during the investigation of Wall Street analysts after the Internet stock bubble burst.
The Times ran a sanitized story about the asset pull-out, but it only quoted a spokesperson of the Times, not from Morgan Stanley—the Wall Street firm was smart enough to keep its mouth shut to the Times reporter. So, it was half in the kitchen for mentioning the “asset shift,” but half out for sanitizing it.
However, on March 12, the Wall Street Journal carried an article by Sarah Ellison titled “New York Times Hears Key Holders’ Complaints.” The article detailed the complaints and showed a chart of the New York Times Co.’s stock 41.2% decline. I don’t think you’d see an article like this in the Times.
As far as being able to take the heat of the kitchen, I think Bill Keller is half in the kitchen and has clothes on, but publisher Arthur Sulzberger is half out of the kitchen with no clothes on, but the Times editors are too cowed to tell him he’s naked, and I’ll bet his family or the board won’t tell him either.

A couple of weeks ago the Ochs-Sulzberger family pulled the majority of its assets (around $640 million) from Morgan Stanley, which had been the custodian of the family fortune for many years. The caption under a picture of Arthur (“Pinch”) Sulzberger on the FORTUNE website read, “Angered by a money manager’s challenge, Times chairman Sulzberger, Jr. will no longer do business with Morgan Stanley.”
I understand how Pinch could get pissed and defensive at Hassan Elmasry, a Morgan Stanly managing director who runs Morgan Stanley’s American and Global Franchise Strategies Portfolio. The fund has $11.5 billion in investments and owns about 7.6 percent of the NY Times Company stock. Elmasry has been urging a shareholder revolt against Pinch and the Ochs-Sulzberger family ownership of about 19 percent of the NY Times Company stock but all of the Class B voting shares, which allows the family to control nine of 13 board seats. The company’s stock is off 40 percent in the last two years and Elmasry thinks it’s probably Pinch’s fault. After all, he’s the Times’ CEO who is elected by the family-controlled board of directors.
But, shame on you, Pinch, for pulling your money out of Morgan Stanley in a snit. What would the NY Times or the Boston Globe say to an advertiser who used economic bullying by canceling its advertising because it didn’t like an editorial stance your papers took? Wouldn’t you say that they were trying to use their financial clout in an attempt to squelch your well-considered and well-researched position? Wouldn’t you defend freedom of speech and the notion that your editorials create a public dialogue about important public issues and that you would welcome and publish dissenting opinions in an attempt to create a robust marketplace of ideas? Wouldn’t you urge the advertiser to fight it out with you publicly, to put the ideas out, defend them, and let the public choose? Wouldn’t you accuse them of trying to bully you and interfering in your duty to your public?
In the FORTUNE website article (February 2) by Tim Arango, in which the picture and caption quoted above appeared, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack was reported to have said that he would have preferred that Elmasry had never gone after the newspaper of record, but that he has never interfered because meddling would conflict with Elmasry’s obligation to his investors.
It’s ironic that the New York Times editorialized when the dot.com bubble burst and the subsequent scandal erupted about how some investment analysts should be punished because they gave positive ratings to turkey stocks because of pressure from the investment banking side of the house. It seems only fair and balanced that the Times should editorialize now against another type of economic bullying or else be accused of flagrant hypocrisy.

If you are interested, as I am, in the challenges that face the newspaper industry in general and the New York Times in particular, then there are two recent articles you should read that provide great insight from two different, but essential, perspectives: Ken Auletta’s article, “The Inheritance,” in the December 12 issue of the New Yorker and Seth Mnookin’s article, “Unreliable Sources,” in the December issue of Vanity Fair.
Auletta is the dean of American writers about the media–no one has the pedigree and consistently intelligent, insightful, and thorough body of work as Auletta does. Mnookin is relatively new to the media writing scene, but his book Hard News about the crisis at the New York Times as a result of the Jason Blair disaster and the rein and subsequent firing of executive editor Howell Raines received excellent reviews and has catapulted him to the stratosphere of media writers, in my view.
Both Auletta and Mnookin place much of the blame for the Times’ recent troubles squarely on the shoulders of the Times’ CEO, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., but each writer comes to his conclusion from a different perspective. Auletta writes from a financial, boardroom, newspaper industry perspective and focuses more on Sulzberger–his background, early career at the Times, and his management and leadership style–using the context of the recent Judith Miller brouhaha as a springboard for his analysis of Sulzberger’s problems and style. Mnookin writes from a reporter’s, Times newsroom perspective and focuses more on the inside reaction to Sulzberger’s leadership (or lack of it), using the Judith Miller brouhaha as his springboard, too.
I liked Aulatta’s article because he related the Times’ problems to the challenges facing the newspaper industry. He has a deep understanding of Sulzberger’s background, motivations, and shortcomings. Also, because of his reputation and credibility, Auletta had access to Times’ board members, Sulzberger, Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, and to Judith Miller, all of whom he interviewed for his article. The biggest problem with Auletta’s piece was that he had to go easy on Miller and Keller because, as he disclosed in the article, his wife is a literary agent who represents both Judith Miller and Bill Keller. So he had to be relatively gentle on them, and he was. Auletta’s article reflected the tone of the New Yorker–intelligent, in-depth, refined, reserved, and high-toned.
I liked Mnookin’s article because he didn’t go easy on either Miller or Keller, particularly Miller. Sulzberger, Keller, and Miller wouldn’t sit for interviews with Mnookin like they did for Auletta, but Mnookin has excellent anonymous sources inside the Times newsroom, who unloaded. Readers got much more of a sense of how the reporters in the newsroom felt about Sulzberger and, especially, about Miller. Mnookin reported that Miller had a “reputation for sleeping with her sources.” He must have had several unimpeachable sources in order to get that comment past the Vanity Fair lawyers, much to the delight of Vanity Fair’s editor, I’m sure. Mnookin’s article reflected the tone of Vanity Fair–smart, bitchy, insightful, edgy, and fun to read.
Auletta would never have stooped to pass on that gossipy item and put his wife in the position of having to choose between having lucrative clients or being married to him. In the New York high-octane, highly-competitive media and literary stratosphere, it’s best to avoid those types of dilemmas in an environment in which money is the ultimate bond.
Mnookin ends his article with an expression of hope from the newsroom that someone other than Sulzberger will lead the Times in the future. Auletta ends his article with a more realistic assessment from the boardroom that Sulzberger’s rein will continue because the family controls the voting stock of the company and the family has closed ranks in support of Sulzberger. Auletta quotes Gay Talese, who wrote the definitive history of the Times in his book The Kingdom and the Power, as saying, “you get a bad king once in a while.” I think this is the point that both Auletta and Mnookin make coming at the situation from different, but essential, perspectives.