Anyone find a backbone- June 30, 2005 I am stunned and sickened by Time's decision. Where is their backbone This is not just horrible for Time, this is horrible for the entire field. This sends a signal to every potential source out there, that reporters cannot be trusted when they assure you of confidentiality. As a reporter, I have given my word, and I have kept sources secret for years. And some of them have gotten very nervous. I once came under heavy fire, and the idiotic Jeffco Sheriff publicly accused me of being a liar...http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/media/2005/06/30.html#a1642 I feel dirty- June 28, 2005 I just finished True Story: Murder, Memoir and Mea Culpa. It gives me the shivers. And I just realized something as I typed in the title. Maybe I don't hate it anymore. Because the first two words are aggressively ironic, though I'm not sure they were intended that way. (The author opens by imploring us of the opposite.) So much of it was maddeningly boring, but I have to admit it had a powerful payoff. The climax was unexpected (I won't spoil with any specifics), and more revolting than I...http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/media/2005/06/28.html#a1637 Crying While Eating- June 24, 2005 There is an absolutely wonderful piece up on Slate, called Crying, While Eating. A first-person account from the founder of the site by that name, who's primarily a writer for a living, and it shows. The setup: I had signed up for a "contagious media" contest. The rules: Make a (nonpornographic) Web site. Promote it any way you want, short of paid advertisements. The page with the most visitors after three weeks wins. He and his partner came up with CryingWhileEating.com, which is exactly...http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/media/2005/06/24.html#a1635 The sex sites take on Bush- June 24, 2005 Well. Sex and . . . romance, perhaps. So I logged onto gay.com yesterday morning--and here's the disclaimer: gay.com includes a lot more than just a place to meet guys for "dates," but that seems to be its main role in life, or at least among my demo. So I log on and nearly all the pictures are replaced with one of those big red roadsign signals for NO!--a red circle with a diagonal slash through it--followed by the text: "ADULT PHOTOS TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE DUE TO THE BUSH...http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/media/2005/06/24.html#a1633 The instead-ed page- June 17, 2005 Timothy Noah has a great, overdue idea in Slate, today. Virtually every paper in America added an "op-ed" page over the past 30 years, short for "opposite the editorial page." Noah suggests it should have replaced the editorial page. No one reads those stupid things, and for good reason: . . . editorials typically lack sufficient length to marshal evidence and lay out a satisfactory argument. Instead, they tend toward either timidity, at one extreme, or posturing, at the...http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/media/2005/06/16.html#a1628 The journalist, my hero and the murderer- June 15, 2005 I had to stop reading the cover story Salon just posted after the first page. Nothing lacking in the material, or Andrew O'Hehir's treatment of it, quite the reverse. It's past 11, so the bookstores here are closed, but first thing in the morning, I'm hopping on my bike to snag a copy of Michael Finkel's book True Story. The subhead of the Salon story capsulizes it expertly: A disgraced New York Times reporter learns his identity has been stolen by an all-American hunk who killed his wife.http://blogs.salon.com/0001137/categories/media/2005/06/15.html#a1625 |