en-us IceRocket RSS Builder 1.0 http://rss.icerocket.com I started this feed on my own because my Slate overlords were taking their sweet time about improving our RSS set-up. They finally woke up this month to produce a pretty decent feed so I'm ending this one.
To keep Press Box flowing into your RSS reader, please subscribe to:
http://beta.slate.com/rss/feed.aspx?id=68090
And thanks so much for reading.
Jack Shafer]]> Billing itself as "Peer review within science journalism," KSJ Tracker sifts the Web for the day's newsiest science stories, summarizes the topic, and assesses the work of one or two of the reporters before linking to the other takes on the story. When Petit gets the URL to the press releases behind the science news, he links to them, and he charts his favorite stories on the "Petit's Picks" page. Think of KSJ Tracker as a Romenesko for science scribes.[Continued on Slate.] ]]> Nobody denies the similarities between passages from McEwan's novel and Andrews' memoir, least of all McEwan. McEwan says he acknowledged his debt by citing her book in an author's note at the close of his novel and in public when readers ask him where he gets his ideas from. But not even Julia Langdon, the journalist who publicized the parallels last month in her Mail on Sunday news feature, uses the P-word against McEwan. She tells the New York Times the novelist was "discourteous not to have drawn [Andrews'] attention to this when she was alive." Andrews died in October. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> Speaking on the left, Eric Boehlert derides the press for only now calling the mayhem a civil war. Boehlert accuses various organizations, which include NBC News, the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times, of accommodating President Bush by keeping the phrase out of their coverage for three-plus years. The administration abhors the phrase, preferring "sectarian violence." [Continued on Slate.] ]]> As announced more than a year ago, the girthsome Journal will lose 3 inches in width starting Jan. 2, giving it a similar dimension as other newspapers that have downsized in the name of cutting their newsprint costs—the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. The New York Times gets its paring in summer 2007.[Continued on Slate.] ]]> The associations formed the Newspaper Readership Project, which sociologist/marketing specialist Leo Bogart helped direct. Bogart's 1991 book, Preserving the Press: How Daily Newspapers Mobilized to Keep Their Readers, portrays an industry that knew exactly what ailed it but refused to adapt to a shifting marketplace. Change a few dates and a few names in a couple chapters from Preserving the Press, and you could republish the whole thing as "breaking news." [Continued on Slate.] ]]> In one lawsuit, he claims that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the federal government, FBI agents, and other federal employees violated the Privacy Act of 1974 repeatedly during the 2002 investigations of the anthrax mailings and poisonings. Hatfill alleges that federal employees improperly pulled government records—thus triggering the Privacy Act—to leak information about him to the press. (The Privacy Act was passed in response to President Nixon's routine abuse of records.)
In a second lawsuit, Hatfill claims Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times libeled him in a series of columns written in 2002. Kristof drew on "experts," "investigators," and "Army documents" to drop intriguing clues about the involvement of a "middle-aged American" with U.S. bio-defense program experience with the anthrax case. His columns urged the FBI to "pick up the pace," "shift into high gear," and recover from its "lethargy" in the investigation. Kristof finally named Hatfill as the "middle-aged American" he'd written about after Hatfill complained publicly about the FBI's visible investigation of him.[Continued on Slate.] ]]> Are journalists leaping from the newspaper ship before it sinks?
If swarms of midlevel reporters were making this exodus instead of senior aces, I might draw that conclusion. But Harris, VandeHei, and Von Drehle have been bid away for top dollar, which makes it hard to view them as survivors awaiting rescue. Even if Harris and VandeHei weren't worth the fantastic salaries they've been said to negotiate (My opinion? They are.), Allbritton has already recouped its premium with loads of positive publicity in the press. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> Over the last eight years—as far back as Nexis covers the Post—the New York Post has woven the word perv into the heds of at least 642 stories and the word pervert into another 59. That's almost 90 a year. Working as a slightly slower clip, the city's Daily News has published at least 163 perv heds (29 pervert heds) in the past four years. That's about 48 a year, which makes the Daily News half as perv-minded as the Post. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> I received dozens of notes from readers reminding me of the Bobs' song "Bus Plunge" and of National Lampoon's devotion to the plunge short. The magazine frequently reprinted plunge stories in its "news" section. Dozens also offered that ferry-sinkings are the new bus plunges. Sorry, guys, not enough ships go down to qualify. Bill Gifford goes even further, hypothesizing that Third World plane crashes are the new bus plunge. Gifford, who worked at Washington City Paper with me, has been a little mental about air travel since he survived a summer's worth of Siberian flights. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> As an example of the genre, it's hard to beat this 30-word gem I culled from the March 5, 1959, edition of the Times:
15 AFRICANS DIE IN BUS PLUNGE MATTAIELE, Union of South Africa, March 5 (Reuters)—Fifteen Africans were killed and thirty others were injured today when a bus careened out of control off a cliff near the Mabusa mission station, about fifteen miles from here. [Continued on The new assessments the press hands out have nothing to do with the politicians having recently "grown," though that's often how it is presented. It's all about access. If a reporter covering a political beat expects access to the newly powerful, he must genuflect, he must charm, he must write a beat sweetener that tells the new boss everything he wants to hear about himself.[Continued on Vanity Fair's Bob Colacello profiles the cheesiest of the lot, Eli Broad, in the December issue. Today's Wall Street Journal reports that Broad and supermarket king Ronald Burkle have joined checkbooks to make a preliminary bid for the whole Tribune Co. [Continued on OK, now that we've covered that base, what sort of editor will his replacement, Chicago Tribune Managing Editor James E. O'Shea, make? Where will he take the Times? Will it be someplace nice? Or will he visit ruin upon the paper? [Continued on Slate.]]]> Slate.]]]> For your labors, UCLA scholars Matthew A. Baum and Angela S. Jamison would type you a politically aware individual, as opposed to, say, your politically unaware sister-in-law who learned everything she knew about the 2004 presidential candidates by watching George W. Bush on Live With Regis and Kelly and John Kerry on The Late Show With David Letterman. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> In his columns, Rutten warns that the threatened cuts at the Los Angeles Times will injure democracy and the "stakeholders" (as opposed to stockholders) who rely on the Times' broad coverage. Kurtz declares that news organizations' "corporate slashing" will "mean fewer bodies to pore over records at City Hall, the statehouse or federal agencies"—even though he gives no examples of a newspaper slashing its hard-news staff. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> Slate.] ]]> Slate.] ]]> Slate.] ]]> On one point, however, the miserable, the whiners have a point: The number of newspaper reporters is in decline. According to decennial workforce estimates published in The American Journalist in the 21st Century, the number of daily newspaper journalists rose steadily from 38,800 in 1972 to a peak of 67,207 in 1992 before sliding to 58,769 in 2002, the most recent year surveyed.
Yet during this shrinking era, a news service started from scratch and entered in the ultracompetitive field of business journalism and has thrived almost to the point of dominance. The outfit, Bloomberg News, now employs 1,700 reporters and editors in 127 bureaus worldwide, and its wire service routinely supplies most top papers with business news and briefs. As other publications have shed older, high-paid journalists, Bloomberg News has hired them: Al Hunt (Wall Street Journal), John M. Berry and Charles Babcock (Washington Post), Margaret Carlson (Time), and Roger Simon (U.S. News & World Report), just to name a few. Yes, dinosaurs all, but each conveys to readers credibility and cachet that only money can buy.[Continued on Slate.] ]]> Preposterous, I frothed, after inspecting the methodology of the FTC-commissioned survey. A couple of weeks later, Business Week scoffed at the number, too, noting as a point of comparison that banks only made $103 billion in profits in 2005. How could identity-theft losses be half as large as their total profits? The magazine cited two smaller estimates as more plausible: the Department of Justice's estimate of $3.2 billion in identity-theft losses during six months in 2004, and an industry survey that reported banks lose $1.1 billion to credit card fraud annually. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> My magazine ocean refused no river, including fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, which I had come to appreciate through the interpretive lens of a junior-high school classmate, with whom I routinely served detention-hall sentences. We did our time in the home-economics classroom, which was well-stocked with fashion magazines, and it was under his tutelage that I learned to appreciate the fashion spreads and lingerie advertisements as a kind of subversive, highly stimulating pornography. "[Continued on Slate.] ]]> Law enforcement authorities inform the Post that "the conventional wisdom about the attacks turned out to be wrong," specifically, "the widely reported claim that the anthrax spores had been 'weaponized'—specially treated or processed to allow them to disperse more easily."[Continued on Slate.] ]]> Instead of firing Baquet and Johnson, which everybody expected, the Tribune bosses have changed the subject, according to today's New York Times. They've set the issue aside for a meeting of the Tribune board to deal with the equally insubordinate Chandler family. In 2000, the Chandlers sold the Times and the media empire to which it belonged to Tribune, making themselves Tribune's largest stockholder. The family isn't livid about budget cuts but rather Tribune's depressed stock price, and the remedy they seek is the company's breakup.[Continued on Slate.] ]]> Slate.] ]]> Slate.] ]]> "The political dialogue has been digitally enhanced, but it has also been digitally diminished," the New Republic editor-in-chief says to David Carr. "I do not remember a time, even during the 60's, when there was such uncivil discourse. … Even at Harvard." [Continued on Slate.] ]]> As W. Joseph Campbell writes in his excellent history The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms: [Continued on Slate.] ]]> In the New York Times story about the incident, Siegel acknowledges responsibility, stating, "I'm sorry about my prank, which was certainly not designed to harm a magazine that has been my happy intellectual home for many years." [Continued on Slate.] ]]> Yet serial liars aren't automatically guilty of every charge leveled against them. Even the tobacco company baddies, who took a wicked beating this week in the press, deserve a fair hearing before we hang them. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> Campbell's cross-century road trip, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, rarely leaves New York City, where three schools of journalism captained by three men in their 30s were battling for supremacy. In one corner stood Adolph Ochs, who preached an impartial, just-the-facts-ma'am approach to newspapering, and who in 1897 was enjoying his first year as the proprietor of the New York Times. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> My piece didn't advocate "free speech for terrorists," as the headline to a feature criticizing me in the March 2005 issue of Commentary would have it. My point was that the government shouldn't be in the business of blocking propaganda from U.S. viewers; it's the right of Americans to read and view what they choose that I defend. My position, as we'll see, appears to be identical with the one enshrined in U.S. law. [Continued on Slate.] ]]> The furious blog reaction to Michael Noer's Forbes piece, "Don't Marry Career Women," posted to the Web yesterday, makes the piece sound like an ugly example of "backlash" journalism. If you're not familiar with the genre, backlash stories are the kind feminists believe are 1) full of beans and 2) designed to keep women down. Here's the piece's beginning:[Continued on Slate.] ]]> Not I.
So, Time's announcement that, come January 2007, it's breaking from its Monday pub date, which it shares with Newsweek, for Friday didn't make me cheer. It did, however, cause me to wonder whether this means Time will be coming out three days before Newsweek or four days after. [Continued on Slate.] ]]>
"What apology could possibly be worthy of the Ramseys' forgiveness?" writes Ronnie Polaneczky in the Philadelphia Daily News. "The era of cable-news sensationalism has given us what's becoming a series of victims of society's judgment." [Continued on Slate.] ]]>
Scores of news organizations have accepted the 800,000 estimate as credible in their reporting of human trafficking in recent years. Within the last year alone, the figures have appeared, unquestioned, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and NPR, just to name just a few outlets. [Continued on Slate.] ]]>
I know one writer so opposed to $10 words that he uses the short stories of Raymond Carver as his thesaurus lest the genuine thesaurus cause him to insert a high-price word into a piece. Don't get me wrong: I get a kick out of $10 words, too, and even use them now and again to make my pieces showier. But the psychic surcharge deters me from using them often enough to fall into the faux-erudition trap that bedevils undisciplined, rich writers like Martin Peretz, co-owner and editor-in-chief of the New Republic. He burns through $10 words and phrases like they're kindling. Pertez's latest exercise in word-bling arrives in the third paragraph of "Just Cause," his piece in the Aug. 7 New Republic. [Continued on Slate.] ]]>
As a vanity press mogul, you join a bag of mixed nuts. There's real estate's revenge on journalism, Mortimer Zuckerman, who runs (into the ground) U.S. News & World Report and the Daily News; Philip Anschutz litters driveways with his free daily Examiners in D.C., S.F., and Baltimore; and Bruce Wasserstein extends his claim to being the toughest guy in the room with the American Lawyer and New York. David Bradley conducts etiquette lessons at the National Journal and the Atlantic; Martin Peretz makes the world safe for Israel at the New Republic; and convicted felon Rev. Sun Myung Moon is at this moment preparing us all for the rapture, Korean-style, with the Washington Times and UPI. [Continued on Slate.] ]]>
Wrong, if you live in Tennessee, Illinois, or Minnesota and were recently convicted of making methamphetamine. Tennessee adopted a "methamphetamine offender registry" in 2005, patterning its law after the sex-offender registries now kept by all 50 states. The names of all new meth felons who made or sold the drug are stored in a public Web database, where they stay for seven years. Next came Illinois, whose law logs only meth manufacturers. Last week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty mandated a Tennessee-style registry and he promises his state's Web site containing the names, birth dates, and conviction information of meth offenders will be up by year's end. Oklahoma, Georgia, and other states are also considering meth registries. [Continued on Slate.] ]]>
This week's example of journalistic overkill in the pursuit of a drug story owes its origin to a 400-word letter in the July 27 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Twin Girls With Neurocutaneous Symptoms Caused by Mothball Intoxication," in which three physicians in France solve a medical mystery posed by an 18-year-old patient. [Continued on Slate.] ]]>
George and Waldfogel examine the long march of the Times into national markets, which reached blitzkrieg velocity in the years between 1996 and 2000 as the paper commenced or expanded home delivery in more than 100 cities. George, an economist at Hunter College, and Waldfogel, a Wharton School professor (and sometimes Slate contributor), investigated the changes wrought on local newspapers by Times expansion. How does it affect circulation of local papers? How do local papers compete editorially? [Continued on Slate.] ]]>
The capsules spend 20 words—and usually fewer—to pass informed judgment on movies. Even if you never intend to watch any of the films, the capsules make for good morning reading. Consider this taut kiss-off of The Matrix Revolutions: "Ferocious machine assault on a battered Zion. Stop frowning, Neo; it's finally over." Appreciate, if you will, the efficient setup and slam of the 2 Fast 2 Furious capsule: "Ex-cop and ex-con help sexy customs agent indict money launderer. Two fine performances, both by cars." And for compression, it's hard to better the clip for the Julie Davis feature Amy's Orgasm. It warns potential viewers away with just four syllables: "Change the station." [Continued on Slate.] ]]> An iron law of journalism dictates that news of increased drug use goes onto Page One and at the top of broadcasts, but news of decreased drug use must be buried or ignored.

The press followed this iron law last month when the nation's leading tester of drugs in the workplace, Quest Diagnostics, released new findings in a press release titled "Amphetamines Use Declined Significantly Among U.S. Workers in 2005." (The company lumps amphetamine and its chemical cousin methamphetamine together in its "amphetamines" category.) [Continued on Slate.] ]]> Who are all those bloggers? Why do they blog?
The Pew report, written briskly and ably by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox, delivers an array of provocative findings about bloggers. The most immediately startling for me was the repetition of the phrases "about half" or "nearly half" to describe various blogger attributes. About half of all American bloggers are men, says Pew. About half are under the age of 30. About half use a pseudonym. About half say creative self-expression or documenting personal experiences is a major reason for blogging. About half think their audience is folks they already know. Half say changing people's minds is not a major reason behind their blog, and about half had never published before starting their blog. (The margin of error for the telephone survey was plus or minus 7 percentage points.) [Continued on Slate.] ]]> On June 25, the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times published a "Modern Love" column on how to use animal training techniques to fix your man. Titled "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage," it almost immediately reached No. 1 on NYTimes.com's list of most frequently e-mailed articles. No big deal. Columns about men, women, and relationships are perennial favorites. But almost three weeks later, the piece remains near the top of the NYTimes.com's constantly churning list of most-e-mailed articles and shows no sign of sinking. "Shamu's" run makes it the newspaper equivalent of Dark Side of the Moon, the Pink Floyd disc that has owned a spot on the Billboard Top 200 chart for all but a couple of weeks since 1973. (Continued on Slate.) ]]> Slate.] ]]> Slate.]]]> Slate.]]]> Slate.] ]]>