History > 2007 > USA > Journalism (I)

Court:

Reporter Need Not Turn Over Notes

December 24, 2007
Filed at 6:03 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- An appeals court on Monday struck down a ruling ordering a reporter to give prosecutors unpublished notes from an interview with a man who shot two police officers before killing himself.

Mankato Free Press reporter Dan Nienaber was one of the last people to speak with Jeff Skjervold, 41, who shot and injured two police officers during a Dec. 23, 2006, standoff at his home.

District Court Judge Norb Smith ruled that Nienaber had to turn over his unpublished notes to Blue Earth County prosecutors, who were investigating the incident.

But the Minnesota Court of Appeals panel ruled that prosecutors did not prove they had a compelling enough reason to seize Nienaber's notes.

''Essentially, the county attorney argues that it needs to conduct discovery to find an injustice, but declines to connect the discovery to a particular injustice,'' appeals court Judge Christopher Dietzen wrote. ''We conclude that the statute requires that the particular injustice be identified.''

The ruling was a rare test of the state's reporter shield law, which protects reporters from having to identify sources or reveal unpublished information. Mark Anfinson, an attorney for the newspaper, said the fact that few cases are brought under the shield law adds to the importance of each ruling.

''This decision reminds everyone who might think about using a subpoena against a journalist that those circumstances are very narrow,'' he said.

County Attorney Ross Arneson said his office has not decided whether to appeal.

    Court: Reporter Need Not Turn Over Notes, NYT, 24.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Officers-Shot-Court.html

Remaking The Journal

December 12, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

In the last few months, Rupert Murdoch has moved into an office at Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal. He has pushed the paper’s editors for shorter articles and more hard news. He has personally wooed reporters he wants to keep out of his competitors’ hands.

And last week, he oversaw the replacement of top executives, including The Journal’s publisher, with his own lieutenants.

And he hasn’t even bought the company yet.

That will change on Thursday, when in all likelihood shareholders will vote to approve the sale of Dow Jones to Mr. Murdoch’s company, the News Corporation. But Mr. Murdoch has already seized the reins of Dow Jones and The Journal, setting in motion what amounts to an overhaul of the look, content and staff of one of the world’s most prized newspapers.

“He’s not wasting any time,” said one Dow Jones executive who, like most of the people interviewed, asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the changes being made. “He’s already calling the shots, making decisions. We know that’s his M.O., but it’s amazing to see.”

For The Journal’s editors and reporters, this is a time of both anxiety and anticipation about what will happen when more than a century of independent family ownership reaches its end.

During the protracted takeover battle last spring and summer, many of them expressed concern that Mr. Murdoch would shape The Journal’s news pages to promote his own business and political interests — a News Corporation practice that The Journal itself documented in a long article — or simply cheapen the august paper.

But Mr. Murdoch also pledged to open the purse strings to expand The Journal’s reach, a prospect many people welcome at a newspaper with years of stagnant advertising revenue. Already, The Journal has offered significant raises to journalists it wants to hire and to some who were considering leaving the paper, with Mr. Murdoch calling some reporters personally to ask them to stay.

Mr. Murdoch has said that he wanted The Journal to step up its coverage of politics and national and international affairs, making it a more direct competitor to The New York Times. He has lobbied for more hard news and more succinct articles — a marked shift in tone for a newspaper whose signatures include long, often quirky news features that start on the front page.

There has even been talk of a front page with articles short enough to start and end there rather than continuing on inside pages, and of taking the words “Wall Street” out of the paper’s name to give it broader appeal, according to people who have been briefed on the matter. Both ideas were quickly dismissed, but the fact that they were raised even semiseriously shows how unconstrained by tradition the new owner is, these people said.

“This kind of decisiveness and moving rapidly, not just at the top but deep into the organization, is unusual in media takeovers,” said Louis Ureneck, chairman of the journalism department at Boston University. “There tends to be some patience about getting to know the operation and making a smooth transition. But he’s operating like a young man who’s bought a sports car and can’t wait to hop in and drive it around.”

None of that should be surprising from Mr. Murdoch, who is known for being sure of what he wants to do with each of his many properties — often molding them to reflect his own views and wasting no time in doing it. His habit of detailed, personal control contrasts starkly with decades of hands-off ownership by the Bancroft family, which viewed almost any involvement as unethical meddling.

The takeover puts vast resources behind a newspaper that is marginally profitable at best, in part because it has defied the industry trends of cutting staff and circulation. The News Corporation has $29 billion in annual revenue compared with $2 billion for Dow Jones, and Mr. Murdoch has shown repeatedly that he is willing to invest in his properties — even to take heavy losses on some of them — in order to win audiences and advertisers away from their competitors.

With a bodyguard and his longtime secretary in tow — as well as the occasional News Corporation executive — Mr. Murdoch has been a frequent presence in Dow Jones offices, meeting with executives, the editorial page editor of The Journal, Paul Gigot and, in the main newsroom two floors below, Marcus W. Brauchli, the managing editor.

In a handful of walks through the newsroom and a visit to The Journal’s printing plant in South Brunswick, N.J., Mr. Murdoch, 76, has revealed little about his intentions, employees say. But they add that at each stop, he has asked questions about their work and displayed an astonishing command of detail about what they do, from production schedules to running the presses.

There are already firm plans to eliminate The Journal’s Marketplace section, containing articles on business trends and technology, in the first half of next year, with a new section taking its place, according to people at Dow Jones and the News Corporation who have been briefed on the changes. The editor of Marketplace, Melinda Beck, recently left that post to write a column on health, and no replacement has been named.

There are also plans to replace dozens of the newsroom staff, while other personnel changes reflecting Mr. Murdoch’s priorities have already begun, including building up the Washington bureau and shopping for reporters and editors to hire away from The Journal’s competitors.

When the takeover battle was under way last spring and summer, some of The Journal’s reporters and editors accused Mr. Murdoch of shaping his company’s journalism to reflect his own interests. Such criticism became far more muted as the takeover approached. There is anxiety about changes, real or rumored, tempered by optimism.

“I think there are a whole span of people who say, ‘Hey, let’s see what he does, let’s give it a chance,’” said Byron Calame, a former deputy managing editor of The Journal who has also served as the public editor of The Times. “The idea that there might be more assets, more resources put into the news-gathering gives some people hope.”

Mr. Murdoch has acted like a man in a hurry since the end of July, when the controlling Bancroft family agreed to sell him Dow Jones for more than $5 billion. Days after the family’s decision, Mr. Murdoch had an office built for him in the 11th floor executive suite in the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan where Dow Jones is headquartered.

Within weeks, teams of executives and managers from the two companies were meeting to compare advertising strategies, look for joint ventures and to debate the future of The Journal’s paid online subscription system, which Mr. Murdoch dislikes.

Indeed, Mr. Murdoch, who tends to muse out loud about big ideas that might be dropped later, told investors in Australia and one of his newspapers there that he would stop charging readers of The Journal’s online site, WSJ.com, but the statement came as a surprise to executives at both companies who later said they did not believe a final decision had been made.

People close to top Dow Jones executives say that it has been made clear to them that they would be replaced almost immediately either to consolidate operations with the News Corporation or to put Murdoch loyalists in control, or both. The first confirmation came last week, when Dow Jones announced that Richard F. Zannino, the chief executive officer, and L. Gordon Crovitz, the publisher of The Journal, would leave their posts.

The Journal will dismiss two to three dozen people on its news staff of about 750, probably through buyouts, officials at both companies say. The aim is not to reduce head count, which could actually increase, but to make room for a wave of hiring in areas Mr. Murdoch wants to expand and in some cases, simply to be rid of people.

Since last summer, at least 10 reporters and editors have left the paper, and some of their jobs remain vacant. Many more, concerned about the paper’s new direction, have reached out to other publications about job prospects.

A year from now the newspaper could have a large contingent of reporters and editors hired under Mr. Murdoch and not rooted in The Journal’s traditions. They would also be people who did not live through the anxious months when many newsroom employees opposed the takeover and questioned Mr. Murdoch’s journalistic ethics. “It has the makings of a pretty big cultural shift,” a veteran reporter said.

An agreement between Mr. Murdoch and the Bancrofts gives Mr. Brauchli, the top newsroom executive, total control over most of the newspaper’s content, and over newsroom hiring, firing and job assignments — at least in theory. But experts have predicted that with control of The Journal’s budget, Mr. Murdoch would eventually hold sway over the newsroom.

People who work with Mr. Brauchli say that some of the changes contemplated or under way might have occurred even without the takeover — including the recent appearance of more hard news and political news on the front page — and that in some areas he agrees with Mr. Murdoch’s agenda. But they also concede that the future owner’s influence is powerful, his stamp unmistakable.

A number of Mr. Brauchli’s recent personnel moves align with the new priorities.

Several highly regarded reporters and editors are being relocated to The Journal’s bureau in Washington, including a new chief of the bureau, John Bussey. Gerald F. Seib’s column on Washington, Capitol Journal, is being revived.

The Journal has been hiring new reporters and has made lucrative offers to a number of prominent journalists at The Times and elsewhere, mostly unsuccessfully.

The Journal has lost some big names, like Henny Sender, a prominent reporter who went to The Financial Times. But so far, the departures do not amount to a large-scale defection.

“A lot of us are at least a little worried about what this place will become,” said one veteran reporter at The Journal. “But right now our attitude is, wait and see.”

    Remaking The Journal, NYT, 12.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/business/media/12murdoch.html?hp

Grim View of Iraq Dangers

in Survey of Journalists

November 28, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

In a newly released survey, American journalists in Iraq give harrowing accounts of their work, with the great majority saying that colleagues have been kidnapped or killed and that most parts of Baghdad are too dangerous for them to visit.

The survey was conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in Washington. Of the 111 journalists who participated, half had spent at least nine months in Iraq, and three-quarters had experience reporting on other armed conflicts. Most of the journalists were surveyed in October, one of the least deadly months in Baghdad in recent years.

Almost two-thirds of the respondents said that most or all of their street reporting was done by local citizens, yet 87 percent said that it was not safe for their Iraqi reporters to openly carry notebooks, cameras or anything else that identified them as journalists. Two-thirds of respondents said they worried that their reliance on local reporters — including many with little or no background in journalism — could produce inaccurate or incomplete news reports.

The Americans also voiced serious concerns about how effectively they were able to do their own jobs. Most respondents said that the media did not do a good job covering the lives of ordinary Iraqis or reconstruction efforts, simply because those lines of reporting could be deadly.

The Project for Excellence said that the journalists in the survey worked for 29 of the 30 news organizations that report regularly from Iraq and reach large American audiences. The organizations include newspapers, news agencies, magazines, broadcast and cable television networks, and radio networks. One organization declined to take part, and all but one that did participate are based in the United States.

The Project for Excellence kept the names of the organizations secret as well as those of the journalists, citing security concerns.

“The grimness of the results surprised me,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project. “It shows how difficult and extraordinarily dangerous telling this story is.”

When asked to elaborate on the risks, the Americans gave comments like, “Seven staffers killed since 2003, including three last July,” and, “The dangers can’t be overstated.” One wrote of routinely sitting away from windows to avoid shards of glass from an explosion, and “scanning every car on the street for low rides (too much weight) and weapons,” adding, “It’s amazingly scary.”

Iraqi employees take the greatest risks by far on behalf of the American media, going to the most dangerous places and dying in the greatest numbers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a separate organization that keeps track of violence against journalists.

That group says that 124 journalists from around the world have been killed in Iraq since the war there began in 2003, including 102 Iraqis. In addition, 49 support staff employees working for news organizations — people like drivers, bodyguards and translators — have been killed, and all but one of them were Iraqis.

Of the respondents, 69 percent said that most or all of Baghdad was too dangerous to visit; only 6 percent said that less than half of Baghdad was too dangerous.

Almost three-quarters of the journalists travel with armed guards, and nearly as many ride in armored vehicles. A majority said that traveling with the United States military imposes some limitations on their reporting, but it also allows them to go places they could not survive otherwise.

    Grim View of Iraq Dangers in Survey of Journalists, NYT, 28.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/business/media/28pew.html?hp

AP Challenges

Photographer's Detention

November 22, 2007
Filed at 12:30 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- A series of accusations raised by the U.S. military against an Associated Press photographer detained for 19 months in Iraq are false or meaningless, according to an intensive AP investigation of the case made public Wednesday.

Evidence and testimony collected by the AP show no support for allegations that Bilal Hussein took part in insurgent activities or bomb-making, and few of the images he provided dealt directly with Iraqi insurgents.

''Despite the fact that Hussein has not been interrogated since May 2006, allegations have been dropped or modified over time, and new claims added, all without any explanation,'' said the nearly 50-page report compiled last spring by lawyer and former federal prosecutor Paul Gardephe.

The report, along with copious exhibits and other findings, were provided to U.S. and Iraqi officials in late June but have never been publicly released by the AP.

''The best evidence of how Hussein conducted himself as a journalist working for AP is the extensive photographic record,'' Gardephe wrote. ''There is no evidence -- in nearly a thousand photographs taken over the 20-month period -- that his activities ever strayed from those of a legitimate journalist.''

The U.S. military notified the AP last weekend that it intended to submit a complaint against Hussein that would bring the case into the Iraqi justice system as early as Nov. 29. Under Iraqi codes, an investigative magistrate will decide whether there are grounds to try Hussein, who was seized in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi on April 12, 2006. The AP has retained Gardephe to defend Hussein before the Iraqi court.

Military officials have alleged that Hussein, 36, had links to terrorist groups but are refusing to disclose what evidence or accusations would be presented. Previously, the military suggested an array of possible lines of investigation, including claims that Hussein offered to provide false identification to a sniper seeking to evade U.S.-led forces, that he possessed bomb-making equipment, and that he took photographs that were synchronized with insurgent blasts.

Most of Gardephe's report is based on a two-week visit to Iraq in March. He inspected hundreds of photographs taken by Hussein and interviewed him in custody for more than 40 hours along with a wide range of co-workers, relatives and friends.

The report addresses points raised by the military in both private conversations and public statements, but Gardephe said he was hampered by the lack of specific information about what the military intends to present in court.

Despite U.S. military claims that insurgents granted Hussein ''unusual access,'' the overwhelming majority of his photographs showed scenes readily visible to any passer-by, such as bombed-out buildings, injured civilians and funerals, Gardephe said. He reviewed all of the nearly 1,000 photo images submitted by Hussein while he was working for the AP, of which only 420 were distributed. Fewer than 10 percent of those 420 show either known or possible insurgents.

His report found no photographs synchronized with an explosion or other attack, and no other photographic evidence that he was ever tipped off to insurgent activity.

Only on one day during the most intense fighting over Fallujah in November 2004 did he photograph insurgents actually engaged in combat against coalition forces, while other photos during his employment showed the aftermath of attacks in areas he was covering.

Gardephe cited Hussein's photos of a Red Crescent ambulance damaged by insurgent mortars; of relatives weeping over the body of an Iraqi soldier killed by insurgents; of the bodies of 19 fisherman killed by insurgents for no apparent reason; and of civilians hurt by suicide car bombs.

''These and other such images are inconsistent with the notion that Hussein was 'plugged-into' the insurgency or an insurgent propagandist,'' the report said.

One of the photos of insurgents in combat -- taken in Fallujah on Nov. 8, 2004 -- was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning submission by the AP. It shows one insurgent firing a machine gun, while another holds an ammunition belt and a third apparently had just fired a mortar. According to the AP report, Hussein took this photo from a nearby furniture store, and the insurgents were not aware of his presence.

Regarding some of the other accusations:

--The report rejected the military's contention that Hussein possessed bomb-making materials. Gardephe said this allegation appeared to be based solely on the fact that Hussein, after being arrested at his Ramadi apartment, was taken to an electrician's shop on the ground floor and photographed next to equipment and broken appliances.

''There is no evidence that Hussein had any access to or connection with that shop and storage room; the doors of both were locked before the USM (U.S. military) smashed them in,'' the report said. ''Both the owner of the building and Hussein himself told us that the shop was owned and operated by an electrician who had left Ramadi six months to a year earlier.''

--Gardephe said he uncovered no evidence that Hussein provided false identification to anyone. He noted that false IDs are readily available from numerous sources in Iraq. Many Iraqis carry false IDs to conceal their religious affiliation, which has been used as a pretext in sectarian killings.

''Why anyone would approach Hussein about false identification is unclear, but such an allegation ignores the fact that false identification is epidemic in Iraq and readily obtainable both from the marketplace and even from Government offices,'' the report said.

--The U.S. military has suggested that Hussein may have played a role in the kidnapping of two Arab journalists in March 2006. The AP report said Hussein simply brought the two men to safety, at the request of another journalist who had telephoned him with news of their release.

The report noted that the AP had spoken with both journalists, neither of whom had been contacted by the U.S. military. ''They emphatically stated that Hussein was not involved in their kidnapping and that he in fact brought them to safety,'' it said.

--At the time of his arrest in Ramadi, Hussein had two guests in his apartment, one of them an alleged insurgent leader named Abu Moadh. According to the AP report, Hussein said he had never met Abu Moadh before that day, and had offered him refuge in his apartment during a chance encounter on the street as people were fleeing from a bombing nearby.

The U.S. military contends that Hussein ''gave conflicting answers during his interrogations when asked whether he 'knew' these two men,'' the report said. ''The issue, however, could turn on a miscommunication or mistranslation as to the meaning of the word 'know.' Hussein told interrogators initially that he 'knew of' these insurgent leaders, but he did not mean to suggest that he had had personal dealings with them.''

--The U.S. military said explosive residue was found on Hussein after his arrest. But the report of such residue would not be surprising, given that Hussein had been walking back from a bakery at the time of a nearby explosion.

''Explosions are commonplace in Iraqi cities where insurgents are active. Like other journalists, Hussein was expected to frequent such places as part of his job,'' the report said. ''Under the circumstances, the presence of explosive residue on Hussein's body or clothing proves nothing.''

Gardephe recounted discussions he had with U.S. military officials at Camp Cropper, the facility outside Baghdad where Hussein is being held.

''The USM conceded that the 'evidence' concerning most of the allegations against Hussein was quite weak,'' Gardephe wrote.

''However, I was told that the USM has 'irrefutable proof' concerning the synchronized photo/explosion allegation and the false identification claim. The USM refused to share any evidence concerning these two allegations with me, however, on the grounds that the proof was 'classified.'''

Hussein comes from a prominent family in Fallujah and was one of 14 children.

Gardephe's report said one brother has been taken into custody three times but was quickly released each time. It said the U.S. military has alleged that another brother is active in an insurgent group located outside of Iraq; however, the AP report said he left Iraq because he was threatened by insurgents after he had joined a pro-coalition police force.

''In the more than 40 hours I spent with Hussein, I saw no hint of religious, sectarian, or ideological extremism,'' Gardephe wrote. ''Instead, I found a fairly sophisticated man who had thought deeply about the ethics of his trade.''

The report said the lack of evidence linking Hussein to the insurgency suggests that he is being detained because of his work as a photojournalist.

''Hussein's interrogators have repeatedly alluded to the photographs he took as the basis for his incarceration,'' the report said. ''Interrogators have focused, in particular, on several photographs taken shortly before his arrest showing Iraqi children playing with the torn-off leg of an injured U.S. or Iraqi soldier.''

The report quoted one interrogator as saying to Hussein: ''Do you know what would happen if these photos were shown in the U.S.? There would be huge demonstrations and we would have to leave Iraq. ... Your photos present a threat to us.''

None of those photographs was distributed by the AP.

Numerous other photojournalists have been detained in Iraq, but few have been held more than a few months.

Hussein's continued detention ''cannot be justified,'' the AP report said. ''He has not been interrogated since mid-May 2006; there is no credible evidence that he was an active participant in the insurgency; and journalists with known connections to the insurgents have been released.''

''In light of these factors,'' the report concluded, ''we request that the USM release Hussein after reviewing the facts ... and carefully considering Hussein's extensive photographic production.''

------

The AP report:

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/--international/bilal--document/ind

    AP Challenges Photographer's Detention, NYT, 22.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Detained-Photographer.html

Why Big Newspapers Applaud

Some Declines in Circulation

October 1, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

As the newspaper industry bemoans falling circulation, major papers around the country have a surprising attitude toward a lot of potential readers: Don’t bother.

The big American newspapers sell about 10 percent fewer copies than they did in 2000, and while the migration of readers to the Web is usually blamed for that decline, much of it has been intentional. Driven by marketing and delivery costs and pressure from advertisers, many papers have decided certain readers are not worth the expense involved in finding, serving and keeping them.

“It’s a rational business decision of newspapers focusing on quality circulation rather than quantity, shedding the subscribers who cost more and generate less revenue,” said Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm.

That rational business decision is being driven in part by advertisers, who have changed their own attitudes toward circulation.

In the boom years, “there was more willingness by advertisers to assign some value to the occasional reader, the student, the reader who doesn’t match a certain profile,” said Jason E. Klein, chief executive of the Newspaper National Network, a marketing alliance.

But advertisers have become more cost-conscious and have learned how to reach narrowly tailored audiences on the Internet. Sponsors of preprinted ads that are inserted into a newspaper have been especially aggressive in telling papers that some circulation just is not worthwhile.

“The insert advertisers look to flood the area within five miles of their stores or flood certain ZIP codes,” Mr. Klein said. “They’re not interested in hitting a scattering of readers, and they don’t want to pay for it.”

As a result, newspapers have sharply curtailed their traditional methods of winning customers — advertising, cold-calling people and offering promotional discounts. That strategy was always expensive, and it has become more so with do-not-call laws and the rising number of people who have only cellphones. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the average cost of getting a new subscription order, including discounts, was $68 in 2006, more than twice as much as in 2002.

Most of the customers recruited with promotions and cold calls drop their subscriptions when the discount expires, so the cost of pursuing them and putting the news on their doorsteps can exceed what they pay for the paper. And despite falling ad sales, most American papers still make more money from ads than from circulation.

So the industry is accepting that circulation will fall and hoping to find a level that can be sustained with little effort. As a result, the subscription churn rate — the number of people who drop their newspaper each year divided by the total number of subscribers — fell to 36 percent last year from 54 percent in 2000, the newspaper association says.

There are exceptions to the trend; New York City’s tabloids, The Daily News and The New York Post, continue to scrap for as many readers as they can, even if many of them drift away. And some executives and analysts think newspapers have gone too far in cutting investments meant to cultivate new readers, like advertising on radio or distributing papers in schools.

“Newspapers have not spent a lot of money on that kind of self-promotion, and I think that has hindered our long-term growth,” said John Kimball, chief marketing officer at the Newspaper Association of America.

A prime example of the new approach is at The Los Angeles Times, which has lost more circulation in this decade than any other paper, falling to about 800,000 on weekdays in its most recent reports to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, from almost 1.1 million in 2000.

“There is a school of thought these days that you stop actively selling altogether and let the readership seek its natural level,” said Jack Klunder, senior vice president for circulation at The Los Angeles Times. “We’re not at that point, but we’re running far fewer promotions, accepting that some number of people are never going to buy the paper, long run, at full price.”

Like many other papers, The Times has also cut back sharply on advertising itself. “When the profitability stream of the paper is interrupted, you start to look at places to save on the expense side,” including advertising, Mr. Klunder said. “You need to advertise in the long run, but we make a lot of short-term decisions in this business.”

The New York Times’s circulation has held relatively steady in this decade, but that masks two opposing trends. In its home market, circulation is down, as The Times, like others, has cut back on promotions and discounting. But sales are up in other markets where The Times continues to pursue new, mostly affluent readers.

Some large papers have made conscious decisions to limit their geographic range. The most striking recent example is The Dallas Morning News. Last year, it stopped distribution outside a 200-mile radius, and weekday circulation tumbled 15 percent to a little over 400,000. This year, the paper imposed a 100-mile limit. It expects to show another drop in sales when new figures are reported this month.

“We were distributing in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, way down in south Texas,” said Jim Moroney, the publisher and chief executive. “It cost too much money getting the papers to those places, and this clearly wasn’t anything our advertisers were giving us value for.”

Many of the readers who were cut loose complained, “but I have no regrets,” he said. “The people who really want to read The Dallas Morning News can still get it online.”

    Why Big Newspapers Applaud Some Declines in Circulation, NYT, 1.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/business/media/01paper.html

Cash - For - Coverage

Alleged at NY Post

May 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:02 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Strippers! Sex acts! Illicit gifts!

A typical day for the New York Post's salacious Page Six -- except this time, the bold-faced names in the widely read gossip column included the paper's owner, its editor and the editor of the column itself.

Post editor Col Allan, according to a one-time Post employee, received sexual favors from the dancers at a well known Manhattan strip club. Owner Rupert Murdoch spiked stories that were bad for his business ventures, the ex-employee alleges.

And longtime Page Six honcho Richard Johnson accepted a cash gift from a Manhattan restaurateur for a favorable mention -- typical, the fired worker claims, of an operation where graft and freebies flowed freely.

The Post acknowledged the last charge was partially true. It said Johnson received a ''Christmas gift'' of $1,000 cash in 1997. He was confessed the gift to Allan and was reprimanded, the paper said. It did not say when Johnson came forward to Allan, who did not take over the Post until 2001.

Allan, meanwhile, insisted that his behavior several years ago at the club, Scores, was ''beyond reproach.''

A Post spokesman said the tabloid would not respond to the other allegations point by point. ''They're branding them generally as false,'' Howard Rubenstein said Saturday.

In an apparent pre-emptive strike Friday, the Post published the charges made in a four-page statement by a former Post reporter, Ian Spiegelman. The rival Daily News jumped on the story in Saturday's paper, with the front page tease, ''Ex-Post Reporter Alleges Seedy Shenanigans.''

Spiegelman's assertions, if true, would bolster any legal action against the tabloid by another ex-Post writer, Jared Paul Stern. The allegations involving billionaire media mogul Murdoch also could complicate his News Corp.'s offer to buy Dow Jones & Co., which owns The Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch specifically spiked any ''unflattering stories about Chinese officials'' over concerns they might have ''endangered Murdoch's broadcasting privileges'' in the country, Spiegelman said.

Murdoch has insisted his reputation as a meddler is overstated and he would preserve the Journal's independence if his bid to buy Dow Jones is successful.

Stern, a Page 6 freelancer, was suspended last year amid allegations he tried to shake down billionaire Ronald Burkle in exchange for favorable coverage. He no longer works for the paper.

Spiegelman, who also worked for Page Six, was fired in 2004 -- a point noted by Allen in his response to the charges.

''Spiegelman's claims are a tissue of lies concocted by an embittered former employee I fired,'' the editor said in Friday's paper. ''His untruths are so outrageous, they would be laughable if they were not so offensive.''

Stern, speaking Saturday, said he had witnessed some of what Spiegelman alleges, including Allan's regular visits to Scores and orders ''that came down from the top'' about sparing certain public figures from bad publicity.

''They're not telling the whole truth,'' Stern said.

    Cash - For - Coverage Alleged at NY Post, NYT, 19.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Page-Six.html

Two ABC News journalists

killed in Iraq

Fri May 18, 2007
3:27PM EDT
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Gunmen killed two ABC News employees in Iraq in the latest attack on journalists in the war-torn country, the U.S. news organization said on Friday.

The men were identified as cameraman Alaa Uldeen Aziz, 33, and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, 26, ABC News said in a statement.

"Today, we've lost two family members, and it really hurts," Terry McCarthy, ABC News' Baghdad correspondent, said on the organization's Web site. "We have Iraqi camera crews who very bravely go out ... without them we are blind, we cannot see what's going on."

The two were returning home from work at the ABC News Baghdad bureau on Thursday when they were stopped by two cars full of gunmen and forced out of their car, the statement said. They were confirmed dead Friday morning.

There were no details available on their attackers.

The deaths brought the number of journalists killed in Iraq since 2003 to 104, making it the deadliest conflict for media in 25 years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

"This senseless attack underscores why Iraq remains the most dangerous assignment in the world," CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said in a statement. "No journalist is safe in covering this story, especially local Iraqi reporters who have suffered the brunt of media casualties."

Iraqis have accounted for 83 percent of all media deaths in the country, the group said.

Several U.S. television journalists became casualties in attacks last year on military convoys.

ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff was badly wounded, along with his cameraman, Doug Vogt, by a bomb blast in January 2006 while on assignment near Baghdad.

In May of that year, two British journalists working for CBS, Paul Douglas and James Brolan, were killed, and American CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier was severely wounded, when a car bomb struck a U.S. military patrol in Baghdad.

Aziz is survived by his wife, two daughters and mother, and Yousuf by his fiancee, mother and brothers and sisters, ABC said.

    Two ABC News journalists killed in Iraq, R, 18.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1846194020070518

Murdoch

on Owning The Wall Street Journal

May 4, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD SIKLOS
and ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

Like any close reader of The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch has his opinions.

“I’m sometimes frustrated by the long stories,” he said, adding that he rarely gets around to finishing some articles.

The editorial pages? He likes them but would like to see more political coverage in the news pages. “I might put more emphasis on Washington,” he said. He’s not a huge fan of the Saturday Journal begun in 2005, but he would continue it and look at converting its Pursuits section into a glossy weekend magazine to compete with The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

And while he’s no technology geek, he also said he regularly reads the paper’s technology columnist, Walter Mossberg, although he added: “I don’t say I understand it perfectly.”

Most readers just write a letter to the editor. Mr. Murdoch offered $5 billion to buy The Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones & Company. To do that, he must first win over the Bancroft family, which has controlled Dow Jones for the last 92 years and has so far resisted all of his overtures, in part over concerns of what he might do to The Journal.

He insists he won’t meddle in the journalism or slash-and-burn the staff. “We’re not coming in with a bunch of cost-cutters,” he said, but added: “I’m not saying it’s going to be a holiday camp for everybody.”

In an interview in his eighth-floor office in Midtown Manhattan yesterday, Mr. Murdoch, who occasionally glanced at his notes on a yellow tablet, waxed on about his plans to invest in the company’s journalism, including rebranding the forthcoming Fox business channel with The Journal’s name. He also spoke of his family’s commitment to preserving the paper’s heritage and, perhaps more surprisingly, with sympathy about the position his offer has put the Bancroft family in.

The family, which owns 64 percent of the voting shares, has said that 52 percent of those voting shares oppose Mr. Murdoch’s offer. They have not answered any of his invitations to meet with him and his sons, James and Lachlan, and a daughter, Elisabeth.

“My real intention is to try to get a meeting, not to impress them with my charm — if I have any — but to impress them with the intentions and feelings of my adult children,” Mr. Murdoch said, trying to assuage concerns about succession at the News Corporation as he leaned back on his taupe sofa.

While he said he still hopes to address the family as a group, Mr. Murdoch said he did not personally plan to start to lobby any individual shareholders on the fence. The Bancroft trusts, representing three dozen or so members of the family, own 24.7 percent of Dow Jones’s stock but control 64.2 percent of the votes through supervoting shares. With many other shareholders in favor of his bid, Mr. Murdoch might only have to persuade a handful of family members.

“I don’t want to be in a position of putting one Bancroft against another Bancroft. I’m not in the business of stirring up trouble in the family,” he said. “Our understanding is that there are several members of the family who have not made a final decision,” he said. “I think the next step for us is to be patient — and to be available at anytime should they respond to my suggestion for a meeting.”

And if a large majority of the family ended up clearly rejecting his bid? “It would be ugly — depending on your perspective, it might be admirable too,” Mr. Murdoch said of the way the family would most likely be perceived. “I think it would cause quite a lot of argument.”

Mr. Murdoch has long sought The Wall Street Journal. He said he decided to finally make a formal bid after years of flirting with the company. His offer — worth $60 a share, a 67 percent premium — was meant “to get the attention of the owners,” he said, while acknowledging that even some his own board members who unanimously supported the proposal shared the view that it was “insanely high.”

Mr. Murdoch needs to win over not only the Bancroft family but members of The Journal’s newsroom, many of whom hope to fend off his bid. Jesse Drucker, a Wall Street Journal reporter and representative of the paper’s union, has written an e-mail message to his colleagues, asking them to write short letters to three members of the Bancroft family: Leslie Hill, Christopher Bancroft and Elizabeth Steele.

“I am urging you to take part in this,” he wrote. “The Bancrofts are under tremendous pressure to accept News Corp.’s offer, and that pressure will only become greater in the likely event that Murdoch raises his bid.”

Mr. Murdoch spoke of his upbringing in newspapers and listed various titles in Australia and Britain that he says he saved from disappearing by revitalizing them. He added that he had started businesses around the world — including the Fox Broadcasting network and Fox News Channel in the United States — where people said the market was too crowded, and prided himself on expanding media choices.

“It has been a long career and I’m not going to say that it hasn’t been punctuated by mistakes,” he said.

Mr. Murdoch said that if it were legally possible, he would rechristen his planned Fox Business Channel with a name with “Journal” in it.

While Mr. Murdoch went to great pains to explain that he sees himself as a lifelong newspaperman who learned journalism from his father in Australia, he also tried to say that his reputation as an interloper owner was overstated. He said he was not involved with the news operations of the higher-end newspapers, although he takes a closer role in tabloids like The Sun in London and The New York Post.

And he said he would propose to the Bancrofts setting up a separate board for the newspaper, mandated with ensuring its editorial independence, as he has done since he acquired The Times and Sunday Times in 1981.

He said the independent board works, recalling that “The Sunday Times came out loudly for the decapitation of Margaret Thatcher,” whom he had personally supported. He said, “I didn’t know about it,” and then joked, “I pretended I hadn’t read it.”

Many people have said that The Times has become more populist or down-market under his ownership, but Mr. Murdoch said “absolutely not” to that characterization, adding that he had doubled editorial space and expanded foreign bureaus.

And while he said he wouldn’t take a hands-on approach, he said, “I think I’d be around the place — not every day. After all, it’s going to be News Corporation money and I’d be grossly negligent if I didn’t take a close interest.”

He said that he admired the Dow Jones chief executive, Richard F. Zannino, and the newly appointed top editor, Marcus W. Brauchli, and would leave them in place. He said that he did not plan on bringing any News Corporation editors to the paper, but that he did plan to call on Robert Thomson, the editor of his Times of London and the former editor of the United States edition of The Financial Times, for advice.

Although he said that he hoped to make money off his $5 billion investment, Mr. Murdoch said, as he did in his letter to the family, that being part of his larger global company would allow the company to invest for the longer term.

He talked about revitalizing The Journal’s editions in Europe and Asia, which have been depleted of resources. He also suggested that globalization would make The Journal even more important internationally — he said millions of people in India and China represented a huge opportunity, not to be squandered.

Mr. Murdoch said recent changes by management like scaling back international editions were made for “efficiency” and that his company would “be coming from a different point of view to develop a paper that provides management and journalists more resources and more investment.”

“A year ago they made $81 million after tax and paid $80 million in dividends,” he said, “and you can’t grow a company that way.”

    Murdoch on Owning The Wall Street Journal, NYT, 4.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/business/media/04murdoch.html?hp

David Halberstam, 73,

Reporter and Author, Dies

April 24, 2007
The New York Times
By CLYDE HABERMAN

David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and tireless author of books on topics as varied as America’s military failings in Vietnam, the deaths of firefighters at the World Trade Center and the high-pressure world of professional basketball, was killed yesterday in a car crash south of San Francisco. He was 73, and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Halberstam was a passenger in a car making a turn in Menlo Park, Calif., when it was hit broadside by another car and knocked into a third vehicle, said the San Mateo County coroner. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The man who was driving Mr. Halberstam, a journalism student at the University of California at Berkeley, was injured, as were the drivers of the other two vehicles. None of those injuries were called serious.

Mr. Halberstam was killed doing what he had done his entire adult life: reporting. He was on his way to interview Y. A. Tittle, the former New York Giants quarterback, for a book about the 1958 championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts, considered by many to be the greatest football game ever played.

Tall, square-jawed and graced with an imposing voice so deep that it seemed to begin at his ankles, Mr. Halberstam came into his own as a journalist in the early 1960s covering the nascent American war in South Vietnam for The New York Times.

His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground.

For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Eight years later, after leaving The Times, he chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam — how able and dedicated men propelled the United States into a war later deemed unwinnable — in a book whose title entered the language: “The Best and the Brightest.”

Mr. Halberstam went on to write more than 20 books, including one on the Korean War scheduled to be published in the fall.

“I think the work he was proudest of was his trilogy on war,” his wife, Jean Halberstam, said last night. Besides “The Best and the Brightest,” she was referring to a study of United States policies in the 1990s called “War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals,” and the Korean War book, “The Coldest Winter.”

Mr. Halberstam’s range, however, extended well beyond war. His interests roamed from basketball to the auto industry, from the 1949 American League pennant race to the rise of modern media conglomerates in the 20th century.

“A writer should be like a playwright — putting people on stage, putting ideas on stage, making the reader become the audience,” he recently told an interviewer for NY1 News.

Over the years, he developed a pattern of alternating a book with a weighty theme with one that might seem of slighter import but to which he nonetheless applied his considerable reportorial muscles. “He was a man who didn’t have a lazy bone in his body,” said the writer Gay Talese, a close family friend.

Almost invariably, Mr. Halberstam wrote about sports in those alternate books. “They were his entertainments,” his wife said. “They were his way to take a break.”

As a result, his book on the media, “The Powers That Be,” was followed by a basketball book, “The Breaks of the Game.” A study of the decline of the American automobile industry and the Japanese ascension, “The Reckoning,” was followed before long by “The Summer of ’49,” on an epic pennant battle between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

Other works included “The Fifties,” a look at a decade that he argued was more monumental than many believed; “The Children,” about the civil-rights movement of the 1960s; and “Firehouse,” a study of the tight-knit world of New York firefighters, focused on 13 men from a firehouse near his Upper West Side home who went to the World Trade Center on 9/11. Only one survived.

David Halberstam was born on April 10, 1934, in New York City, to an Army surgeon, Dr. Charles A. Halberstam, and a schoolteacher, Blanche Levy Halberstam. His older brother, Michael, became a well-known cardiologist in Washington. In 1980, Michael Halberstam was shot in his home and killed by an intruder.

After World War II, the Halberstam family moved to Westchester County. David attended school in Yonkers, and then went to Harvard, where he graduated in 1955. By then, his commitment to journalism had been sealed. He was managing editor of the student newspaper, The Crimson.

After graduation, he went south and wrote about the nascent civil-rights movement, first for The West Point Daily Times Leader in Mississippi, then for The Nashville Tennessean. In 1960 he joined The New York Times, first in the Washington bureau, then as a foreign correspondent based in Congo.

It was when he went to South Vietnam in 1962 that he began to leave an indelible journalistic mark.

He soon saw that the American-backed government in Saigon was corrupt and failing — and he said so. William Prochnau, who wrote a book on the reporting of that period, “Once Upon a Distant War,” said last night that Mr. Halberstam and other American journalists then in Vietnam were incorrectly regarded by many as antiwar.

“He was not antiwar,” Mr. Prochnau said. “They were cold war children, just like me, brought up on hiding under the desk.” It was simply a case, he said, of American commanders lying to the press about what was happening in Vietnam. “They were shut out and they were lied to,” Mr. Prochnau said. And Mr. Halberstam “didn’t say, ‘You’re not telling me the truth.’ He said, ‘You’re lying.’ He didn’t mince words.”

President John F. Kennedy was so incensed by Mr. Halberstam’s war coverage that he strongly suggested to The Times’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, that the reporter be replaced. Mr. Sulzberger replied that Mr. Halberstam would stay where he was. He even had the reporter cancel a scheduled vacation so that no one would get the wrong idea.

After Vietnam and after winning his Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Halberstam was assigned to the Times bureau in Warsaw. There, he met an actress, Elzbieta Czyzewska, whom he married in 1965. That marriage was short-lived. In 1979, he married Jean Sandness, then a writer.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Julia, also of Manhattan.

By the late 1960s, Mr. Halberstam tired of daily journalism and he left The Times, not exactly on mutually amicable terms. After that, he devoted himself to books, magazine articles and even a Vietnam-based novel, “One Very Hot Day.”

In the recent NY1 interview, Mr. Halberstam summed up his approach to work by quoting a basketball player. “There’s a great quote by Julius Erving,” he said, “that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.’ ”

Sewell Chan, Jesse McKinley and Sam Roberts contributed reporting.

    David Halberstam, 73, Reporter and Author, Dies, NYT, 24.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/arts/24halberstam.html?hp

NBC News Defends

Its Use of Material

Sent by the Killer

April 20, 2007
The New York Times
By BILL CARTER

NBC News fought back yesterday against a growing backlash over the way it handled the pictures and writings of the student who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech.

Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, strongly defended the network’s decision to broadcast the material.

“The news-value question is long gone,” Mr. Capus said. “Every journalist is united on this. You can tell by their actions.” He referred to the widespread use of the material NBC released by virtually every other news organization in the country.

Still, NBC announced early in the day that it would limit its use of the images across NBC News, including MSNBC, to no more than 10 percent of its airtime.

NBC received a package in the mail Wednesday from the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui. The material included 23 pages of writing and photographs and videos on DVD. Mr. Cho made rambling threats and was depicted brandishing guns and other weapons.

Families of some of the victims, some law enforcement officials and executives from competing television news organizations have accused NBC of being insensitive or exploitative in the way it presented the materials on the air.

But in an interview, Mr. Capus described a daylong process of evaluation on Wednesday, involving numerous NBC executives and news staff members, some of whom, including Matt Lauer, the “Today” show anchor, expressed some reservations about putting the statements of a mass killer on television.

Mr. Lauer said on his program yesterday, “Let’s be honest, there are some big differences of opinion right within this news division as to whether we should be airing this stuff at all, whether we’re taking the right course of action.”

Numerous NBC executives had been involved in the process, Mr. Capus said, including the president of the company, Jeff Zucker, and the head of its standards division, David McCormick. Along with the management and many of the staff members of the news division they had weighed all the factors before deciding how to proceed, Mr. Capus said.

“It’s not every day we get a story like this,” Mr. Capus said. “We went over it for seven and a half hours. We didn’t rush it on the air. We weren’t promoting it. We weren’t trumpeting it all day. It was extraordinary, and that’s how we treated it.”

One law enforcement official said that the F.B.I. had not publicly taken issue with NBC’s decision to broadcast the material because it was not the agency’s place. “It was their property, and it was sent to them,” the official said, referring to NBC. “And they’re in the news business.”

F.B.I. agents sought to determine whether the package contained material beyond what might have been recovered in Virginia. Mr. Capus said the network had expected some of the criticism heard yesterday from family members and friends of the victims — in one example several family members canceled an appearance on “Today” to protest the network’s use of the material.

Of the comments by family members and police officials, Mr. Capus said, “It is understandable and not surprising given the horrific experience they have all been through.”

NBC was more surprised at the criticism from Col. Steve Flaherty of the Virginia State Police, who after praising the network’s handling of the material on Wednesday said yesterday that he was disappointed that it had broadcast it. But Mr. Capus said that, too, might be expected given the way the events have rocked the Virginia Tech community.

But upon hearing that executives at other television news organizations had accused NBC of exploiting the material for its own advantage, Mr. Capus said, “I chalk that up to competitive silliness.”

Two of those competitors, ABC and CBS, led their newscasts last night with the backlash against the use of the images from the mailing, with ABC’s report specifically taking NBC to task for “promoting their pictures before their actual release.”

In interviews yesterday several competitors questioned some of NBC’s decisions concerning the way it distributed the images, which went out accompanied by a list of rules for how they could be used, including points like: “No Internet use. No archival use. Do not resell,” and “Mandatory credit; NBC News.”

The chief source of complaint about NBC seemed to be that it had failed to understand how extraordinary and sensitive the images really were, and that it erred in treating them like a news exclusive.

Paul Friedman, the vice president of CBS News, said NBC had not done enterprise reporting to come into possession of this material, but had “picked it up in its mailroom.”

And while the rules about usage were fairly standard for the television news business, Mr. Friedman said that “in this instance it seemed inappropriate” for NBC to be so proprietary about material of such sensitive nature.

One aspect that clearly irritated many of NBC’s competitors was the impression of the logo “NBC News,” which the network burned into every image from the material. Mr. Friedman of CBS said he had thought about calling NBC executives Wednesday night to suggest they remove the logo simply to distance the network from the material. “It may backfire for them to be so closely associated with footage that makes people’s flesh crawl,” Mr. Friedman said.

But NBC had supporters as well. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said, “NBC was obviously very sensitive.” He added, “While reasonable people may disagree, it was clear they were trying to exercise restraint.”

    NBC News Defends Its Use of Material Sent by the Killer, NYT, 20.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/us/20nbc.html

Media dilemma

deepens over gunman video

Thu Apr 19, 2007
10:54PM EDT
Reuters
By Michele Gershberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Broadcast of a video diatribe by the Virginia Tech gunman has reopened the debate over media use of vile or disturbing material that goes back decades to the likes of Son of Sam and the Zodiac killer.

Gunman Cho Seung-Hui sent the footage to NBC News in the midst of his rampage on Monday during which he killed 33 people including himself, the worst shooting attack in modern U.S. history.

NBC aired the footage on Wednesday evening and was quickly followed by rivals ABC and CBS. But those networks distanced themselves from the decision on Thursday and said they would limit future broadcasts of the video. NBC itself said it would use restraint.

Some media experts labeled the move as an effort to improve NBC ratings and questioned whether giving 23-year-old Cho an outlet for hate-filled rants served the public interest.

"It was a very bad decision," said Paul Levinson, chairman of the communication and media studies department at Fordham University. "He's not a public official, he's not a terrorist we are pursuing as part of our government policy. He's just an individual psycho."

Others said the video provided a window on Cho's motives that could help in future cases, however painful the images may be to victims and their families.

"They aired valuable new information. One of the questions was the why?" said Judy Muller, a former ABC News correspondent and journalism professor at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication.

"It was not even a close call -- it was a news judgment that was right," Muller said.

U.S. media are facing a barrage of such tough choices with the ease of spreading violent or gruesome images on Internet forums like video sharing site YouTube and elsewhere.

Cameras embedded in cell phones have turned every witness to an event into a potential broadcaster. Some experts wonder whether viewers can expect to see a deadly attack broadcast live one day by its perpetrators.

"It's balancing truth and harm," said Bob Steele, who teaches journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute in Florida. "In situations like this you cannot prevent all harm."

PUBLIC BEHEADINGS, SON OF SAM

The ethical breach comes when networks replay the footage to drive ratings, experts said. By taking that step, they run the risk of alienating the same advertisers they seek to attract.

"Advertisers all have different thresholds of what's suitable or not," said Brad Adgate, research director at media buyer Horizon Media.

Some advertisers build it into their contracts not to have commercial messages appear next to news of war or disaster, but not every situation can be anticipated, he said.

Recent cases include video of Saddam Hussein's hanging in December and the beheading of Nick Berg, an American kidnapped by al Qaeda in 2004.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the San Francisco Chronicle stirred controversy by publishing letters from the infamous Zodiac killer.

In a 1977 case, a killer later identified as David Berkowitz, or "Son of Sam," sent a hand-written letter to columnist Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News. The newspaper consulted with police before publishing excerpts.

"Son of Sam was a much better writer than this guy," Breslin said on Thursday. "This guy writes drivel."

But he defended the broadcasts as part of an unstoppable, modern news flow.

Levinson said there were some useful parallels to be drawn between Cho, a native of South Korea who reportedly had been deemed mentally ill by a Virginia court, and the infamous urban serial killers.

"They are close cousins," he said. "Part of their psychological make-up is to get publicity and they do want to manipulate the media."

NBC is majority-owned by General Electric Co . CBS is part of CBS Corp. and ABC is owned by Walt Disney Co .

(Additional reporting by Gina Keating in Los Angeles and Paul Thomasch in New York)

    Media dilemma deepens over gunman video, R, 19.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1944056920070420

Networks limit use of gunman video

Thu Apr 19, 2007
5:55PM EDT
Reuters
By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. television networks limited broadcasts of a video manifesto by the Virginia Tech killer on Thursday after heavy coverage drew criticism from police and victims' families.

NBC News, which received the manifesto in the mail on Wednesday, said it had acted responsibly in showing the images and rants of gunman Cho Seung-Hui. But NBC and rival networks said they would use restraint in the future.

The images dominated U.S. news coverage on Wednesday evening, two days after Cho killed 32 people then himself in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

"We had planned to speak to some family members of victims this morning but they canceled their appearances because they were very upset with NBC for airing the images," said NBC's "Today" morning program co-host Meredith Vieira.

Police investigating the shootings in Blacksburg, Virginia, were also critical. "We're rather disappointed in the editorial decision to broadcast these disturbing images," state police chief Col. Steve Flaherty said.

"The world has endured a view of life that few of us would or should ever have to endure," he said.

Cho, a 23-year-old student, mailed photographs of himself posing with his guns and video railing against rich kids and debauchery. The package was mailed to NBC after he killed his first two victims on Monday morning but before he cut down 30 more in classrooms.

Common Sense Media, which monitors media impact on children, said it had received many calls about the broadcasts from anxious parents. "This is really gruesome and scary stuff," organization head Jim Steyer told Reuters. "People have said could they have used a bit more discretion."

Experts also said the images could resonate with potential copycats envisioning a deadly sequel.

THE 'MIND OF A KILLER'

NBC acknowledged the images were probably devastating to the victims' families. But NBC News President Steve Capus defended the decision to air them.

"This is I think as close as we will ever come to being inside of the mind of a killer, and I thought that it needed to be released," Capus said on cable channel MSNBC.

NBC said it contacted authorities when it received the material on Wednesday and used it only after "careful consideration."

NBC, which let other news outlets use some of the images, said in a statement its news division would limit use of the video to "no more than 10 percent of air time."

ABC News cut back to showing still excerpts from the video or muting the audio, but left video images on its Web site.

"Once you've seen it, its repetition is little more than pornography once that first news cycle is passed," Jeffrey Schneider, senior vice president of ABC News, said.

CBS Corp. unit CBS News said it would use the images "only when necessary to tell the story."

"I would be surprised to see much usage of it," spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said

Fox News said "we see no reason to continue assaulting the public with these disturbing and demented images," but it would reserve the right to use them again as needed. Fox is a News Corp unit.

Images from the manifesto were also scarce on Time Warner Inc's CNN on Thursday and a network spokeswoman said it would use the material "very judiciously."

Flaherty said the material turned out to be of little value to investigators.

NBC is owned by General Electric Co. ABC is owned by Walt Disney Co..

(Additional reporting by Michele Gershberg and Jeremy Pelofsky)

    Networks limit use of gunman video, R, 19.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1939822820070419

Gunman's media image

could prompt copycats: experts

Thu Apr 19, 2007
5:52PM EDT
Reuters
By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Virginia Tech university gunman Cho Seung-Hui lived for years in turbulent isolation, but died an American media sensation that could inspire deadly sequels among others driven by anger and a thirst for recognition, experts say.

Three days after Cho killed 32 others and himself in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, media images of the 23-year-old student posing with his weapons and ranting into a video camera dominated television screens and newspapers across the country in a grim media extravaganza.

Footage and photos, released by NBC from a self-made media package Cho mailed to the television network between rounds of shootings, shocked viewers worldwide and stirred objections from the victims' families and other critics.

But experts on violence were most worried that the images could inspire copycats from among a relatively small number psychologically weakened young people, who often grapple with depression or mental illness in a media-dominated society that is criticized for glamorizing high-profile violence.

"The copycat phenomenon feeds on attention and publicity, particularly when the publicity is excessive. When the publicity stops, so does the copycat effect," said Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston.

"These killers are romanticized and glorified by the media," he added. "Suddenly, they become the celebrities that they so much wanted to be."

Sometimes violent action inspires copycat threats rather than actual shootings.

"Wall-to-wall media coverage could certainly be a factor in some of the copycat threats," said FBI spokesman Richard Kolko, when asked about the phenomenon. He said such threats have occurred over the past two days in Minnesota, California and Texas.

Experts said Cho himself appeared to be a copycat killer inspired by both real-life killers and violent movies.

Cho referred to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in a diatribe that itself reminded some experts of the videotaped messages of Middle Eastern suicide bombers.

Postings on Internet film sites also noted a similarity between Cho's poses and scenes from the bloody 2003 South Korean film, "Oldboy." Cho immigrated from South Korea to the United States as a child.

Other observers suggested parallels with the 1976 movie, "Taxi Driver," in which the main character, a troubled Vietnam veteran, goes on a shooting rampage.

Alan Lipman, director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Violence, said the images released by NBC are likely to resonate most with young men like Cho who live in severe psychological isolation bounded by anger and delusion, often after long periods as the butt of teasing and bullying.

"There's this small group of people who'll see him standing there, with those two guns pointing out, and feel a sense of power and control over their own highly disordered and disturbed lives," Lipman said.

Mass shootings at U.S. schools and universities hit the national stage in the late 1990s and became regular events until the September 11 attacks shifted a large part of media attention to worries about terrorism, experts said.

Shootings in schools tends to occur as the school year ends, when academic pressure is highest and the approaching summer vacation threatens to allow perceived injuries to escape retribution.

The shooters sometimes imagine themselves part of a fraternity of oppressed people who use violence to mete out justice. Lipman said many are simply inspired by earlier violence as a way to address their own problems.

Despite criticism of NBC's decision to release sections of Cho's media package, some experts said it might have been worse if the network had tried to keep the material under wraps.

"I don't think it's good. But I think if they withheld it, and eventually someone knew they had it, there'd have been a clamor and that would have made it even more sensational," said Bill Woodward of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

    Gunman's media image could prompt copycats: experts, R, 19.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1941599520070419

NBC Gets 'Manifesto'

From Va. Killer

April 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:17 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Even before it was opened, the oversized letter sent from Cho Seung-Hui to NBC News attracted attention. The postal worker who brought it to NBC's Manhattan headquarters on Wednesday pointed out the return address of Blacksburg, Virginia.

Inside was what NBC anchor Brian Williams described as a multi-media manifesto, with video, pictures and writing from the murderer of 32 people just before he went on his killing spree at Virginia Tech. Cho mailed it at 9:01 a.m. Monday, between murders.

It was mass murder for the YouTube generation, a chilling document from a man who said little in life but clearly wanted people to know his grievances in death. And it started a frantic day for a news organization that, for the second time in a week, suddenly found itself at the center of the nation's biggest news story.

The package was addressed to 30 Rockefeller Ave., mistaking the Plaza for a street. Incorrect zip codes were written twice and crossed out -- the failure to settle on the right one delaying the letter's arrival by a day.

NBC security opened the envelope, a policy they have taken with suspicious packages ever since anthrax was delivered to anchor Tom Brokaw shortly after the September 2001 terrorist attacks. They handled it with gloved hands, and quickly made copies of what they found.

At noon, NBC News President Steve Capus was called out of a news meeting by security chief Brian Patton and told what had been delivered.

''At first I wondered if it was real, but when you look at it and see all the pictures you realize that it is,'' he said.

The package contained a DVD and a 23-page printout of a computer file that mixed rambling, profane messages with 29 pictures of the killer. Eleven photos showed him aiming a gun at the camera.

One photograph showed 30 hollow-point bullets, with the message written underneath: ''All the s--- you gave me right back at you with hollow points.''

''I recoiled in horror,'' Capus said. ''It was chilling.''

Through NBC's Justice Department correspondent, Pete Williams, NBC reached out to authorities. A representative of the FBI's New York office came to NBC to get the originals, and NBC was asked not to say anything about it publicly until investigators could examine it, a request Capus thought was appropriate. The first public word of what NBC had wasn't released until a news conference in Blacksburg around 4:30 p.m. EDT.

''If we wanted to do something competitive, we would have popped it on the air immediately,'' Capus said.

Authorities still hadn't fully examined Cho's DVD and it wasn't until after 6 p.m. that NBC had an official OK to show some of his filmed message. NBC's ''Nightly News'' aired at 6:30 p.m. Except for one still picture aired earlier on MSNBC, that broadcast was the first to show extensive details of what NBC received.

''We are sensitive to how all of this will be seen by those affected,'' said NBC anchor Brian Williams. ''We know we are in effect airing the words of a murderer.''

NBC's evening-news competitors, ABC's ''World News'' and the ''CBS Evening News,'' managed to swiftly air portions of what NBC released only minutes after it came on the air.

''They seem to have acted honorably,'' said ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider. ''They turned the information over to the authorities swiftly and they reported it out.''

Some competitive anger flashed at the 4:30 news conference when Col. Steve Flaherty of the Virginia State Police announced that the package had been received by NBC, offered a brief description, and abruptly left the room. Reporters in the packed conference hall shouted, ''C'mon,'' ''What?'' and ''No questions?'' as authorities filed out silently.

''There are a lot of questions,'' one reporter shouted.

For both NBC and Capus, it was another turn in the media spotlight after his announcement last week that MSNBC would no longer simulcast Don Imus' radio show following racist and sexist remarks Imus made about the Rutgers women's basketball team. CBS Radio soon followed suit by firing Imus.

    NBC Gets 'Manifesto' From Va. Killer, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Virginia-Tech-NBC.html

Wall Street Journal,

AP Win Pulitzers

April 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Wall Street Journal won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, including the public service award for its coverage of the stock-options scandal that rattled corporate America in 2006. The Associated Press captured one for breaking news photography for a picture of a Jewish woman defying Israeli security forces in the West Bank.

The Oregonian has won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for coverage of a family missing in the Oregon mountians.

Cormac McCarthy has won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for ''The Road.''

Brett Blackledge of The Birmingham (Ala.) News has won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for his exposure of cronyism and corruption in the state's two-year college system.

Kenneth R. Weiss, Usha Lee McFarling and Rick Loomas of the Los Angeles Times have won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for their reports on the world's distressed oceans.

Debbie Cenziper of The Miami Herald has won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for reports on waste, favoritism and lack of oversight at the Miami housing agency.

Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe has won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his revelations that President Bush often used ''signing statements'' to assert his controversial right to bypass provisions of new laws.

The Wall Street Journal staff has won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for it work on the adverse impact of China's booming capitalism on conditions ranging from inequality to pollution.

Andrea Elliott of The New York Times has won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for coverage of an immigrant imam striving to serve his faithful in America.

David Lindsay-Abaire has won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for drama for ''Rabbit Hole.''

Jonathan Gold of LA Weekly won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for his restaurant reviews.

    Wall Street Journal, AP Win Pulitzers, NYT, 16.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Pulitzer-Prize.html

Campus Exposure

March 4, 2007
The New York Times
By ALEXANDRA JACOBS

Aaron Foster, a junior majoring in history at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, was browsing Craigslist one day in 2005 when he saw an ad for nude models. It had been posted by Boink, a glossy new sex magazine by and about college students founded by Alecia Oleyourryk, then a senior at nearby Boston University, and Christopher Anderson, a software consultant in his 30s moonlighting as a photographer. “You’re going to pay me $200, and all I have to do is pretend to be with a chick — you’re going to pay me to do that?” was how Foster, now 24, a slim, dark-haired former marine with pierced nipples and tattoos of raking animal claws on his back, described his reaction.

Soon he found himself standing behind closed Venetian blinds in Oleyourryk’s off-campus apartment, clutching the denim-clad buttocks of a redheaded, similarly nipple-pierced young woman named Jessica as Anderson’s camera clicked away. It wasn’t long before the jeans came off, and the underwear. The impromptu couple then repaired to a queen-size bed, where they simulated intercourse and then lay as if in blissful postcoital repose. The session resulted in a cover shot and an eight-page layout in the third issue of Boink. “It was fun, being nude and being photographed,” Foster told me months afterward. “A good experience. All my friends thought it was pretty cool. Especially if I have a party, the first thing my friends will do is bust out my porn. I think they get a kick out of it.”

It wasn’t so long ago that the male collegians of America hid their copies of Playboy deep inside their sock drawers, and the naked women tucked therein were glamorous, unknowable princesses from a media empire far, far away. These days, when anyone can run a virtual media empire out of a dorm room, student-generated sex magazines, some with the imprimatur of university financing and faculty advisers, are becoming a fact of campus life. Their subjects and contributors are the gals — and guys — down the hall; their target audience is male, female, straight, gay and everything in between. Not all are as overtly titillating as Boink. The grande dame of the group is Squirm, a “magazine of smut and sensibility,” which has been circulating since 2000 at Vassar, once the inspiration for the awkward lunges and contraceptive pessaries of Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel “The Group.” Topics considered within its pages have included bondage and sadomasochism, the history of the condom and the fluidity of gender. At Yale, there is the earnest, instructive SWAY, whose title is an acronym for Sex Week at Yale, a student-run symposium held biennially there since 2002, with administrative blessing and a corporate sponsor, Pure Romance, a company whose representatives sell sexual aids for women at Tupperware-like “parties.” The premiere edition included a slightly breathless interview with the porn star Jesse Jane along with an essay by the conservative Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., a former Yale economics lecturer, which concluded: “Marriage is for lovers. Hooking up is for losers.” In 2004, H Bomb arrived at Harvard with slightly loftier intellectual aspirations: its founders, Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg and Camilla Hrdy, positioned it as a “literary arts magazine about sex and sexual issues.” Vita Excolatur followed shortly after at the University of Chicago (its title a truncated version of the university’s motto, translates roughly as “Life Enriched”), proclaiming itself “eager to engage all interested parties, from Republican pro-choicers to pro-Foucauldians.” And Columbia now has, simply, Outlet, whose second issue, published online in December 2006, includes a review of eight vibrators and an article on “vaginal personality” — shades of Dr. Betty Dodson, the masturbation instructress — subtitled “How snarky is your punani?”

To middle-aged parents who still remember parietal rules, these projects might seem shocking. True, Playboy has been publishing a feature called “Girls of the Ivy League” since 1979. (Later came “Girls of the Big 12” and “Girls of the Top 10 Party Schools.”) But it could be argued that the co-eds depicted (in a far more decorous mode than their Playmate counterparts) represented only a very small percentage of the student population. College-based sex magazines suggest that the students willing to bare it all may not be so exceptional after all. And while these publications may be less common than the sex columns — usually written by women and often explicitly confessional — that have popped up like little red-light disctricts within the respectable black-and-white confines of established school newspapers, they have taken hold at some of the country’s most prestigious campuses.

In an era when the educated elite seems wholly comfortable with overt sexual imagery (Nerve.com depicts highbrow group gropes; Fleshbot.com and others archly parse the nether parts of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears), maybe it’s not so strange that students are confronting their own sex lives so graphically and publicly. But there’s more to the phenomenon. Considering that a smorgasbord of Internet porn is but a mouse click away for most college students, there’s something valiant, even quaint, about the attempt to organize and consider sex in a printed magazine. It’s as if, though curious to explore the possibly frightening boundlessness of adult eroticism, they also wish to keep it at arm’s length, contained within the safety of the campus. The students involved display a host of contradictory qualities: cheekiness and earnestness, progressive politics and retro sensibilities, salacity and sensitivity. They aren’t so much answering the question of what is and what isn’t porn — or what those categories might even mean today — as artfully, disarmingly and sometimes deliberately skirting it.

Despite the sex magazines’ brash names and general air of exuberance, a scrim of protectiveness, even primness hangs over many of them — a vestige, perhaps, of a not-so-distant past when topics like date rape, sexual harassment and AIDS were dominating the national discourse. Seminars addressing these issues are still a part of most freshman orientations, though mention of the infamous Antioch sex code of the early 1990s — which postulated that students should secure their partner’s verbal consent, button by button, before each stage of lovemaking — tends to evoke blank stares and giggles from the undergraduates of 2007. Still, though personal online pages on Web sites like MySpace or home videos on YouTube often reveal as much as students do in these magazines, Squirm’s release form specifies that the magazine is intended solely for on-campus distribution and that students retain the copyright to their contributions. “We try to limit unwanted exposure as much as we can,” wrote its current editor, Sarah Fraser, in an e-mail message. “It’s one thing to know you’re posing nude or writing erotica for an insulated campus, and understandably quite another to know it’s being disseminated widely.” After a brief initial flurry of publicity, Kimi Traube, one of Outlet’s founders, began declining interviews from noncampus press. “We’re flattered by all the attention but have decided it’s best for the magazine to focus our energies on the Columbia community,” she said, also via e-mail. The current editor of H Bomb, Ming Vandenberg, is especially concerned about the security of the magazine’s content on the Web. “I am trying to design a foolproof plan to prevent any negative externalities,” she said, adding with a note of horror, “There could be a photo of a clothed Harvard student that someone goes into, chops the head off and puts it on an unclothed body.”

These publications vary in tone and content, but while all strive to be provocative after a fashion, they generally eschew the term “pornographic,” hurling it as an insult with the good-natured mutual contempt of varsity football teams. “Outlet ... is not intended to be porn,” sniffs a December letter from Traube to readers, saucily addressed “Dear Hotbottoms.” “They do a very good job of that over at Harvard.” On their Web site, Harvard staff members retort: “If you aren’t mature enough to tell the difference between playful nudity and pornography you probably shouldn’t be reading H Bomb.”

The exception is Boink, which Oleyourryk calls “user-friendly porn”: an unblushing assortment of bared private parts, lewd prose and graphic caricatures. With its panoply of contributors — about 50 percent of whom are enrolled at B.U., most of the rest at other colleges — Boink is the most independent and commercially ambitious of the pack, and at first glance the least interested in critical thought. It retails for $7.95 at Newbury Comics and other stores in the Boston area, has a print run of 10,000 and, atypically for a college publication, pays its contributors. Boink has also sponsored a number of parties, some shut down by the police for under-age drinking. Recalling one of these events, Aaron Foster said enthusiastically: “Girls walk around with their tops off. But it’s just a party. My buddy was convinced there was some secret orgy room. I was like, Dude, there is no secret orgy room!”

The absence of a secret sex dungeon was not enough to endear Boink to Boston University’s administrators. Before the first issue even appeared, it was denounced by Kenneth Elmore, the dean of students. It did, however, attract the attention of Howard Stern, a B.U. alumnus, who promptly booked Oleyourryk on his radio talk show. Ben Greenberg, a young editor at Warner Books, was alerted to the broadcast by a friend. “I was like, Wow, I can’t believe someone would do that — what would their parents think?” he says. But the shock wore off quickly. Harvard’s sex magazine might have been more obvious fodder for a book, but “the general consensus was that the H Bomb one was kind of tame,” Greenberg says. “It didn’t want to consider itself in any way porn. The Boink people were willing to embrace that and run with it and turn it into something sex-positive rather than something that was dirty and smut.” Warner, which has published anthologies by Penthouse and Vice magazines, eventually offered Anderson and Oleyourryk a six-figure advance to compile “Boink: The Book,” a collection of erotic writings and photographs from college students around the country; it is scheduled for publication in 2008, to coincide with spring break.

Oleyourryk, now 23, graduated in 2005 with a journalism degree and is working part time as a bartender. She herself gamely disrobed for the debut issue of Boink. “I was very comfortable with it,” she said on a chilly autumn afternoon at Charley’s, a pub on Newbury Street. Blond and slender, with professionally arched eyebrows, she was wearing a glittery paisley shirt and big gold-medallion earrings and furiously biting her nails. Anderson sat across from her: a dark, calm, slightly portly fellow in a green fleece pullover with a faint sheen of perspiration on his upper lip.

The two met after Oleyourryk, then in her sophomore year, paused at a water fountain during a run and looked up to see a flier Anderson had posted seeking nude models with athletic builds. He was hoping to augment his portfolio of black-and-white art photos, which he sells at www.light-sculptor.com. (Cited influences include Edward Weston and Rodin.) “It was about, Can I do this?” Oleyourryk said. Photographer and subject struck up a friendship, and after Anderson did some work for the first issue of H Bomb, he called to see if Oleyourryk wanted to collaborate on a magazine. “We thought it would be fun,” he said.

“People couldn’t understand that we were just doing it to do it,” Oleyourryk said. “So many people were looking for justifications — like: ‘Oh, there are going to be articles, right? There are going to be articles about S.T.D.’s and contraception and about this and about that?’ Nobody could accept that it was for entertainment value. Why is that not O.K.? It’s just so unsettling, it seems, for people, that it’s just like, Oh, it’s porn for porn, enjoy it, masturbate to it, whatever.”

Oleyourryk said that for her and her peers, the question is not why pose nude, but why not? After all, they grew up watching Madonna (“All she was was naked all the time”), parsing the finer points of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and flipping through Calvin Klein ads: sexual imagery was the very wallpaper of their lives, undergirded by a new frankness about how to protect oneself from pregnancy and disease. “Condoms. They’ve been rammed down our throats ... since we were old enough to start contemplating training bras,” wrote a Boink contributor in an essay called “Fall Fornication Must-Haves,” which apparently included crotchless bikinis and a Swarovski-crystal-encrusted dildo called the Minx.

Sex is “everywhere, and it’s always been everywhere for this generation,” Oleyourryk said. “A body is a body is a body, and I’m proud of my body, and why not show my body? It’s not going to keep me from having a job. Maybe it sticks to people, but it doesn’t have that negative connotation like, I’m going to have to carry around this baggage. Maybe it’s like, I’m going to carry this around and be proud of it and say: Look how I looked then! My boobs weren’t on the ground. I wasn’t 45 pounds overweight. How hot was I? It’s not, like, ‘The Scarlet Letter’ anymore. It’s a little badge of honor.”

Of course, posing naked for a sex magazine is not exactly like making Phi Beta Kappa or playing the lead in the school play. For one thing, it’s generally not something you write home about, though Oleyourryk insists that her parents have been supportive of her venture. (“As much as they could be,” she said. “I was raised very Catholic, but they live in today’s world.”) For another, it’s something pretty much anyone with sufficient moxie can achieve; Boink models are fit and fresh-faced but hardly all homecoming kings and queens. “We’re looking for diversity,” Anderson said.

Indeed, the most recent issue — Boink’s quarterly publication schedule has been suspended while its editors work on their book — is, in a way, a triumphant marriage of the prurient and the politically correct. There is a 10-page layout devoted to the cover model, a fetching blonde named Eve; 7 more pages of Sarah, a buxom brunette, stripping for the shower; and 9 of Crystal and Lexi photographed together in a tangle of pearls and pierced body parts. But a customer buying the magazine to get glimpses of such nubile female flesh might be startled to encounter compact, mop-topped Zach (“I’m planning to get my Ph.D. in mathematics, just for fun”), followed by dark-eyed Costa (“Some of my friends call me Super Greek”) masturbating to orgasm clad in nothing but a silver cross around his neck. “We have different sexualities represented, which commercially has been a hindrance,” Anderson said with a shrug. The practice, however, has won Boink grudging approval in at least one unlikely quarter: the Boston University Women’s Center, the college’s resident feminist organization. “What really stood out is that there were male students in it,” Heather Foley, 21, now president of B.U.W.C., which devoted a meeting to discussing the issue, said in a phone interview. “Because there were men in it, and gay men, under the same cover, it was sort of alternative. It kind of equalized it: gay men could look at it, women could look at it, and that was great. Women as objects, men as objects.”

Foley, a senior majoring in political science, acknowledged that equal-opportunity objectification might represent a dubious sort of progress. “I believe Andrea Dworkin, that porn perpetuates violence against women,” she said. “Most pornography is just women. Boink is different in that way, but because porn does feed into that system, I tend to be against it in general, and I don’t think just because we’re putting men in it that makes it O.K. But it’s a step forward that men are being put in it.” In some way her confusion seems to mirror the awkward pas de deux of college sex magazines and their audiences, a tug of war between pornographic conventions and subverting those conventions, between private and public: Look at me! Don’t look at me! Protect me! Set me free!

For all Boink’s raunchiness, its founders profess a certain idealism and purity of purpose. Back at Charley’s, Anderson told me that he and Oleyourryk have turned down lucrative offers to do reality-television shows and for joint deals with what they disdainfully call “the industry,” with all its implications of hairy middle-aged predators, silicone implants and tacky trade shows in the San Fernando Valley. Oleyourryk stressed the authenticity of Boink’s subjects in a Botoxed, surgically altered world. “We want to be proud of the fact that this is what’s going on in sex and in college right now, and these are real people, and you’re more relatable if you’re a real person,” she said. “We don’t put makeup on them, we don’t do their hair, we don’t Photoshop them. We aim for honesty and truth.”

Over at Harvard, students are pursuing a different kind of sexual veritas. In contrast to Boink, H Bomb was approved by the university’s Committee on College Life and somewhat controversially granted $2,000 in start-up costs by the Undergraduate Council. Sex magazines apparently create strange bedfellows: writing in The Crimson, Travis Kavulla, publisher of the conservative journal The Harvard Salient, suggested with unlikely indignation that this grant shortchanged the Take Back the Night rally, sponsored by the Coalition Against Sexual Violence, an event historically ridiculed by campus conservatives.

Unlike Boink, H Bomb has a faculty adviser and adult champion: Marc Hauser, a professor of psychology and evolutionary biology, who is a friend of Sarah Hrdy, the anthropologist and mother of Camilla, one of the magazine’s founders. But Hauser pronounced himself somewhat disappointed with

H Bomb’s maiden efforts. “It hit the ground with all this big fanfare, but it didn’t really do its thing,” he said. “Stylistically it succeeded, but everyone” — citizen critics gathered breathlessly during the long ramp-up to the magazine’s debut — “felt that it didn’t really succeed in terms of content, that’s where it fell flat.” He would like to see the magazine take a more belletristic bent, reviewing controversial books, perhaps — “You think of ‘Lolita,’ ” he said — and examining what might be called sexistential questions. “Nowadays, what constitutes porn?” Hauser mused. “What does a 21-year-old think porn is? I, as a parent of an 18-year-old, would like to hear that view.”

H Bomb initially shared at least some of Boink’s exhibitionism, if not quite the full-frontal erections. In the spring 2005 issue, undergraduates posed in various states of undress, using only their first names and responding to the question “How’d you lose it?” One young man was depicted with a bare light bulb shining on his flaccid member, his face obscured by shadow. Vandenberg, who inherited the magazine after Hrdy graduated and Katharina Cieplak-von Baldegg grew preoccupied with her thesis, plans to take things in a more modest direction (and curtail all the budding Anaïs Nins experimenting with free verse — “I hate the poems,” she said).

“Now that I’m in charge, it’s not the kind of thing that you have a problem with your parents seeing,” the new editor said over homemade oxtail soup in the capacious penthouse apartment she shares with her boyfriend in Boston. “I would prefer if all nude photos were anonymous,” she said. “But people want everyone else to know. People want to stand out.”

On a laptop computer, Vandenberg, 20, showed a few of the pictures she is planning to publish in the next edition of H Bomb, which will be online only for financial reasons. “Quite tame,” she said. In one, female Harvard science majors peered earnestly at test tubes, wearing lab coats opened to expose black lacy bras and panties, as in the old Maidenform advertisements. It was intended, she said, as a comment on the brouhaha that ensued after Lawrence Summers, Harvard’s former president, publicly remarked that genetics might account for why women are still a minority in the sciences. “I really don’t think he said much wrong,” said Vandenberg, who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology. “I’m not a feminist. Feminism has this premise that men and women are equal, and I have a more biological view of things. I don’t think men and women are equal at all. I think we’re different, and what’s wrong with that?”

She spoke disparagingly of the prose submissions — H Bomb publishes both essays and fiction — sent in by Harvard women. “They’re sent in as fiction, but they’re always barely disguised personal confessions, or not even confessions, outpourings of angst: I entered Harvard and I thought to myself, I’m going to rebel against my sheltered upbringing, I’m going to have sex with whomever I want to — that’s the opening of the piece, and then the body will be Subject A: I led him on and then I felt bad, because I really liked him. Subject B: I thought I was leading him on, but actually he dumped me first. Conclusion: I’m so frustrated, I’ve ruined my reputation and now no one wants to have a serious relationship with me. They realized that they’re not fulfilled by casual sex, and yet they can’t find someone they connect with.”

More photos clicked past: a daytime re-enactment of Primal Scream, a Harvard tradition during which students streak naked across the Yard the last night before final exams begin; a montage of young vacationers frolicking in the Hawaii surf — “like Abercrombie & Fitch,” Vandenberg said, referring to the clothing company’s popular ad campaign; and a young man photographed in the dressing room of a sex-toy store, wearing handcuffs and a feather boa. “This was about making bondage, which is a scary sort of thing, more palatable,” she said.

Sleek and attractive, with a low-key volubility, Vandenberg was a freshman when she walked into a crowded H Bomb meeting in Harvard’s Loker Commons, thinking it was for the film-society magazine. She stayed because there were free T-shirts. “They wanted me to be a model, and I was incredibly scandalized by this,” she said. Hrdy learned that Vandenberg had done some travel photography and offered to provide her with human subjects. “I thought, Well, this would be interesting,” Vandenberg said. “I’ve never taken nude photos before — why not?” Among her efforts was a series of black-and-white shots of a fellow female student sitting on a toilet with her legs crossed, naked but for a pair of pumps, her head turned to the side and mostly obscured, and another of a woman covered in red rose petals, “American Beauty”-style. “I thought it was great fun,” Vandenberg said. “It was a great, controversial thing to say, Oh, I’m a photographer for H Bomb.” Miss Rose Petals, a sophomore named Fiona, returned the compliment, saying on the phone later that she was “honored” by the opportunity. “It’s sort of a document of my time at Harvard,” she said. “My friends were very accepting. Those who saw my pictures thought they were very beautiful.”

You might expect that the staffs of campus sex magazines would convene in some sort of Dionysian, orgiastic formation — multiple bare limbs splayed over a king-size bed — but in fact the publications are just as likely to be produced in digital solitude, submissions beamed over the Internet, no one so much as touching hands. “Right now it’s a dictatorship,” Vandenberg said. “I’m the meeting. I really hate meetings, actually. I really just like to communicate online. It’s very inconvenient to meet physically.”

The exploration of sexuality on college campuses has often had a political, communitarian component. Forty years ago, love-ins and slogans like “Make Love Not War” linked anti-war sentiment with feminist rejections of traditional roles. In 1990, students at Radcliffe — then still a separate institution from Harvard — began publishing a magazine called Lighthouse, after the Virginia Woolf novel “To the Lighthouse.” Considered a “safe space” for women to express themselves, it also contained intensely personal anonymous female sexual confessionals, dropped furtively into a cardboard box in Lamont Library. It died a quiet death in the late 90s, around the time that Radcliffe definitively merged with Harvard. In H Bomb and many of the other new breed of publications, any tolerance for emotional vulnerability appears to have evaporated, replaced by an uneasy, fleshy bombast.

Vandenberg described a social landscape changed irrevocably by the rise of networking Web sites. After meeting someone, it’s now de rigueur to check out his or her profile — a collage of pictures (often risqué) and preferences — on MySpace or Facebook.com. “I have a BlackBerry — so immediately,” Vandenberg said. “You might run into someone at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they crazy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains over presenting themselves. It’s like an embodiment of your personality.” Except for the die-hard holdouts who refuse to participate in these networks — “They’re treated like pariahs, people will just harass them until they join,” Vandenberg said — to attend college now means to participate in a culture of constant two-dimensional preening, for males and females alike. In this context, posing for a sex magazine can seem like just another, more formalized level of display.

At one of Boink’s parties, Aaron Foster, the cover model from the third issue, met a female model, Anna Lee, signing copies of the second issue of the magazine, in which she appeared wearing only body paint. They connected again on MySpace and had what he described as “a whirlwind thing,” but then he stopped calling her. “It was a weird situation,” he said. “She’s a porn girl, so ... I dunno. I assumed she wasn’t really looking for much from me. I’m a guy. There’s a lot less stigma attached to it. A chick, people think ‘slutty,’ whereas a dude gets associated with male bravado.”

Now a junior, Lee became audibly distressed when asked about her relationship with Foster. “That’s not why he told me he broke up with me,” she said. “The reason we split up is because Aaron was in a time in his life when he didn’t want to have a relationship.” As for her being a “porn girl,” Lee said: “It was a mutual thing. I didn’t know what to think of him either.” About her dealings with Boink, she expressed equally mixed feelings. “It really just started out as a joke. I think it’s good to be proud of your body, especially when you’re younger and stuff, as long as it’s tasteful. Just something to add to the résumé. I thought the body-painting spread was really creative. I wanted people to say, ‘That’s really cool and artistic and different.’ ” But she wasn’t pleased that her image was associated with some other, more explicit shots. “In my issue there’s this guy who posed, and he’s masturbating in the picture. It’s really awkward. I’m like: Wow. That was pretty disgusting.”

Lee, who is 20, was also upset because, she said, Boink had marketed a poster featuring a picture from her shoot — one without body paint — without her consent.

Anderson later told me that he had contemplated making posters of Lee and another model (the release form Boink models sign gives the magazine complete sovereignty over their images, he said), but there was no consumer interest and they were never printed.

“I think this was a case of being in the spotlight and then out of the spotlight,” he said of her complaints. “An attention-getting thing.”

It was a windy Sunday, a model search for the Boink book at a local nightclub had been canceled after the club’s manager was fired and Anderson and Oleyourryk were having a subdued meeting in the living room of the latter’s apartment in South Boston. They were discussing a Web site she had discovered that featured faces — only faces — of people experiencing orgasm, one that a writer for Outlet would also later cover. A cat paced back and forth on a white shag rug, eyeing the birds on the swaying boughs outside. In one corner of the room was Oleyourryk’s discarded Halloween costume, a low-cut green garment with glittery scales. “I was a dragon,” she said. “Girls totally find Halloween a chance to be slutty. Not slutty in a negative way, but — sexy.”

“We’ve had a surprising number of people, writers who have told us they’re virgins, which just seems unusual to me,” Anderson said.

“Why are there so many virgins?” Oleyourryk wondered.

“Might be a lack of opportunity,” Anderson said. “College is supposed to be a time of experimentation, but a lot of people get freaked out by it too. They have all this opportunity, and they don’t really know what to do. Too much choice.”

The duo were sitting on a couch, a bottle of Diet Coke at Oleyourryk’s side, sifting through printouts of essay submissions. “I would guess that if you were watching J. K. Rowling write a book, it would be a bit more stimulating,” Anderson said, passing over a sheaf of papers. Our sex is the Mass, read a piece by a Dartmouth student. You kneel down in the doorway of my chapel. ...

“We get so many female submissions,” he said. “Everyone wants to be Carrie Bradshaw.”

“All girls want to be sexy and have a lot of sex, but they want to do it in an environment that’s safe for them,” Oleyourryk said. “So they’re doing the Carrie Bradshaw thing or dressing up for Halloween.”

Anderson tilted his laptop to show a picture of a blond woman standing in a black bikini in a road, then clicked over to a head shot of a light-skinned African-American woman. “I like her lips,” Oleyourryk said, stretching and getting up. Her cellphone bleated urgently. “Oh, Christ, I will call you back in a minute,” she said, batting crossly at it.

They seemed a bit overwhelmed, to lack zest for the task at hand. Where were the eager freshmen to help? “Who in college doesn’t want to get involved in a magazine like this?” Anderson said. “And then their interest lasts about five minutes once they find out that they’re not going to be surrounded by naked girls. People have a very skewed view of what it’s all about. They think it’s going to be the Playboy mansion 24-7.”

“Wait, wait,” Oleyourryk said in sarcastic imitation. “We’re not going to have an orgy?” Rising from the couch, getting ready to leave for her evening bartending shift, she sounded like any other recent college graduate facing the world. “Oh, lordy, lordy,” she said. “I do not want to go to work.”

Alexandra Jacobs is an editor at The New York Observer. This is her first article for the magazine.

    Campus Exposure, NYT, 4.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04sexmagazines.t.html?hp

Reporters Avoid Jail in Balco Case

February 15, 2007
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 14 — Two reporters from The San Francisco Chronicle who wrote a best-selling book about steroid use in baseball will avoid jail time after a defense lawyer agreed Wednesday to plead guilty to leaking them secret federal court documents, prosecutors said.

The lawyer, Troy L. Ellerman, will plead guilty to two counts of contempt, as well as one count each of obstruction of justice and filing false statements in a federal court, according to a statement from the United States Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.

As part of the plea, the Justice Department will withdraw subpoenas issued to the reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who had been held in contempt by a federal judge since September for refusing to say who their sources were for a series of Chronicle articles and their 2006 book, “Game of Shadows.”

“The government believes that Ellerman’s guilty pleas alleviate the need for the reporters to testify,” the statement read.

Ellerman faces up to two years in prison and a $250,000 fine, said Douglas M. Miller, one of the prosecutors in the case.

Ellerman, who did not return a call to his cellphone for comment, had once represented Victor Conte Jr., the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, the company from Burlingame, Calif., at the center of a continuing federal investigation into steroids in sports. Ellerman had also represented James J. Valente, the vice president of Balco.

Conte and Valente served time in prison in connection to distributing steroids through their company, whose client list included some of the biggest names in sports, including Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger; Tim Montgomery, the Olympic sprinter; and the baseball stars Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi.

All four athletes testified in front of a grand jury in 2003, and court documents filed Wednesday show that Ellerman admitted that he had allowed the Chronicle reporters to see transcripts of each of the men’s testimony in 2004 in violation of a court order.

Carol Pogash and Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting.

    Reporters Avoid Jail in Balco Case, NYT, 15.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/sports/baseball/15steroids.html

Molly Ivins, Columnist, Dies at 62

February 1, 2007
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62.

Ms. Ivins waged a public battle against breast cancer after her diagnosis in 1999. Betsy Moon, her personal assistant, confirmed her death last night. Ms. Ivins died at her home surrounded by family and friends.

In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who she thought acted too big for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her opponents with droll precision.

After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that the United States was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”

“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”

Hers was a feisty voice that she developed in the early 1970s at The Texas Observer, the muckraking paper that came out every two weeks and that would become her spiritual home for life.

Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was “reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” and its Legislature was “reporter heaven.” When the Legislature is set to convene, she warned her readers, “every village is about to lose its idiot.”

Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family. She viewed the first President George Bush benignly. (“Real Texans do not use the word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she wrote.)

But she derided the current President Bush, whom she first knew in high school. She called him Shrub and Dubya. With the Texas journalist Lou Dubose, she wrote two best-selling books about Mr. Bush: “Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush” (2000) and “Bushwhacked” (2003).

In 2004 she campaigned against Mr. Bush’s re-election, and as the war in Iraq continued, she called for his impeachment. Last month, in her last column, she urged readers to “raise hell” against the war.

On Wednesday night, President Bush issued a statement that said he “respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase.”

Mr. Bush added: “Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed.”

Mary Tyler Ivins was born on Aug. 30, 1944, in California and grew up in the affluent Houston neighborhood of River Oaks. Her father, James, a conservative Republican, was general counsel and later president of the Tenneco Corporation, an oil and gas company.

As a student at private school, Ms. Ivins was tall and big-boned and often felt out of place. “I spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds,” she said.

She developed her liberal views partly from reading The Texas Observer at a friend’s house. Those views led to fierce arguments with her father about civil rights and the Vietnam War.

“I’ve always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such a martinet,” she told Texas Monthly.

After her father developed advanced cancer and shot himself to death in 1998, she wrote, “I believe that all the strength I have comes from learning how to stand up to him.”

Like her mother, Margot, and a grandmother, Ms. Ivins went to Smith College in Northampton, Mass. She also studied at the Institute of Political Science in Paris and earned a master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Her first newspaper jobs were at The Houston Chronicle and The Minneapolis Tribune, now The Star Tribune. In 1970, she jumped at the chance to become co-editor of The Texas Observer.

Covering the Legislature, she found characters whose fatuousness helped focus her calling and define her persona, which her friends saw as populist and her detractors saw as manufactured cornpone. Even her friends marveled at how fast she could drop her Texas voice for what they called her Smith voice. Sometimes she combined them, as in, “The sine qua non, as we say in Amarillo.”

Ronnie Dugger, the former publisher of The Texas Observer, said the political circus in Texas inspired Ms. Ivins. “It was like somebody snapped the football to her and said, ‘All the rules are off, this is the football field named Texas, and it’s wide open,’ ” Mr. Dugger said.

In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.

While she drew important writing assignments, like covering the Son of Sam killings and Elvis Presley’s death, she sensed she did not fit in and complained that Times editors drained the life from her prose. “Naturally, I was miserable, at five times my previous salary,” she later wrote. “The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.”

After a stint in Albany, she was transferred to Denver to cover the Rocky Mountain States, where she continued to challenge her editors’ tolerance for prankish writing.

Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.

She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.”

But the newspaper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.

After The Times Herald folded in 1991, she wrote for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, until 2001, when her column was syndicated by Creators Syndicate.

Ms. Ivins, who never married, is survived by a brother, Andy, of London, Tex., and a sister, Sara Ivins Maley, of Albuquerque. One of her closest friends was Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, who died last year. The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds.

“Molly is a great raconteur, with a long memory,” Ms. Richards said, “and she’s the best person in the world to take on a camping trip because she’s full of good-ol’-boy stories.”

Ms. Ivins worked at a breakneck pace, adding television appearances, book tours, lectures and fund-raising to a crammed writing schedule. She also wrote for Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation.

An article about her in 1996 in The Star-Telegram suggested that her work overload might have caused an increase in factual errors in her columns. (She eventually hired a fact-checker.) And in 1995, the writer Florence King accused Ms. Ivins of lifting passages Ms. King had written and using them in 1988 for an article in Mother Jones. Ms. Ivins had credited Ms. King six times in the article but not in two lengthy sentences, and she apologized to Ms. King.

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.

Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”

Molly Ivins, Columnist, Dies at 62, NYT, 1.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/washington/01ivins.html