The New York Times

DENVER—On Aug. 25, The New York Times’ chief political reporter, Adam Nagourney, was looking for a pair of seats for an interview in a sawdust-ridden tent in the parking lot of Denver’s basketball arena that served as the paper’s media workspace.

The Times wound up bringing so many staffers to this event (60!) that nearly every seat in its space was occupied in that area; he walked over to Bloomberg News, where there were another 30 workstations set up.

The thing about the conventions is that so many reporters come to them. The result is that it’s rare for anyone to write anything important.  read more »

The New York Times' Paper Cuts blog has an item today by Jennifer Schuessler headlined "What We Search for When We Search for Books About Running."

What's strange about the piece is that it ends with an apology to a semi-anonymous reader called "Jacob S." who complained the day before about editors and writers abusing the title of Raymond Carver's 1981 short-story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

In his comment, Mr. S. wrote:

I know [Haruki] Murakami could be blamed for the title of this blog post, but can we institute some sort of embargo against invoking the title of that Raymond Carver story (collection)? It’s used far too often on numerous lit.  read more »

I just spoke to the Times' top political reporter, Adam Nagourney, who told me this might be the last time he'll cover a convention--or, an election for that matter--for the paper.

"What I'm thinking--and it's not remotely about disillusionment; I love this job--that maybe I should do something different," he said. "There are a lot of opportunites at The New York Times. I think I've done it well, or as well as I could do it, but I just want to do something different."

He brought up the possibility of either moving over to the national desk, or taking a foreign assignment. He's been covering Conventions for the Times since 1996.

There's a strict caste system for press passes in Denver. There's the perimeter pass, which gets you inside the general media area, which takes up a large portion of the parking lot to the Pepsi Center; a hall pass which gets you inside the Pepsi Center, but only throughout the concourse; and then there's the super pass, the Floor pass, which gets you in the inside of the arena, where you'd find Michelle Obama giving a speech.

Many media outlets--including us!--only have a handful of the Floor passes, so reporters have to trade off so the Floor Pass and the Hall Pass can circulate around. According to Rick Berke, assistant managing editor of the Times, who was wearing a perimeter pass, that's exactly what the paper of record is doiing. And Gail Collins, with her perimeter pass in hand, was wondering aloud who she could do a trade-off with.

An overheated Times columnist Gail Collins was leaving Media Pavilion 4 and heading to a port-a-potty when she stopped for a few minutes to chat. She said she was going to do some reporting, but she was only going armed with a notebook and tape recorder. 

"I've been carrying around the laptop for 2 hours today wandering through the city," she said. "The laptop is in there, and it's not moving. It stays there for the rest of the convention. I'll be moving, but not the laptop. After walking three miles in the sun—it's a presence in your life you'd like to eliminate."

Media outfits are camped out in several different press tents just outside the Pepsi Center. So far, the heavyweight tent is Media Pavilion 4 where you'll find The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg News, Reuters, Congressional Quarterly, McClatchy, the Hearst papers, The New York Post and the The Daily News.

And what do you do if you're a reporter and you want a moment to break away from your laptop?

Head over to the Media Spa, located dead in the middle of the tent. It's open for 11.5 hours every day ("11:30am to 11pm!"). We went there around noon (mountain time) and found it mostly unoccupied.  read more »

D.T. Max, the author of The Family That Couldn't Sleep (and onetime Observer writer), submitted to The New York Times Paper Cuts blog "Stray Questions" survey today.

After avoiding an inquiry about what he's working on ("In a way nothing. In a way lots of things," he says) and offering some thoughts on the Web, Mr. Max answers the question, "Whose books are generally shelved next to yours in bookstores? How does it feel to be sitting between them?"

I’d like to say I’m next to Ernst Mayr, the great evolutionary biologist, and some places I may be. But there’s a man named Tucker Max who has a book out on beer and chasing girls. No relation, btw. He throws the wild parties on our otherwise sedate bookshelf.

Come on, there are worse things than having your well-reviewed book sit next a best-selling fratire forevermore. Actually, no, there aren't.

The New York Times has been hard on Anthony Weiner recently, and he thinks that's a reflection of how the paper has changed.

This morning, The Times ran a story about the departure of yet another staff member from the congressman's office, and that was a follow-up to a July 23 front-page story about his high staff turnover.

(Also, last week, one of his likely mayoral rivals, Christine Quinn, got a more favorable profile.)

I saw Weiner this morning near Brooklyn Borough Hall, where he was handing out campaign literature with State Senate candidate Dan Squadron, and asked him about this theme.

The Times is making its "own theme,” Weiner said.  read more »

Is Nicholas Kristof the new Michael Moore? This week, The New York Times columnist wrote about his attempt to obtain a permit to protest at the Olympics in Beijing and, at times, his stunt feels like a remake of Roger & Me, minus Mr. Moore's trucker hat and blue collar crusading.

Here's how Mr. Kristoff sets the scene:

Following government instructions, I showed up at an office of the Beijing Public Security Bureau, found Window 12 and declared to the officer, 'I’m here to apply to hold a protest.'

What I didn’t realize is that Public Security has arrested at least a half-dozen people who have shown up to apply for protest permits.  read more »

It's not every Sunday that you pick up The New York Times and find Bill Keller's byline all over the paper. And, according to Mr. Keller, there might be a Sunday someday soon when there won't even be a paper for him to write in.

Stealing a page from the David Remnick playbook, Mr. Keller decided to drop his editor's cap and rewind back to the good old days when he was a senior writer pointing his critical eye to far-off places. In yesterday's Times, Mr. Keller's byline appeared on the cover of Week in Review and Book Review sections for articles about the  read more »

Yesterday on The New York Times' Paper Cuts book blog, Times Book Review and 'Week in Review' editor Sam Tanenhaus took a look at James Wood's How Fiction Works, specifically, Mr. Wood's critique of John Updike.

As Mr. Tanenhaus writes, "Wood suggests that Updike’s fiction doesn’t work very well at all, in part because Updike’s prose, like Vladimir Nabokov’s, is oversaturated with pointillist descriptions that, Wood objects, 'freeze detail into a cult of itself.'" He then goes on to quote a particularly florid passage from Mr. Updike's Of the Farm, which Mr. Wood thinks is "an exaggeration of the noticing eye."  read more »

John Koblin asks, What's the matter with Jersey? "Since the start of summer, The New York Times emptied out its two New Jersey bureaus in Trenton and Newark; in June, The Record of Bergen County announced it would shut down its headquarters and its reporters would be homeless; in July, The Star Ledger announced that it was cutting about a third of its newsroom, and its owners said they would consider selling the paper."

Leon Neyfakh talks to author Jonathan Mahler about his book, The Challenge, which found itself released the same week as its subject, Salim Hamdan, was in the news: "[Mr. Mahler] hadn’t expected the trial so soon, and the timing made him self-conscious. What if readers thought his book, a rigorous chronicle of the Supreme Court case that led up to the trial, was just some thrown-off quickie meant to expire and disappear within a few news cycles?" Plus: Tribunal and Error.  read more »

Is New Jersey really that uninteresting?

Since the start of summer, The New York Times emptied out its two New Jersey bureaus in Trenton and Newark; in June, The Record of Bergen County announced it would shut down its headquarters and its reporters would be homeless; in July, The Star Ledger announced that it was cutting about a third of its newsroom, and its owners said they would consider selling the paper.

It’s becoming reasonable to wonder if, at this rate, there will be anyone left to cover the state soon.

“Can you cover the big stories that really mean something to people—how taxes are spent, projections for jobs, stuff you just need to know if you live here—if you have too few journalists?” said Frank Scandale, the editor of The Record.  read more »

After months of sitting on the sideline, the mainstream media let loose over the past three days with coverage of former Senator John Edwards' admission that he had had an affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter.

Some highlights from the coverage:

On ABC's web site, "The Blotter," Brian Ross and company posted a story today entitled "Is John Edwards Still Lying," which includes an exclusive interview with a friend of Ms. Hunter's named (apparently) Pidgeon, who suggests that he is, in fact, still lying.

In Broadcasting & Cable, Marisa Guthrie writes that according to multiple sources "Edwards was apoplectic that ABC News broke the story on its website and began promoting it early on Friday, giving the rest of the media a chance to play catch-up and cite ABC News' report.  read more »

Olympic gold medal-winner Michael Phelps has a few thoughts on Facebook, the social networking site beloved by teenagers and marketers everywhere. In an article by Karen Crouse from this weekend's New York Times (in the new "platform agnostic" era, it ran on August 9th on the Web and August 10th in the paper), Ms. Crouse writes:

As Phelps’s legend grows, so does his popularity. The last time he checked his Facebook page, he had more than 4,300 friends. And then there is President Bush. All of which does not impress Phelps much. All the hotheads and cold shoulders he endured as a child have inured him to celebrity’s charms.  read more »

More Landmania for you Friday afternoon!

As we wrote this week, NBC and The New York Times are going into the Olympics with different goals: NBC is covering the sports, The Times is waiting for a big news story.

Well, Jonathan Landman, The Times' deputy managing editor, laid out his own distinctions between NBC and the paper of record in his weekly memo. Even though Jeff Zucker believes NBC's coverage over the next two weeks is "the most ambitious broadcasting event ever attempted," with a planned 3,600 hours of coverage, including 2,200 hours live on the Internet, Mr. Landman isn't so impressed:

The formula for a great news and information Web site: Be interesting and useful.

 read more »

The New York Times' digital maestro Jon Landman brings out his favorite term again this week for his newsroom memo: platform agnostic! As we've previously discussed, Mr. Landman has been using a broad definition(s) of the term.

In one case, he's saying why in a breaking news story it's great to publish on the Web and in print, especially if the news can be broken on the Web first. (So, score one for the Web.) Then in another, he's saying why some material is better for the Web than for print and vice versa.

Today, he talks about more "agnostic platforms" (what?), but now it's how print was really getting the better of the Web in the way The Times was dating its stories.  read more »

David Carr must be one busy man this month. In an interview with Salon's Andrew O'Herir, Mr. Carr, The New York Times media columnist and author of the recently released book, The Night of Gun, says that he "got 1,200 e-mails when an excerpt of the book ran in The New York Times Magazine, and a lot of them were from people seeking recovery."

We know from Jennifer Senior's profile of Mr. Carr in this week's New York magazine that he probably felt compelled to answer them all since:

When he recently wrote a media column slamming Fox News, he got 450 e-mails, and he answered each and every one.  read more »

Joe Kahn, the Times’ deputy foreign editor, is the paper’s go-to China-expert.

He’s won a Pulitzer for his work in China, and has been described as the paper’s most invaluable resource for explaining Beijing and China to the paper’s sports desk.

He’ll be on the Charlie Rose show tomorrow night to explain China to Channel 13 viewers, but before you tune into that, here’s what he had to say to us while he spoke to him for our cover story this week:

China’s surprisingly rough year:

“I think many of us who have spent time in China tended to discount predictions made with whether or not China could handle these games successfully…The international media already has a pretty big presence, and even with an increase in quantity, there wouldn’t be a lack of sophistication with understanding China—it’s not like they’re letting in press for the first time as they were with Nixon’s visit to China.

 read more »

Welcome to the Olympics! If you're one of the 20,000+ journalists covering the games, you've probably arrived. But boy, it hasn't been easy getting there. Over the past week, The Observer spoke to reporters and editors about their headaches getting credentials in Beijing.

"One day, they’ll e-mail us and ask for certain information and the next day, after we raised a question as to why, then it changes," said Tom Jolly, The New York Times sports editor. "This is mostly silly stuff—like requests for photos for credentials because there was a blue background instead of a white background. That literally happened."

"I think the biggest problem is set from the language barrier," said Fran Turkowitz, the assistant to the Times' sports department who's in charge of credentialing.  read more »

At lunchtime on July 29, the New York Times masthead invited a group of reporters and editors up to a conference room in the paper’s executive hall on the 16th floor to eat roast beef and turkey sandwiches and talk about the paper’s massive investment in the Olympic Games.

How, they wanted to know, could The Times best use the 32 credentialed reporters and editors that would cover the Olympics in China?

George Vecsey, the paper’s longtime sports columnist, answered by not talking about sports at all.

He told the group the real story in Beijing over the coming three weeks was not about athletes, but about China, its geopolitical aspirations and how they were staked on the games.  read more »

The last year or so has not been a great time for the Times sports section. The paper lost three major talents in Damon Hack, Selena Roberts and Lee Jenkins all to Sports Illustrated. Clifton Brown, an NFL reporter, went to—of all places—The Sporting News. The paper's Nets reporter, John Eligon, left sports for the Metro desk.

Last year, the Nets beat, famously a career-launcher for the paper, was cut and the paper's other NBA reporter, Liz Robbins, went on book leave. (Oddly, she has yet to return even though her book is finished.) Howard Beck, one of the many dispirited Knicks reporters from last year's season in hell, was the only man The Times had to cover the NBA in 2007-08.

Finally, the paper has found its second man: Jonathan Abrams, a Clippers reporter for The Los Angeles Times, has escaped the clutches of Sam Zell and will join The New York Times' Sports section.  read more »

Just how historically accurate is AMC's critically acclaimed series Mad Men? Very.

In June, The New York Times Magazine's Alex Witchell called the show's art direction "almost fetishistically accurate." New York Magazine's Logan Hill actually went so far as to examine the books behind one character's desk on the magazine's Vulture blog.

But it's not just the sets that are period perfect. Last night's episode featured a plot point (spoiler alert?) about an American Airlines crash in Jamaica Bay. Here's how The New York Times's Peter Kihss described that crash, on March 1, 1962, in the March 2nd edition of the paper:

Nintety-five persons were killed yesterday in a jet airliner crash in Jamaica Bay.  read more »

Our sibling blog, The Culture Czar, drew our attention to a New York Times article about The Jewish Channel, a cable network devoted to Jewish interests.

As The Times' Joanne Kaufman writes: "The channel, which has been labeled the 'Jewish HBO,' relies mostly on pre-existing content."

What a pithy, perfectly formulated analogy: It really tells us everything there is to know about this little-seen network. Wonder who came up with it?

According to a July 25, 2008 article by Barbara Pash in the Baltimore Jewish Times:

Aaron Horning [sic.] calls it the 'Jewish HBO.' That’s a quick and easy reference for viewers to identify The Jewish Channel, a premium cable television channel that is now available in the Baltimore metropolitan area through Verizon FiOS.  read more »

Western journalists are beginning to flood Beijing in the run-up to the Olympics, which start on Friday. Many of them are beginning to tell us their first impressions of the city, and overall, everyone has been pretty friendly.

George Vecsey of the Times was impressed by the volume of volunteers to help shepherd him from Beijing's airport to the Main Press Center in the Olympic village. One volunteer who didn't know a word of English a few months ago, took him by the hand and helped him through. "My first hour ever in China could not have been nicer," he wrote.  read more »

With help from Romenesko, we now know that Gary Schwitzer at the University of Minnesota health news blog is shocked—shocked!—that NBC gave up so much time to the mouse-pill story. (A recap: A lazy mouse took two pills and showed increased endurance and fitness without doing any exercise.)

"It devoted more than 2 minutes out of its total of 22 minutes or so of news time to this story. We are at war. The economy is in the tank. No one can afford gas in the tank. But 2 minutes was given to this mouse research...With limited airtime, why was that an important nugget? Unless one's goal is to make drug company sponsors happy.  read more »

Where The New York Times sees an editorial scolding, the McCain campaign sees an opportunity.

At issue is an editorial, which appeared yesterday on The Times blog "The Board," accusing the McCain campaign of "starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives ran against Harold Ford."

McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb just sent out this statement, attacking The Times as hysterically pro-Obama:

"If the shareholders of the New York Times ever wonder why the paper's ad revenue is plummeting and its share price tanking, they need look no further than the hysterical reaction of the paper's editors to any slight, real or imagined, against their preferred candidate.  read more »

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This Sunday's Play Magazine will be full of Olympics stuff, a profile of Michael Phelps and something else: one advertiser.

The Nielsen Company, formerly VNU, will be the sole sponsor for this Sunday's Play, the only time The Times has ever given one of its editorial enterprises an exclusive arrangement. This was actually announced very quietly by the paper many months ago, but who remembers?

At 10 a.m. on July 29, three top editors of The Washington Post arrived at the Times Tower on Eighth Avenue.

The Post, which is currently combining its digital and newspaper newsrooms, had come to one of its great rival news organizations for something unimaginable just a few years ago: advice.

"We're visiting a couple places to talk about the integration of our online and print news operations," said Phil Bennett, the managing editor of The Post, who joined Jim Brady and Liz Spayd, top online editors at washingtonpost.com. "The Times went through this three years ago and they were generous enough to open up that process and tell us what they discovered.  read more »

With the Beijing Olympics less than three weeks away, The New York Times is beefing up its coverage of China for obvious reasons. But how many stories can the paper run on architecture, earthquakes, anti-smoking campaigns, and human rights before readers get bored?

Surely there must be a new, sexy angle on this thoroughly covered nation.

How about an article about young Chinese women learning to writhe and dance erotically? Yep, that'll do.

In today's Times' Jimmy Wang takes a serious look at a pole dancing class where:

Clad in knee-high leather boots, spandex shorts and a sports bra, Xiao Yan struck a pose two feet off the ground, her head glistening with sweat and her arms straining as she suspended herself from a vertical pole.  read more »

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Once again, the right is up in arms, yelling that the Liberal Media is conspiring to distort coverage and silence opposing views so that their chosen candidate might claim the White House. Several specific developments account for the current clamoring.

One is the presidential-level press coverage of Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan and the Middle East, where he’s been accompanied by all three network news anchors and many of the most prominent television and print correspondents. John McCain, meanwhile, has taken many similar excursions but never received remotely comparable coverage. And this week in particular, McCain seems sort of like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – left by himself while everyone else heads overseas.  read more »

Bill Schmidt, an assistant managing editor and 27-year New York Times veteran, is moving to the International Herald Tribune to become the paper's "Editor, Global editions."

Mr. Schmidt is the administration-man of the Times newsroom—the one who sends out emails reminding reporters to file their expenses—and he'll have a similar, if expanded, role at The Times' sister publication. Bill Keller writes in a memo, "He will be, in effect, the chief operating officer of the Trib newsroom, the principle liaison with the publisher and with the Executive Editor of The Times."

Memo after the jump:  read more »

The New York Times' Metro report will write more about food and sex than ever and it will write less about New Jersey than it has in years. This news officially comes in response to a reader's inquiry to Metro editor Joe Sexton: "Do you cover Jersey anymore?" Sexton's response in today's nytimes.com Q &A: "Ouch. But Jersey? Love Jersey."

After explaining that the Times' stellar local reporter David Kocieniewski would stay on the Jersey beat—presumably when Mr. Sexton isn't busy assigning him to investigative pieces on Charlie Rangel's real-estate ownership—he lays out Metro's future "pledge" to Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester and Long Island now that the bureaus have been emptied out.  read more »

When The New York Times Metro section reorganized earlier this year—one staffer described it as "retrenchment"—and killed off the regional bureaus in favor of more city-centric beats, one senior newsroom source told The Observer that there was an idea for a sex beat for Metro.

In a Q&A on nytimes.com today, Joe Sexton (hold your jokes please!) seems to confirm that.

When answering a question about Metro's new mission, Mr. Sexton said: "Jim Dwyer, our gifted About New York columnist, likes to say there are three great, inextinguishable human needs: food, sex and stories. We're going to keep the stories coming, likely including many about food and sex (don't wince yet!)"

Ad Age scored an extremely rare interview with Arthur Sulzberger Jr. today. It's good placement for The New York Times publisher and chairman: his company is days away from releasing second-quarter earnings results, which aren't looking particularly great. Some good press is a welcome event since this year has arguably been one of Mr. Sulzberger's most challenging as publisher. The paper lost money last quarter; he's getting divorced from his wife; the paper experienced lay offs in the newsroom for the first time.

But you won't find any mention of the divorce in the profile, and only a small bit on the company's terrible year.  read more »

Last week presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama contributed an op-ed to The New York Times headlined "My Plan for Iraq."

In it, Senator Obama wrote:

Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

According to The Drudge Report, Mr. Obama's Republican rival, Senator John McCain, attempted to file a rebuttal but didn't make it past The Times editorial board.  read more »

It's a late, sleepy summer Friday, but New York Times online editor Jon Landman has some choice words for Rupert Murdoch, Robert Thomson and The Wall Street Journal's online editor, Alan Murray, this afternoon.

Well, technically speaking, he doesn't name any of those people in his weekly memo, or the paper itself, but in his weekly briefing designed to discuss accomplishments for nytimes.com, he comes out swinging! Namely, he says wsj.com has accomplished nothing!

As Mr.Landman writes:

There's some financial newspaper out there, on Wall Street or maybe in midtown, we aren't sure. There's new ownership, it seems, some rich guy who says he wants his paper to be more like ours.  read more »

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Merely a coincidence, or does The New York Times editorial staff foresee an imminent real estate apocalypse?

For the second time this week, The Times has run a story about portable, one-man tents (the better to shelter us when the city comes to resemble Cormac McCarthy's The Road).

Two days ago, the paper's business section reported on the so-called "Mini Motel," a one-man tent complete with air mattress, night light and alarm clock for those unlucky souls marooned at O'Hare with no hotel voucher to temper the inconvenience.

Today, the paper ran a story on the latest technologies in one-man tents -- not for camping inside transit hubs, but for camping outdoors.  read more »

NYT Co. stock took another nosedive today, dropping 2.73 percent to $12.85. That means in the last week, Times Company stock has fallen $2.21, or 15 percent.

The big hit came after Craig Huber, an analyst at Lehman Brothers, wrote to investors last week: "We continue to think the board and management would think long and hard about selling assets and repurchasing shares again until it gets a much better handle on where the fundamentals of the newspaper industry are going."