Author: Dan Kennedy

GateHouse zings the Globe

The online-content war between the Boston Globe and GateHouse Media may have been settled out of court last winter, but resentments apparently linger. The Globe’s Boston.com site has a local-search function that lets you find content from other sites. Check out the description in this Patriot Ledger video at Boston.com.

New site covers arts on the North Shore

Check out Art Throb, a new online project covering the arts on the North Shore. Looks pretty ambitious. The lead Throbette is Dinah Cardin, among other things the former arts writer for GateHouse Media’s North Shore Sunday. According to the mission statement:

Art Throb is an independent publication and a collaboration of many talented writers and photographers. Our funding comes from a combination of sponsors, donors and grants.

Joel Brown said hello to Art Throb last Friday.

More evidence that the post-newspaper era will not lack for journalism of all kinds, whether there’s a financial model or not.

Dowd was just talking with a friend

I don’t think New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd committed a hanging offense. But I continue to be troubled by her explanation of how she came to lift a paragraph from Josh Marshall’s megablog, Talking Points Memo.

OK, so Dowd was “talking” in a “spontaneous” manner with a friend, as she put it to the Huffington Post. Fine. I had decided to assume for the purpose of moving on that by “talking” she meant “e-mailing.” It would be completely believable if she had copied and pasted from a friend’s e-mail who had volunteered to help her write her column. Lame, but believable.

And yet here is what she told a blog called the Nytpicker, via e-mail:

no, we were going back and forth discussing the topic of the column and he made this point and i thought it was a good one and wanted to weave it in;
i just didn’t realize it was josh marshall’s point, and we’ve now given him credit
my friend didn’t want to be quoted; but of course i would have been happy to give credit to another writer, as i often do

I don’t see how you can possibly construe this as an e-mail exchange, especially when, as you will see, the Nytpicker had contacted her a second time trying to clarify exactly how Dowd had managed to reproduce Marshall’s rather lengthy graf almost word for word. Hey, she was just talking with a friend. Right.

(Via an e-mail to Media Nation citing National Review’s Media Blog, which in turn got it from DailyKos.)

Dowd’s modified limited hangout

Jack Shafer points out in Slate that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd deserves credit for not going into hiding, not whining and not claiming that what she did wasn’t plagiarism. I’ll give her that.

In an e-mail to Media Nation, Shafer also fingered an attribution I’d messed up in my Guardian column, which has now been corrected. I’d misattributed a Dowd e-mail to the wrong source. Thank you, Jack.

NU students report on Egyptian dissident

Northeastern journalism students touring the Middle East have broken some important news.

Kate Augusto, Danielle Capalbo and Nick Mendez report that Ayman Nour, a leading political dissident in Egypt, has decided to return to prison and finish his sentence in order to dramatize what he calls the Egyptian government’s ongoing lack of respect for democratic values.

The Boston Globe’s Worldly Boston blog has picked up on the news.

Nour was released earlier this year, with the government announcing that it was responding to Nour’s poor health.

Our students are traveling with journalism professor Carlene Hempel and political-science professor Denis Sullivan, who directs both the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development and the International Affairs Program.

Please check out the group blog, as well as the individual student and faculty blogs that are linked from the main page.

Photo of Nour by Nick Mendez.

Warsh responds to Paulson

David Warsh wrote a letter to the Boston Globe over the weekend responding to Michael Paulson, who, in turn, was responding to Warsh’s observation — which I think I’m characterizing correctly — that the Globe’s coverage of the pedophile-priest scandal was perhaps more popular with the Pulitzer judges than it was with readers.

Specifically, Warsh objects to being called “insane.”

One point Warsh makes that is undeniable is that the Globe’s relentless pursuit of younger readers has not paid off. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea. But by putting so much effort into trying to convert non-readers into readers, the Globe — and many other newspapers — may only have succeeded in the opposite.

My earlier item, with links to Warsh’s and Paulson’s previous salvos.

The blogosphere versus Maureen Dowd

Simon Owens has the latest on the Maureen Dowd plagiarism story, with quotes from Dowd and a no-comment from Josh Marshall.

The New York Times has already updated Dowd’s column to credit Marshall, but there’s no acknowledgment that there was a problem in the first place.

OK, this is premature, but here is Dowd friend Howell Raines’ 1998 takedown of the Boston Globe, which he chastises for failing to fire star columnist Mike Barnicle after he’d been caught plagiarizing one-liners from a book by George Carlin.

I would imagine Times editors are going to have to do something even if Dowd’s explanation pans out. I’d also guess that the next 24 hours will be key. Right now, we can assume that dozens (hundreds?) of bloggers are scouring every column she’s ever written.

If she can survive that, then she’ll get through this. If not, then all bets are off.