Media Nation

The New York Times today unveils a complete redesign of its Web site. It looks great. The best part is that it has a new feature called “Today’s Paper,” which gives you the digital equivalent of what you might otherwise have delivered to your doorstep in the morning.

Before, the Times site only gave you the front page. When you’d go to the other sections, it was hard to tell whether you were looking at something from that day’s paper, an article that wouldn’t appear until the next day or just a wire-service update that would never find its way into print. For someone old-fashioned enough to want to read that day’s paper, even if I didn’t get to it until evening, I like the new arrangement much better.

Two suggestions:

• It looks as though there are no story descriptions for “Today’s Paper” except for material appearing on the front page. Bring them back.
• Offer a week’s worth of “Today’s Paper.” That’s what the Wall Street Journal does for paying subscribers. It would be a great feature to offer TimesSelect customers who, say, missed the previous day’s edition and want to page through it quickly.

Overall, though, this looks like a big step forward for a newspaper Web site that was already among the best.

Update: I missed it at first, but there is indeed a feature called “The Times in Print from the Past 7 Days.” Thanks to Geoff for pointing it out.

This looks like the best news from Bruce Springsteen in years. I’m not a Pete Seeger fan, but I like bluegrass, and I’ve always loved Springsteen’s treatment of old-time material such as the classic Woody Guthrie songs he performed on “Folkways: A Vision Shared.”

So “We Shall Overcome” strikes me as a good bet to be his best album in ages — including the tolerable-but-overrated “Devils & Dust” and his hideous 9/11 album, “The Rising.” It’s about time.

A blogger named Aaron Margolis, who actually wrote that Jill Carroll “set herself up to be a new hero for the liberal left with her criticism of the Bush Administration” in one of her death-threat-coerced interviews, hasn’t apologized either. But, after all, he was just asking questions. Right?

Charles Johnson is “happy to report” that Jill Carroll isn’t actually ready to run off and join the Sunni insurgency. And he links approvingly to a blog that blames Carroll’s ordeal on the media (the “MSM,” natch) for its exploitation of freelancers.

Chuck: You viciously smeared a woman who’d been terrorized for 82 days because you thought she kinda sorta looked like she meant it when she criticized the U.S. mission in Iraq and said nice things about her captors.

I’m glad you’re happy. Now how about an apology?

The Christian Science Monitor now reports:

The night before journalist Jill Carroll’s release, her captors said they had one final demand as the price of her freedom: She would have to make a video praising her captors and attacking the United States, according to Jim Carroll.

In a long phone conversation with his daughter on Friday, Mr. Carroll says that Jill was “under her captor’s control.”

Ms. Carroll had been their captive for three months and even the smallest details of her life — what she ate and when, what she wore, when she could speak — were at her captors’ whim. They had murdered her friend and colleague Allan Enwiya, “she had been taught to fear them,” he says. And before making one last video the day before her release, she was told that they had already killed another American hostage.

So what does Charles Johnson say from the risk-free comfort of Little Green Football Land? Check it out: “Note that all of these statements seem to come from the family, not from Carroll herself.” Good grief.

This AP snippet doesn’t quite jibe with the Monitor’s report, but it’s worth pondering as well:

Dr. David Wellish, a psychologist at the UCLA School of Medicine, said he had the impression Carroll was suffering from a psychological trauma known as “Stockholm syndrome,” a survival mechanism in which a hostage begins to empathize with his or her captors.

“Jill Carroll clearly went down the Stockholm syndrome spectrum part of the way,” he said, adding he thought it would take her “a few weeks to get over it and regain perspective.”

Look, folks. Jill Carroll was a hostage for 82 days. She knew her life was in danger every minute she was held captive. Let’s give her a couple of weeks to decompress and see what she’s got to say. All right, Chuck?

Peter Smith, the freelance photographer who took the photo of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia doing the chin thing, has issued a statement on the Pilot‘s decision to stop giving him assignments.

Not that I can blame the Pilot, whose editor, Antonio Enrique, decided not to use or release the picture, only to see Smith turn around and sell it to the Herald. That may have been a poor journalistic judgment on Enrique’s part, but he’s got a right to make editorial decisions. As Enrique tells the Herald, “I need to try and find people I can trust.” (More disclosure than you probably need to know: I worked as the Pilot’s production manager for four and a half months in 1990 and early ’91. Enrique came well after that.)

Anyway, here’s the statement from Smith, who teaches photojournalism at Boston University:

Thanks for your interest in this story. It sounds like the focus today is on the Boston Archdiocesan newspaper, The Pilot and their editor’s decision to fire me. Technically, that is incorrect usage of language. As a freelancer without a contract, I was not an employee of their newspaper. They can choose not to give me assignments in the future and this is not of large concern to me.

My prime obligation is to my students at Boston University where I am assistant professor of photojournalism. All actions that I have taken to date concerning the release of the photograph of Justice Scalia, have been made based on journalistic principals and ethics. The photograph is mine. The copyright is mine. The image was being misrepresented and a reporter was also being misrepresented.

On Monday, March 27, I had a conversation with Pilot Editor Antonio Enrique explaining that I had not released the photograph to the press and had no intention of doing so. However, as of Wednesday, March 29, the story evolved and required that I speak up and provide some clarity to it. I therefore felt obligated to release the photograph. I notified the Pilot in advance, concerning my intentions to go forward with the photograph, explaining my situation with News Editor Gregory Tracy.

I understood the moment that I released the photograph that The Pilot would in all probability not use me to cover their events in the future, but I had already decided that that was a sacrifice that I was willing to make to do the right thing. My students read newspapers too and they looked to me to understand the ethics involved with this situation and it wasn’t academic but being played out in real time with their professor becoming increasing involved. I couldn’t say one thing to them and then do another when the facts were so clearly laid out.

Though we disagree on this particular matter I still feel that The Pilot has been a wonderful paper to contribute to. Everyone there that I have worked for and worked with have been professional and very decent people. I will miss my association with them.

The Herald, naturally, blows past any distinction about the literal impossibility of firing a freelancer. The front-page headline today: “WHAT’S SICILIAN FOR … YOU’RE FIRED?”

Media Nation’s view is that both Smith and Enrique did the right thing, given that they have two very different missions.

Media Nation reader J.F. passes along this astounding comment (via Andrew Sullivan) about Jill Carroll from alleged Imus funnyman Bernard McGuirk, best known for telling racist jokes:

She strikes me as the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. You know, walk into the, try and sneak into the Green Zone … She cooked with them, lived with them … She may be carrying Habib’s baby at this point.

McGuirk said this yesterday. So never mind my comment that this is going to get very ugly very quickly. It already has.

And so it begins. Check out the conservative blog Little Green Footballs on Jill Carroll’s interview with her kidnappers shortly before her release, in which she makes some remarks critical of the United States’ decision to go to war in Iraq. LGF adds portentously: “Note that even after her release, Carroll maintained that she had been treated well by her captors — so it would appear that this journalist for the Christian Science Monitor made these anti-American comments voluntarily.”

Regardless of whether the remarks she made in her forced interview were anti-American, does it therefore follow that it was anti-American for her voluntarily to say merely that she’d been treated well? I don’t get the logic. Then again, footballs aren’t green, are they?

On WRKO Radio (AM 680) this morning, Scott Allen Miller responded to an unhinged caller by asking whether Carroll was “Patty Hearst” or a “co-conspirator.” I’m not sure whether Miller was actually taking that point of view or simply trying to summarize what the caller had said — although this, on the WRKO Web site, may answer my question: “Scott wondered if there is anything fishy, Ollie North style, about the release, and why is she still wearing a burka.” I don’t get the Ollie North reference; I do get “fishy.”

In any case, get ready. This is going to become very ugly very quickly.

The Boston Herald has managed to squeeze a third front page out of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s less-than-polite gesture. Peter Smith, the freelance photographer who was on assignment for the Pilot, has let the Herald publish it.

Scalia’s fingers-under-the-chin salute is exactly how Herald reporter Laurel Sweet described it in her original Monday story. The question, for those of you who care, is whether or not it’s “obscene,” as Sweet reported. I think it’s been pretty well established that it isn’t. The Herald’s subhead: “Obscene? You be the judge.”

Correction: I originally, and mistakenly, wrote that the Herald had devoted four fronts to Scalia’s digits. In fact, the paper took Tuesday off.

American reporter Jill Carroll has been released after 82 days of captivity in Iraq. The story is just breaking — I heard it on NPR while driving to work this morning — but, at least in these early hours, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Finer seems to have the most detailed account.

Carroll was reportedly turned over to people at the headquarters of a Sunni political party by “unknown people,” according to Tariq al-Hashimi, the party’s secretary general. “She is OK. She is safe. She is more or less scared,” Hashimi told the Post. “I told her calm down and we would take care of her.”

David Cook, Washington bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, for which Carroll had been freelancing, told the Associated Press, “She was released this morning, she’s talked to her father and she’s fine.” Also, BBC News covers Carroll’s release here.

It had long since become obvious that Carroll’s kidnappers would have nothing to gain by killing her. The Iraqi people seemed to be genuinely appalled at her ordeal. That the incident could make such an impression when Iraqis themselves are kidnapped and murdered every day was unusual, and it may well have saved Carroll’s life.

Even so, she was in an incredibly dangerous situation, her fate at the mercy of people who couldn’t be counted on even to act in their own best interests. Her life was at risk right up until the moment of her release. After all, she had been threatened with execution on several occasions.

Just yesterday, the Monitor posted an item about an appeal that Carroll’s twin sister, Katie, had made on Al-Arabiya television. An excerpt of Katie Carroll’s remarks:

I am speaking to you today because it has been nearly two months since the last video of my sister was broadcast. We have had no contact with her nor received any information about her condition. Since that time, I’ve been living a nightmare, worrying if she is hurt or ill. There is no one I hold closer to my heart than my sister and I am deeply worried wondering how she is being treated. No family should have to endure having their loved one taken away from them in this way.

This morning, the nightmare is over.

Update: The Washington Post story has been expanded, with Ellen Knickmeyer’s byline having been added to the account. Carroll herself tells the Post: “I was never hurt, ever hit. I was kept in a safe place and treated very well.”