Tag: New York Times

Pictures from a polling place

I got back from voting a little while ago. While I was there, I took a few pictures to upload to the Polling Place Photo Project, started by Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net and now hosted by the New York Times.

I zipped off four photos to the project, which you can see here. (At right is Salem News reporter Ethan Forman, who’s interviewing a voter outside Danvers High School.) The idea is to supplement election coverage with a little citizen journalism, combining professional with amateur contributions. When it comes to photography, I certainly qualify as an amateur.

Here is Rosen’s original essay on the purpose of the project.

The site is slow today — no surprise, given that it’s Super Tuesday. I imagine things will be quite a bit busier later today, when people start getting out of work.

Rosen and the other folks behind the project hope this will somehow lead to a better voting experience. Perhaps. Certainly there’s a possibility that some real problems will be documented by camera-wielding citizens.

If nothing else, though, the project shows that professional and amateur journalists can work together to produce something that’s both interesting and worthwhile.

The Clintons’ Kazakhstan problem

The New York Times fronts an absolutely brutal story today about Bill Clinton’s dubious dealings on behalf of a Canadian mining mogul.

According to the article, by Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr., the mogul, Frank Giustra, unexpectedly won a lucrative uranium-mining deal in Kazakhstan after Clinton flew to that country with him in 2005 and schmoozed the human-rights-abusing dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Giustra then turned around and donated $31 million to Clinton’s charitable foundation, with a pledge to give $100 million more.

There’s also an account of Bill Clinton’s and Giustra’s somehow not able to remember meeting with the head of Kazakhstan’s state-controlled uranium agency, Kazatomprom, at the Clintons’ home, in Chappaqua, N.Y., until confronted with evidence. Here’s a lowlight:

“You are correct that I asked the president to meet with the head of Kazatomprom,” Mr. Giustra said. “Mr. Dzhakishev [the head of the uranium agency] asked me in February 2007 to set up a meeting with former President Clinton to discuss the future of the nuclear energy industry.” Mr. Giustra said the meeting “escaped my memory until you raised it.”

That’s perfectly understandable, of course. I mean, any of us could forget about meeting with a former U.S. president and the guy who was about to make us many millions of dollars richer, right? Admit it: You probably can’t remember what you had for breakfast this morning.

The story raises the question of how happy Hillary Clinton is with this, as she has been an outspoken critic of Nazarbayev. But she certainly can’t distance herself from her husband’s shenanigans given that she’s ultimately responsible for unleashing him to attack Barack Obama during the past few weeks. It is the Clintons who’ve created the impression that they’re running for co-president, so his baggage is now hers as well. (Not that it ever wasn’t.)

But there’s an additional point of interest here, and that involves timing. This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate story, and the Times deserves a lot of credit for ferreting it out. Tonight we’ll see the most crucial debate of the campaign, as Clinton and Obama go at it one-on-one on CNN at 8 p.m. I suspect that this story will be a big part of the debate. And from there, it could dominate coverage right through Super Tuesday.

As we know, the Times has already endorsed Hillary Clinton. Today’s story may have far more of an effect on the outcome. Whether by accident or design, the news side has sent a clear message that it’s more relevant and more important than the paper’s opinionmongers.

More powerful than Googlezon!*

One of my favorite bomb-tossers, John Ellis, has uncorked a doozy. In a column for the Web site RealClearMarkets, Ellis proposes that Google make an offer to the New York Times Co. that it can’t refuse. Ellis’ arguments:

  • Mega-wealthy Google could easily afford to buy the Times Co., the price of which will only keep dropping.
  • Even though the Times Co.’s controlling stock is owned by members of the Sulzberger family, who don’t want to sell, there’s a point beyond which the family can no longer screw other shareholders.
  • Rupert Murdoch seems determined to transform the Wall Street Journal into a serious competitor to the Times on all kinds of news, not just financial — and he can afford to run the Journal at a loss.
  • Google, like Murdoch, doesn’t need to turn a profit with a small investment like the Times — but may make money anyway if it can leverage Times content across multiple platforms.
  • Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. isn’t getting it done, and has been in charge for so long now that it seems clear that’s not going to change.

Ellis, a former Boston Globe columnist, offers some provocation for us locals as well, suggesting that Google could get the price down to a mere $3 billion or so by selling off the Times Co.’s other properties, including the Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and its share of the Red Sox and of New England Sports Network. (If the right buyer for the Globe can be found? Go ahead, make my day. But that’s a big if.)

Ellis’ piece is a suggestion, not a prediction. Still, it’s worth noting that in October 2006, when it looked as though a group headed by retired General Electric chairman Jack Welch might buy the Globe, Ellis wrote: “Mr. Sulzberger would be a fool, of course, to sell the Globe to anyone at this juncture.”

He was exactly right. Which raises the question of whether Times Co. executives now would be fools not to sell the Globe.

Ellis’ proposal is logical, if unlikely to happen. But given that all of our great news organizations are going to have to find new, once-unthinkable ways of surviving, I can imagine a worse fate for the Times than landing in the arms of Google, which generally, though not always, lives up to its “don’t be evil” philosophy. Better Google than Murdoch, certainly. (Via Romenesko.)

*Click here for reference.

Hoyt’s mixed bag on Kristol

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s column on the hiring of William Kristol is disappointing, but entertaining nevertheless.

It’s disappointing because he quotes the most unhinged, illiterate e-mails the Times has received so that he can claim that at least some Kristol-bashers are nothing but ignorant haters, and because he blows right past the criticism that Kristol “is an activist with the potential to embarrass The Times with his outside involvements.” Well, yeah. That’s disqualifying, or at least it ought to be.

But Hoyt is right on the money in flogging Kristol for publicly urging that the Times be prosecuted for committing the sin of journalism against the Bush administration. And he’s touchingly naive in saying that Kristol’s refusal to talk to him was “an odd stance for someone who presumably will want others to talk to him for his column.”

Does Hoyt really think Kristol is going to do any reporting?

Channeling no one but himself

New York Times reporter Michael Powell asserts that John McCain is borrowing rhetoric from Barack Obama. Yet in his only example, he shows that McCain is borrowing from himself:

Mr. McCain admits to admiring Mr. Obama’s appeal as a “wonderful thing” and has taken to borrowing a line or three. He has been channeling Mr. Obama, calling on Americans to “serve a cause greater than their self-interest,” a theme from his campaign in 2000.

Indeed it is a theme from McCain’s 2000 campaign. So why does Powell say that McCain is “channeling Mr. Obama”?

The trouble with Bill Kristol

In my latest for the Guardian, I take a look at the New York Times’ decision to give an op-ed-page column to William Kristol. The problem, I argue, isn’t that he’s a neocon who was wrong about Iraq and who’s being irresponsible about Iran. Rather, it’s that the Times has bent its ethical rules to give a platform to someone who sees journalism as just another form of political partisanship.