Tag: Washington Post

Casting some doubt on the official marathon accounts

Boston Marathon bombing memorial at the Boston Common Gazebo

For the police — and for the public — last Friday was a day of fear, rage and confusion. So it takes nothing away from the work done by law-enforcement officials to point out that things didn’t go down exactly the way they were described in real time.

Three big stories today underscore that confusion. The most significant is in the Washington Post, which reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was probably unarmed when police fired on the boat in Watertown where he was hiding. They quote an anonymous official as saying that an officer may have accidentally fired his gun, setting off a fusillade.

Such a “fog of war” situation, as the Post describes it, is totally understandable. And yet, if authorities lost a chance to bring in a high-value terrorism suspect alive for questioning, it would have been a serious loss.

In the Boston Globe, a team of reporters quotes law enforcement as saying that it is now believed Tsarnaev’s neck wound came from flying shrapnel rather than a self-inflicted bullet wound, which fits in with the emerging theory that he was unarmed.

And from the New York Times we learn that the boat was actually inside the search perimeter, contradicting earlier reports. Again, not to second-guess the police, but it makes you wonder what sort of search they conducted during all those hours on Friday.

Journalists should approach the official account with skepticism, not cynicism. We need to know exactly what happened last week — including, of course, whether the Boston Marathon bombings can be attributed to a breakdown in intelligence-sharing among the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, which is the main focus of the Globe article.

Photo (cc) by AnubisAbyuss and published under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Masthead changes announced at the Boston Globe

Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory announced several changes to the masthead earlier today. The most significant: managing editor Caleb Solomon will become managing editor for digital to “oversee our rapidly evolving websites and portable platforms,” as McGrory put it in a memo to the newsroom.

Solomon was thought by some to be in the mix as a possible successor to Marty Baron when Baron left the paper late last year to take charge of the Washington Post. The position went to McGrory instead.

With Solomon shifting to the online side, Christine Chinlund will move up from deputy managing editor for news operations to managing editor for news. McGrory writes that Chinlund was his editor when he was the Globe’s national reporter — “though I don’t think she remembers, which, admittedly, sort of hurts.”

Getting a title enhancement is Mark Morrow, deputy managing editor for Sunday and projects, who will become senior deputy managing editor.

Combined with McGrory’s recent changes at Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com, it seems pretty clear that he’s determined to make his mark even as the New York Times Co. shops the paper around to prospective buyers. It calls to mind Baron’s steady hand during the tumult of 2009, when the Times Co. threatened to close the Globe, demanded $20 million in concessions from the paper’s unions, and then put it up for sale only to pull it back.

The full text of McGrory’s memo, a copy of which was sent to Media Nation earlier today, is below.

I’m excited to share some changes in the newsroom leadership.

I’ve asked Caleb Solomon, the managing editor for the past five years, to switch his focus to our digital operation and oversee our rapidly evolving websites and portable platforms as managing editor/digital. He has enthusiastically agreed.

This is an important role, vital actually, to the way our work is read and viewed by the region and the world, and key to our future in every imaginable way. The Globe has for years been at the vanguard of the digital news revolution, first with boston.com in 1995, and then with the introduction of Bostonglobe.com and the two brands web strategy in 2011. Now we’re in the process of sorting out the sites, untangling the content, and creating stronger identities that can mutually thrive with different revenue models. Caleb will shepherd this from the newsroom perspective. He’ll be our eyes and ears in the Nieman and MIT media labs, as well as in our own, and search high and low for what works and what doesn’t. Caleb, having arrived here from the Wall Street Journal in 2003, had an extraordinarily successful run as the Globe’s business editor. We worked together when he was the deputy managing editor for enterprise, and I worked for him when he ascended to be managing editor. My admiration has grown with every passing year and job. Caleb possesses the talent to see long distances and the innate ability to get things done. To that end, he has always viewed digital as the future, evidenced when he created a digital-first philosophy in business that served as a model for the rest of the paper. As managing editor, he was the hands-on editorial force behind the advent of Bostonglobe.com, which has won every accolade under the sun, as well as our highly decorated video operation. He’s already been more indispensable than merely valuable in my short time in this role, and that will flourish in his new position.

I’ve asked Chris Chinlund, the deputy managing editor for news operations, to assume the role of managing editor/news. There’s no one I could imagine more up to this critical job, with impeccable news judgment, journalism values of the highest order, and hands-on editing skills that are on sharp display night in, night out. There’s also the matter of her experience. Investigative background? Chris was part of the Spotlight Team that exposed Whitey Bulger as an FBI informant. National politics? She covered the 1988 presidential campaign as a reporter and was the editor overseeing the 1992 race. World news? She served as foreign editor after the September 11 attacks. She’s also been a New England reporter, suburban reporter and editor, and assistant health science editor in her 30 years at the Globe. She worked a memorable stint as our final ombudsman, and was the editor of the dearly departed Focus section. She was my editor when I was a national reporter way back when, though I don’t think she remembers, which, admittedly, sort of hurts. Chris worked in my shop when I was Metro editor, we worked alongside each other when she became deputy managing editor, and she was my editor again during a second stint as a columnist. All of this gives me pretty good perspective on what we’ll be getting as she ascends to the position of managing editor, and what we’ll be getting is nothing shy of great. She’s also, as each and every person in here well knows, a world class colleague.

I’ve asked Mark Morrow, the deputy managing editor for Sunday and projects, to become a senior deputy managing editor, keeping a similar portfolio. With this new status, Mark has fresh license to interject his trademark creativity across an even broader spectrum of Globe work. As we all know and appreciate, Mark has been the senior editor on just about every distinctive Globe project for the past decade, including the fallout to our Pulitzer Prize winning Catholic Church series, the Partners Health Care Spotlight series, the Probation Department series, and most recently, the 68 Blocks narrative and the Immigration series. He has also overseen and edited two major Globe books, on Mitt Romney and Whitey Bulger, both to critical acclaim. Name it, Mark has delved deeply into it, with wordsmithing skills and perspective that are unrivaled in my time at the Globe. Add to this the fact that week after week, Mark oversees the critical Sunday paper, the showcase for some of our best work. I have already sought Mark’s wise counsel on a constant basis and tapped into his steady stream of ideas, and that will only increase in this enhanced position.

It’s a real tribute to the breadth and depth of this newsroom that journalists of this caliber are ready-made for the task ahead. I’m excited about these changes, very much so. You should be as well. They are effective immediately. Now let’s continue the great and important work of the Globe.

Brian

Marty Baron leaves Globe for Washington Post

Marty Baron

Weeks of rumors and speculation came to an end a little while ago with the announcement that Boston Globe editor Marty Baron will replace Marcus Brauchli as executive editor of the Washington Post. The Huffington Post has memos from Baron, Brauchli and Post publisher Katharine Weymouth.

This is a very smart move for the Post and for Baron, who’ll have the opportunity to rebuild a faded brand. Not that long ago, the New York Times and the Post were invariably mentioned in the same breath. There’s still a lot of great journalism in the Post, but the paper these days lags well behind the Times.

Brauchli, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, got off to a rocky start at the Post. In 2009 he and then-new publisher Weymouth got embroiled in very bad idea: to put together paid “salons” featuring Post journalists, corporate executives and White House officials. As I wrote in the Guardian, there was evidence that Brauchli knew more about the salons than he was letting on.

I take Weymouth’s decision to replace Brauchli with Baron — and Baron’s decision to accept the offer — as a sign that she’s grown in the job and was able to assure Baron of it.

Baron arrived at the Globe in July 2001 to replace the retiring Matt Storin. (Here’s what I wrote about the transition for the Boston Phoenix.) Baron was executive editor of the Miami Herald before coming to the Globe, but he also had extensive experience at the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Many observers believed his stint in Boston would be relatively short, and indeed he was considered for a top job at the Times less than two years later.

Instead, Baron ended up staying in Boston for more than 11 years, winning six Pulitzers, including the public service award in 2003 for the Globe’s coverage of the Catholic pedophile-priest scandal. He has been a solid, steady presence — a journalist with high standards who made his mark at a time when the newspaper business, including the Globe, was steadily shrinking. He also gets digital.

Last February, at an event honoring him as the recipient of the Stephen Hamblett First Amendment Award, Baron told journalists they should stand up against the fear and intimidation to which they have been subjected. You’ll find the full text of his speech here, but here’s an excerpt:

In this environment, too many news organizations are holding back, out of fear — fear that we will be saddled with an uncomfortable political label, fear that we will be accused of bias, fear that we will be portrayed as negative, fear that we will lose customers, fear that advertisers will run from us, fear that we will be assailed as anti-this or anti-that, fear that we will offend someone, anyone. Fear, in short, that our weakened financial condition will be made weaker because we did something strong and right, because we simply told the truth and told it straight.

What’s good news for the Post is less than good news for the Globe. A new editor after 11 years of Baron would not necessarily be a bad thing, as every institution can benefit from change. But at this point it’s unclear who the candidates might be, and whether the next editor will come from inside or outside the Globe. And whoever gets picked will have a tough act to follow.

Baron will be a successor to the legendary Ben Bradlee and all that represents — the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and a boatload of Pulitzers. I think he was an inspired choice, and I wish him the best.

More: Peter Kadzis of The Phoenix has a must-read blog post on Baron’s departure. Great quote from an unnamed source: “On an existential level, I wonder if Marty gives a shit. He’s like a character out of Camus.”

Newsweek will disappear into the belly of the (Daily) Beast

I still remember a classic lede from Newsweek in the late 1970s — “Sihanouk is still Sihanouk,” or maybe it was “Sihanouk remains Sihanouk.” Whatever, there was a wonderful obscurity and a sense of inside knowledge to it that I found vastly appealing as a twentysomething trying to make sense of the world.

Starting around the time I encountered the Sihanouk story, I read Newsweek cover to cover for a good two decades. But Newsweek, unlike Sihanouk, had ceased to be Newsweek for quite a while. It became official in late 2010, when the Washington Post Co. dumped it and the magazine was merged with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast, a free website builder.

Well, King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia died earlier this week. And Newsweek died this morning with the announcement that its long run as a print publication would come to an end with its Dec. 31 issue. It will continue as a paid online magazine, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

For the past few years I had followed Newsweek mainly through a series of embarrassments, from the Michele Bachmann looney-tunes cover, to Niall Ferguson’s widely mocked, fact-challenged essay on President Obama, to the “Muslim Rage” fiasco.

At such moments I would recall that Brown never wanted Newsweek. In February 2011, Jeremy Peters reported in the New York Times that Brown “felt unburdened” when merger talks looked like they were going to fall apart. And though I can’t find a link to back this up*, I distinctly recall reading that it was Brown’s money guy, Barry Diller, who was convinced that the losses he was underwriting at the Daily Beast could only be stopped by marrying it to a print product. Today’s announcement shows that strategy failed.

I’m sure you’ll be reading and hearing a lot about how newsweeklies like Newsweek have been left behind by the Internet and a changing culture. But I think that’s demonstrably untrue. Years ago, there were three big newsweeklies: Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. There still are, only now the competitors to Time are The Economist and The Week.

No, there’s no longer a place for three general-interest newsweeklies doing exactly the same thing. But The Economist and The Week succeed by serving different niches and different audiences. They may not be mass-market publications the way Time (sort of) still is. Then again, the whole idea of a mass market has broken down in recent years. Time’s continued success meant that Newsweek and U.S. News had to figure out how to narrowcast. They never did.

As for Newsweek’s fate, the paid-digital strategy strikes me as little more than a face-saving move. I can’t believe more than a handful of people are going to sign up. At some point I wouldn’t be surprised if Newsweek becomes just a tab within the Daily Beast — used for the sole purpose of signifying that it still exists. If just barely.

*Update: A Facebook friend came through with this story from Business Insider.

Fact-checking the fact-checkers on an “act of terror”

In claiming that President Obama was not fully truthful last night regarding when he said he labeled the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, an “act of terror,” the fact-checkers are adopting as their own the manner in which Gov. Mitt Romney wants to frame it. The attack claimed several American lives, including that of Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

When the exchange took place, Romney appeared to be wildly, extravagantly wrong in claiming it took Obama two weeks to utter those words. He never fully regained his composure after moderator Candy Crowley read a transcript in which Obama, in a Rose Garden address the day after the attack, spoke of it in the context of “acts of terror.”

And it turns out that Obama said it again two days later: “I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished.”

Hard to be much clearer than that. Yet look at how some of the leading fact-checkers handled it.

• PolitiFact, on Obama’s insistence that he labeled it an “act of terror” right from the beginning: “Obama described it in those terms the day after the attack. But in the days that followed, neither he nor all the members of his administration spoke consistently on the subject. There were many suggestions that the attack was part of demonstrations over an American-made video that disparaged Islam. We rate the statement Half True.”

• FactCheck.org, on Romney’s claim that it took Obama withheld the terrorism label for two weeks: “Romney isn’t entirely wrong. Romney claimed Obama refused for two weeks after the Benghazi attack to call it a terrorist attack and, instead, blamed it on a spontaneous demonstration in response to an anti-Muslim video that earlier that day triggered a violent protest in Egypt.”

• The Washington Post: “Romney’s broader point is accurate — that it took the administration days to concede that the assault on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was an ‘act of terrorism’ that appears unrelated to initial reports of anger at a video that defamed the prophet Muhammad. (The reporting is contradictory on whether there was indeed a demonstration outside the mission.) By our count, it took eight days for an administration official to concede that the deaths in Libya were the result of a ‘terrorist attack.'”

It’s pretty easy to see what’s going on here. Romney has attempted to frame the issue as though any suggestions from the White House that the attack may have had something to do with the inflammatory video “Innocence of the Muslims” are incompatible with Obama’s statements that the attack was an “act of terror.”

But why should that be so? Why are they mutually exclusive? Obama said from the start that the attack was an “act of terror,” he repeated it and he hasn’t wavered on it. The administration has wavered on what role the video might have played. It’s worth noting that the New York Times, which had people on the ground in Benghazi, stands by its reporting that the anger stirred up by the video actually did play into the attack. The terrorist attack, if you will.

The administration’s response to the Benghazi attack has not been a shining moment, and Romney had plenty to work with. So it was obviously a huge mistake on Romney’s part for him instead to dwell on whether and when Obama labeled it an “act of terror” rather than focusing on the reasons for the security breakdown and shifting explanations for what went wrong.

But thanks to the fact-checkers’ genetic disposition to throw a bone to each side regardless of the truth, Romney’s mistake looks less damaging today than it did last night.

Photo (cc) by Cain and Todd Benson and republished under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Forbes: Washington Post is wooing Globe editor Baron

Marty Baron

This is potentially a big story, and not a good one for the Boston Globe. Forbes media reporter Jeff Bercovici writes that Globe editor Marty Baron is among several people being wooed to replace Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli. (Bercovici notes that Baron’s name had already come up in a gossip item in the Washingtonian.)

The combination of publisher Katharine Weymouth, granddaughter of the legendary Katharine Graham, and Brauchli, a former top editor at the Wall Street Journal, has not been a happy one, as I wrote in the Guardian in 2009. Despite continuing to produce great journalism, in recent years the Post has seemed lost at the top, and its status as a serious competitor to the New York Times is but a distant memory.

Baron, who has been editor of the Globe for more than 11 years, would, in my view, be a significant upgrade for the Post. He’s done a great job at the Globe, and has emerged as something of a conscience of the industry on the strength of speeches like this and this. Before coming to the Globe he’d been the top editor at the Miami Herald. But he’s also got significant experience at the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, so he shouldn’t have any trouble adjusting to having more resources at his disposal.

Unfortunately, Baron’s departure would not be good at all for the Globe and those of us who read it every day. And it doesn’t help that it comes at a time when questions are swirling about how long the New York Times Co. intends to hang onto the paper.

Following the Globe’s crisis summer of 2009, when the Times Co. threatened to shut it down if the paper’s unions wouldn’t agree to $20 million in concessions, and when the paper was put on the market and then pulled back, it has enjoyed a period of calm and stability, especially compared to other large regional dailies.

It looks like that may be about to end.

Pushing back against the White House anti-leak crusade

By Bill Kirtz

Leading news figures this weekend blasted expanding investigations of national-security leaks, detailed the dilemma of dealing with confidential sources and offered ways to restore credibility in a media universe that merges fact with fiction.

Their comments came at Boston’s Investigative Reporters and Editors conference attended by some 1,200 established and aspiring journalists.

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson said the Obama administration’s widening probes have created an “urgent” problem because it has a “chilling effect” on confidential sources. She said the current Washington environment “has never been tougher and [confidential] information harder to dislodge.”

She said the attorney general’s latest attempts to ferret out leakers raise the question of whether the U.S. Espionage Act “is being used as a substitute for” Britain’s wide-ranging Official Secrets Act.

Using the Espionage Act, the current administration is pursuing six leak-related criminal cases. That’s twice as many as all previous administrations combined brought since the act was passed in 1917 to punish anyone who “knowingly and willfully” passes on information that hurts the country or helps a foreign power “to the detriment of the United States.”

The Official Secrets Act makes it unlawful to disclose information relating to defense, security and intelligence, international relations, intelligence gained from other departments or international organizations and intelligence useful to criminals.

Alluding to recent Times stories about U.S. drone strikes and computer attacks aimed at Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, Abramson said the government’s policy on cyber warfare is an important subject about which the public needs to know.

The vast majority of her paper’s national-security disclosures come from “old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting” and not from leaks, she said. And before they run, she said, “We give all responsible officials a chance to reply” and will hold or cut information if they raise a legitimate security objection.

Times media columnist David Carr called the government investigations an “appalling” attempt to restrict information about significant issues.

“Whistle-blowers aren’t scarce but the people who blow them are,” he said, citing as an example the indictment of a National Security Agency worker who told a Baltimore Sun reporter about a failed technology program.

“As war becomes less visible and becomes its own ‘dark ops,’ reporters are trying to punch through and bring accountability,” he said. Carr added that while it’s easy to say leak-based scoops come gift-wrapped, they usually come from reporters working hard and asking the right questions. Continue reading “Pushing back against the White House anti-leak crusade”

Bonfire of the ombudsmen

In my latest for the Huffington Post, I take a look at the abuse heaped upon Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton and New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane. And though they clearly deserved to be criticized for their lazy, ill-considered commentaries, the over-the-top nature of the reaction says more about their critics than it does about them.

Slate inexplicably lays off Jack Shafer

Jack Shafer

Earlier this summer, Mark Lisheron called and asked if I’d like to talk with him for a profile of Slate media critic Jack Shafer that he was writing for the American Journalism Review. Well, of course. Shafer is among the very best when it comes to journalism about journalism. He’s also been kind to me over the years, so I was happy to return the favor. You can read Lisheron’s piece here.

Then, yesterday, the inexplicable happened: Slate got rid of Shafer, according to AdWeek, with editor David Plotz citing ongoing financial woes at the pioneering webzine. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post also ties the move to problems at the Washington Post Co., which owns Slate.

Shafer is a dogged reporter in a field where too many media critics would prefer to sit back and pontificate. (Yes, irony alert. I get it.) But he wore his reporting lightly in the sense that you could tell how much research he’d put into his pieces, yet he didn’t feel compelled to show his work all the time. As a small-“l” libertarian, he also brought a calm, iconoclastic perspective to a field dominated by liberals and conservatives thundering at each other about allegations of bias.

It was Shafer who popularized my two favorite descriptions of Rupert Murdoch: “rotten old bastard” and “genocidal tyrant.” Though Shafer is no admirer of Murdoch, he uses the former description more affectionately than not, and “genocidal tyrant” is actually something Murdoch himself coined. Nevertheless, I always enjoy borrowing those descriptions and crediting them to Shafer.

As for Slate, well, times are tough, and I suppose Plotz has access to website traffic numbers to justify his decision. But as far as I’m concerned, Shafer is pretty much the only reason to look at Slate, and it’s hard to imagine I’ll even bother with it anymore other than for exceptional articles someone flags on Twitter.

Shafer, I suspect, will soon surface in a better job than he’s got now. Still, this is a bitter day.

Photo via the Missouri School of Journalism.