FRIDAY'S LINKS: Experience Takes a Buyout at 'Wash Post', 'NY Times' and 9/11, Trite Reporting on Disasters

By: E&P Staff In today's edition, a Washington Post writer laments the loss of 70 of his colleagues, Bill Keller says that Judy Miller's pre-9/11 intel about a big attack by Al-Qaeda didn't make it to editors higher up the ladder, and Jack Shafer says that the reporting on this week's earthquake in Indonesia was warmed over, as usual.


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'Wash Post' Staff Experiencing Their Own 'Katie Couric Moments' as 70 Exit
"The departures reflect the financial reality of a shrinking base of daily newspaper readers and major advertisers, or, more precisely, the shift of those readers and advertisers to other media," writes Steven Pearlstein. "With The Post's pension program overfunded, the company is able to pay for the buyouts without much impact on reported earnings. And in the scheme of things, it's probably a better way to right-size than laying off the young and recently hired. That said, this one's gonna hurt. The Post hasn't seen a sudden exodus of so much journalistic talent since Ben Bradlee departed from the fifth-floor newsroom in 1991."


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Judy Miller's Pre-9/11 Info Didn't Make it to Top 'NYT' Editors
In recent months, former New York Times editor Steve Engelberg and former reporter Judith Miller have both said publicly that in 2001 before 9/11, she had info from a high-level counter-terrorism source who said Al Qaeda was planning some sort of major attack. Engelberg apparently didn?t think Miller had enough to go on, so they didn't do a story -- and since then, both have expressed regret that they didn?t get anything into the paper, because it?s conceivable that doing so might have changed history and possibly averted the 9/11 attacks by focusing more public and governmental attention on the threat. Now Bill Keller has weighed in on this little-known episode, and what he has to say is eye-opening. He says that word of the explosive tip never made its way up the Times food-chain and that he was never told about it. What?s more, he acknowledges that he wishes they?d broken the story, though he also says that Engelberg was right to hold back and sit on the info.


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Strassel Tapped as New Columnist at 'WSJ'
Kimberley A. Strassel, a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, has been named the paper's new Washington columnist. Strassel, 33, will be resuming the weekly Potomac Watch column, which has been in hiatus for the last five years. It ceased when Paul A. Gigot, who wrote the column for 14 years, left Washington for New York in August 2001 to become The Journal's editorial page editor. His column won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2000. Strassel has been an editorial writer since January 2002 and was elevated to the editorial board in November.


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On Trite Disaster Reporting
"Water schemes with earth to make mud, which spreads over the dead and half-dead like skanky chocolate frosting. Man-made mayhem curses us, too -- shipwrecks, fires, plane crashes, derailments, pileups, and cave-ins," writes Jack Shafer. "To these scenes comes the journalist -- if he hasn't already staked out the territory. With pen, camera, or microphone in hand, he struggles briefly against clich? to document the suffering and mop-up but always surrenders because the disaster-news template defies renovation. Audiences know what they want from the disaster-news genre -- a blink of horror before the sports scores and then maybe a longer gaze later -- and the press gives it to them."


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More Online Privacy Concerns
Big Internet and telephone companies are girding to fight an unprecedented call by the Bush administration for them to keep detailed records of customers' online activities for two years. The request by Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III would dramatically expand the government's ability to track what people do online and with whom they communicate.


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Demise of Stock Tables Was Overdue
"On Tuesday, the BostonGlobe, my former employer, announced that it would stop publishing weekday stock and mutual fund tables, effective June 20," writes Chuck Jaffe. "The paper will keep the weekly charts, but the day-to-day numbers are gone. The Globe waited longer than a lot of big papers, most notably the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. The paper, like the others before it, will offer enhanced stock and mutual fund quotes on its Web site."


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J-School Graduates, Commence Worrying
From Gene Weingarten's commencement address to the University of Maryland College of Journalism: "Our field is changing rapidly. Technology is overtaking us at an unheard-of pace. The journalists of tomorrow may not look anything like the journalists of today. I mean, literally. For all we know, they might have gills and three buttocks. That's how fast things are changing. But rest assured that, however dizzying the rate of change, when what's at stake is the sacred art of truth-telling, there is always one constant. One thing will always stay the same: Your editor is going to be an idiot."


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Study Finds Journos Don't Do Enough to Stop Unethical Behavior in Newsrooms But What Would 'Enough' Be?
"Journalists might say the more internal critiquing the better when they?re talking about federal bureaucracies, research labs, and police stations. But they don?t want their own newsrooms to operate like Moscow in the 30s," writes Michael Miner.


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Wounded Journalist Off Ventilator, Talking
Correspondent Kimberly Dozier, who was critically wounded Monday in a Baghdad car bombing, has begun communicating, asking family members about the fate of her crew, CBS News said Thursday. As doctors at the U.S. military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center began reducing her sedation, "she began communicating with her family by writing questions on sheets of paper," the network said. "Her first question was, 'What (happened to the) crew?' " according to a CBS News release.