MONDAY'S LINKS: Wikipedia Loses Its Wiki, DeNiro and Co. Close in on 'NY Observer', Tensions High at Gitmo

By: E&P Staff In today's links, Sir Harold Evans reviews former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent's memoir, Robert DeNiro and partners closing in on the New York Observer, and reporters evictions have raised tensions between the military and reporters at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.


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Web Users Open the Gates
Washington Post: "A decade after major news providers such as The Washington Post began publishing on the Internet, they are finally beginning to ask the right questions about what the Web can do for them and their readers -- and to realize how disruptive web technology is to traditional journalism," writes Jay Rosen.


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Surrender the Pink!
New York Magazine: "Arthur Carter is on the verge of selling his salmon-colored paper to Robert DeNiro's Tribeca gang. And Mr. Chips?ish editor Peter Kaplan thinks it?s peachy," writes Kurt Andersen. "If the deal doesn't happen, there?s apparently at least one fallback buyer, a well-known local billionaire ready to write a big check."


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Evictions Raise the Tension Level at Guantanamo
New York Times: The Pentagon said it removed the reporters in an attempt to level the field with other reporters who had been denied access to the base after the suicides. The decision prompted protests from several lawyers representing prisoners and from Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for journalists. But the abrupt expulsions also reflect the continuing tensions between the military personnel who oversee the base, which has served as a prison camp for suspected terrorists since early 2002, and reporters who are trying to gather information in the highly secure environment.


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Eye on the 'Times'
New York Times: "Reporters, columnists and editors who suffered the lash from Daniel Okrent, the first public editor at The New York Times, must have felt, in Lenin's phrase, that he supported the newspaper as a rope supports a hanging man," writes Sir Harold Evans. "Nobody knew where he would sting next in his role as the readers' representative. Now his judgments are pickled for posterity between the hard covers of a book, supplemented by reflections on his 18 months of duty."


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Slate Magazine a Decade Old
Slate: "In the last decade, Slate has gone from fairly well-kept secret to near-household name, with a monthly audience that has risen from the thousands to the millions. Yet our readers persist in regarding us as that great little restaurant that hasn't been discovered yet," writes Jacob Weisberg. "That's fine by us. ... Slate has from the start fostered a loose and cozy sense of belonging for its writers and its readers, creating a kind of no-admission, dues-free society akin to Deadheads, bird-watchers, or amateur chefs. It's a secondary affiliation, but a potent one."


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Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy
New York Times: Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be. Maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs. At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts ? one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.


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My Unwitting Role in the Rove 'Scoop'
Washington Post: "After reading his memoir -- and watching other journalists, such as Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today, crash and burn for making up stories or breaking other rules of newsgathering -- I think there's something else at play here," writes Joe Lauria. "[Truthout.org Rover scooper] Jason Leopold is in too many ways a man of his times. These days it is about the reporter, not the story; the actor, not the play; the athlete, not the game. Leopold is a product of a narcissistic culture that has not stopped at journalism's door, a culture facilitated and expanded by the Internet."


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Zen and the Art of Classified Advertising
Wall Street Journal: By almost any measure, Craigslist is a phenomenal success. It is the seventh-most-popular Web site in the world, according to the people who measure these things. The free online-classifieds site has become the nightmare of newspaper executives everywhere it launches a list. While it does not release financial statements, no one doubts -- and its chief executive does not dispute -- that it is comfortably profitable and has been so since 1999, about the time most other children of the dot-com boom started running out of cash. All the same, no one really questions that Craigslist could be bigger -- much, much bigger.


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Fitfully Blending Papers and TV (NYT)
New York Times: The synergy strategy for Tribune Co., especially on the two coasts, has failed to gel. While the entire media landscape is in turmoil, the Tribune properties in Los Angeles and New York have fared particularly poorly. Circulation is down, below the industry standards at both The Los Angeles Times and Newsday; at KTLA and WPIX, viewers have declined and audience share has plummeted. Nor has a synergistic bump in ad revenue materialized.


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Some Sites Off Limits, Even in a Newsroom
New York Times: Last month, Bennett Haselton, the founder of Peacefire.org, a Web site that promotes open access on the Internet, got an e-mail message from a Los Angeles Times reporter who was writing an article about online censorship. The reporter was unable, from The Times's newsroom, to access Mr. Haselton's site, which also offers instructions on how to get around software installed to block Web site access.


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Cascading Inconvenient Truths
New York Times: "The cluster of serious, point-of-view documentaries may also represent something else, a coup d'etat on the status quo," writes David Carr. "Just as those big books of the 60's took on the elites of the day (chemical companies, Detroit engineers) these films betray a disaffection with their postindustrial counterparts (Hollywood, the traditional news media) for filling theaters with brain-dead blockbusters and neglecting important stories."


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A Push Toward Private Control of Newspapers
Washington Post: The newspaper business was relatively stable over the last half of the 20th century, controlled by a handful of chains that steadily added newspapers and recorded profit margins of 10 percent to as much as 30 percent. Now, after two decades of circulation decline that have led to strife in boardrooms, some of the very precepts that stabilized the business -- newspapers should be owned by publicly held companies, local ownership is limiting, and bigger is better -- are being repudiated.