By: E&P Staff Random House will publish the paperback of Seth Mnookin's 2004 book, "Hard News," on August 9. An advance copy received by E&P reveals that the book has a new subtitle, a new afterword by the author, and, in a rare move, three pages of corrections.
The subtitle has been changed from ?The Scandals at 'The New York Times' and Their Meaning for American Media? to ?Twenty-one Brutal Months at 'The New York Times' and How They Changed the American Media.?
Mnookin says he only made a few errors but, to continue his commitment to ?transparency,? he is ?offering up a relative rarity in the world of book publishing: a corrections section.?
Most of the corrections (like the Times') are of a minor scale, such as the executive dining room of the paper being located on the 11th, not 14th floor, and Clyde Haberman stringing from City College of New York, not Columbia University.
The more substantial correction concerns the original's assertion that two Timesmen, Jon Landman and Jim Roberts, had a testy relationship. Mnookin notes that this was based on a New York magazine story and that Landman tells him that though the two editors are not ?drinking buddies,? they do share mutual respect.
The new afterword is mainly a summary of the past two ?difficult? years for the mainstream media, from the Jack Kelley scandal to the circulation plunge. Mnookin says the media industry ?is facing the biggest crisis of its existence.? Addressing the current Times, he seems to give the Sulzberger-Keller team the benefit of the doubt, and calls the paper still ?the gold standard? in American journalism.
Then he muses: ?But in five or ten years, will anyone care?? Mnookin says he hopes so but sometimes he's ?not so sure.? He closes by revealing that in his Manhattan apartment building a daily paper only lands on two out of 36 doorsteps.
Mnookin is currently writing a book about the Boston Red Sox.
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