THURSDAY'S LINKS: Wen Ho Lee Got the Last Laugh, Journos' Politics, Guardian (U.K.) Goes Web-First

By: E&P Staff In today's edition, Jack Shafer bets that newspaper executives and editors are more upset about the Wen Ho Lee settlement than they let on, reporters tak about how to improve political coverage as the election season looms, and the Guardian becomes the first British paper to go Web-first with news.


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Don't Believe the MySpace Hype
"While MySpace is immensely popular -- the site attracted a whopping 38.4 million unique visitors in April according to Nielsen//NetRatings, up from 8.2 million a year ago -- it's far from being the money-maker that Google and Yahoo are just yet," writes Paul La Monica on CNN/Money. "'The key with MySpace is they only have the eyeballs. The question is how successful will they be in monetizing the number of users,'" said Alan Gould, a media analyst with Natexis Bleichroeder."


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Wen Ho Lee Gets the Last Laugh
"In public, the news organizations treated the settlement as if they'd ordered the least-nasty entree from a bad restaurant at which they were compelled to dine," writes Jack Shafer in Slate. "And they denied that their chow-down set any precedent. 'I don't see this as any type of incentive for attorneys to get money out of the media,' George Freeman, New York Times Co. assistant general counsel, told Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp. AP Managing Editor Mike Silverman and Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. salvaged a victory of sorts from the settlement by noting to E&P that it rescued them from either surrendering their confidential sources to Lee's attorneys or seeing their reporters jailed on contempt charges. But in private, I'll bet editors and their attorneys are as sick as dogs over all this."


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Reporters Tire of Bad Political Reporting
"The 2006 election season is already kicking into cranium-grinding gear," writes Felix Gilette on CJR. "But before things get too messy, a group of media observers recently asked a collection of seasoned journalists to put aside the minutiae of political reporting for a moment and think about big-picture changes that could improve news coverage in the upcoming campaign season."


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Guardian to Offer News Online First
Guardian: The Guardian will become the first British national newspaper to offer a "web first" service that will see major news by foreign correspondents and business journalists put online before it appears in the paper. The shift in strategy marks a significant departure from the established routine of newspaper publishing where stories are held for "once-a-day" publishing.


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Objective, but Not Independent
"The New York Times ethics handbook states that, 'journalists have no place on the playing field of politics,'" notes Katherine Stump in the San Antonio Current. "But where do journalists draw the line between their voting rights as citizens and their professional duties? It is, perhaps, not the most fervent debate occurring in modern newsrooms, but it warrants attention in the aftermath of a highly visible race to get Independent candidates on the Texas gubernatorial ballot."


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Reporter Busted by DEA After Ordering Drugs Online for Story
"Sixty-one tablets of generic Vicodin, a prescription painkiller, came to the Houston Press office from a Florida pharmacy," writes Craig Malisow in the Houston Press. "It was my first successful buy in several weeks of investigating the online drug market. To see how easy it would be for prescription drugs to get into the wrong hands, I told a Costa Rican-based online referral service that I had back problems. That story -- meant to show how an addict or a minor could get these drugs -- came back to bite me in the ass."


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Advice for New PNI Owners
"[Brian] Tierney & Co. have been bending over backwards to show the papers will be editorially independent, resulting in the now famous 'pledge'," writes Will Bunch on his Attytood blog. "But the pledge is only a beginning. The best way to ensure compliance is to hire two independent watchdogs, one for each paper. Since this is the Department of Unsoliciited Advice, here's how I'd do it. The owners should not even hire the two through their new Philadelphia Media Holdings, but rather fund it independently. Why not set it up through the auspices of a third party, like the political watchdog Committee of Seventy, run by the fiercest advocate for good journalism in Philly that you'll ever find, former DN editor Zack Stalberg?"


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Investors Wonder Whether Tribune Is Being Pushed Onto Auction Block
The Street: "It forces you to wonder why the Chandlers wouldn't go along with the plan," says John Morton, of Morton Research. "Maybe they want to see what kind of offer might come around." Benchmark's Ed Atorino says the boardroom breakup raises questions for other institutional investors. "It may give pause to groups like the McCormick fund who agreed to sell, but who might rethink their position," says Atorino. Atorino says the Chandler move "does change the dynamics of the process."


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Mr. Sulzberger, Tear Down This (TimesSelect) Wall!
"The time is long past when the printing presses and mainstream broadcast outlets were the only platform for opinion journalism in America," writes Mark Glaser on PBS.org. "Tens of millions of flowers are blooming with opinions reaching far and wide on the Internet; from grandmas to children, from transsexuals to rednecks, we all have a voice on blogs, podcasts and web pages. Despite all the economic pressures in the new media journalism world, the Times stands secure as a profitable company. And online business models are transforming the globe."