TUESDAY'S LINKS: New Pulitzer Chair, Murdoch Raising Money for Hillary, HBO Comedy About Journos in Iraq

By: E&P Staff In today's links, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is incongruously planning to host a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's re-election campaign, Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger has been named the new head of the Pulitzer board, and HBO is developing a comedy series about journalists in Iraq.


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Murdoch Will Host Fundraiser for Hillary Clinton
Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media mogul whose New York Post savaged Hillary Clinton's initial aspirations to become U.S. senator from New York, has agreed to host a political fundraiser for her re-election campaign.


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'WSJ' ME Paul Steiger Named Head of Pulitzer Board
Paul E. Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a vice president at Dow Jones & Company, has been appointed chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board, Columbia University announced yesterday.


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HBO Comedy About Journalists in Iraq in Development
Several cable networks have contemplated dramatic projects set against the war in Iraq, but only HBO is daring enough to consider a comedy. The premium network is developing Hotel Palestine, a half-hour comedy about a group of wartime journalists living in a Baghdad hotel.


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Investigation in 'LAT' Yields Fruit
Amid all the Pulitzer hubbub a few weeks back, the L.A. Times was particularly noticeably absent from the list of winners. But the Pulitzers by no means tell the whole story -- and last week the paper published an explosive set of investigative stories which have provided their own public service.


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'Stupid Error' By Desk Editor Puts Borrowed Text in 'NYT' Article
An article in Business Day yesterday described the start of a search by the Forbes publishing family to bring investors into its company. In preparing the article, the paper's writer consulted an online report from The Independent on Sunday, a British newspaper, which he appended to the end of his computer file for reference.


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Media Consultants Get Rich Raking in Campaign Donations
"Psst! You with your checkbook in one hand and a political fundraising letter in the other. Are you sure you're being shrewd instead of being screwed when you send your money to this particular campaign?" asks Walter Shapiro. "Would you feel ripped off if you discovered that about 15 percent of everything you donate goes right into the pockets of the media-consulting firm before a single ad is placed on television?"


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'LAT' Contributor Successfully Mixes Booze and GDP
"We've complained more times than we would like to recall about the stilted, often leaden way in which most business stories are written," writes Paul McLeary. "For whatever reason, there just seems to be something about the form that prevents many reporters from injecting any life or levity into their accounts. So imagine our surprise to find in Sunday's Los Angeles Times a business column that was actually fun to read. And even more unexpectedly, it was written by a think tank economist, Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute."


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Pulling the plug on the White House Correspondents Dinner
"There are a number of good reasons why the plug should be pulled," writes Dante Chinni. "First off, the correspondents dinner showcases two of this town's biggest psychological issues, its feelings that it is the center of the universe and its fear that no one really cares what happens here. The dinner is like prom as imagined by the debate team. The political geek set gets dressed up and glamorous and sits down to congratulate itself, but fearing it isn't cool enough on its own, media organizations try to score A-list celebrities from New York or Los Angeles to dine at their tables."


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'Cincy Post' Editor Left Mark on Paper
"Journalists, the really good and caring ones, have ink in their veins and busy-looking desks. Post Features Editor Wayne Perry never ran out of ink. And his desk was an absolute marvel of controlled chaos. Perry's legacy is caring about every upcoming story, every caught misspelling or misplaced comma; and a lengthy archive of beautifully written articles on music and the arts."


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Metro Expands Into Croatia
On May 15, a Croatian edition of Metro will be launched by Europapressholding (EPH), the biggest newspaper publisher in Croatia in which German publisher WAZ (Essen) has a 50% stake. The paper is a Metro franchise and wil have the familiar green Metro design. Metro will be pubished in four different editions (Zagreb, Istria, Dalmatia, and the northern area) with a circulation of 250,000.