Four in the morning

1. There's some news out of Egypt today. NYT

2. LA City Attorney Carmen Trutanich wants to get tough with political protesters. LAT

3. Huffington Post economics editor Peter Goodman explains the Huffington Way of coverage. HuffPo

4. The low bar of getting a story on Gawker. Capital New York (via Poynter)

Four in the morning (the Huffington Patch edition)

Did AOL just pay Arianna Huffington $315 million to figure out how not to pay its writers? This and other questions mulled in today's AOL Way-HuffPo roundup:

1. Huffington and her cohorts say the deal will change nothing and everything, "it will be like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet." Atlantic

2. Ken Auletta on Tim Armstrong's "Hail Mary Pass." New Yorker

3. Nick Denton calls the Huffington Post "remarkably ugly" (scroll to bottom of Q&A). Atlantic Wire

4. Gawker makes fun of the whole thing. Gawker

Ben Sherwood gets thumb in the eye from ABC News staffers

ABC News staffers really hate their new boss, Ben Sherwood. So much so that they edited a video of the speech he gave upon accepting the job of president of ABC News to advertise what an underwhelming talent he is. For example, they call him a liar and a failure. Gawker has the video here.

Whatever other faults he has, Sherwood definitely has a weak news background (unless you consider "Good Morning America" a strong news show). That fact alone explain why some news staffers are unhappy with his selection. Usually, when a mass media company brings in an interloper to run a news division it's because the higher ups want a fiddle around with staffing (i.e., lay people off or hire flashy but substance-less talent) and experiment with programming without having a respected news veteran stand in their way.

The origins of spam*

The Internet security company Kaspersky Lab has a report on the origins of spam and finds that, in 2010, Russia became the leading source of spam, followed by India and Ukraine. Not surprisingly, the United States was the leading recipient of malicious software, followed by Germany and China. The full report is here.

(found via Gawker)

*Update: A notorious and prolific Russian spammer, 23-year-old Oleg Nikolaenko, was arrested in Las Vegas last month and charged with violated U.S. spam laws. We'll see if that ratchets down the Russian numbers.

If you like Long Island and journalism...

The days of cutting are over at Newsday (for now). The Long Island newspaper plans to add 2,600 pages of news each year and will hire an additional 34 reporters to help write the stories. The paper's editor in chief is "very excited." Here's the story.

If you'd prefer something snarkier, Gawker is hiring a booker.

Four today

1. Reuters is looking for News Ninjas to do New & Cool stuff. Context: Forge (via Nieman Journalism Lab)

2. The Society of Environmental Journalists awarded Charles Duhigg of the New York Times first place for his woefully under-read series on toxic water. SEJ (via Romenesko)

3. Google and Verizon are for net neutrality ... sort of. Time

4. If you ate paste in first grade, you're probably eating paste now. Gawker

Reveal your sources for unknown riches

If you ever do a story about Viacom/CBS boss Sumner Redstone with an unnamed source, you just might get a call from the man himself: Gawker

In iPhone case, shield law doesn't matter

A court has set aside concerns that police trampled the state's shield law protecting the free-press rights of journalists and appointed a "special master" to search through the computer files of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen in hopes of finding information about a prototype iPhone. Apparently Chen's attorney, Thomas Nolan, brokered a deal to let the search happen.

Chen published several online stories and videos about the prototype, which he obtained after Gizmodo's parent company, Gawker Media, agreed to pay $5000 to a man who said he found the phone in a bar.

Police search Gizmodo editor's home*

In the ongoing investigation into how Gawker Media's Gizmodo blog got hold of a prototype of Apple's next generation iPhone, police in Fremont, California, raided the home of editor Jason Chen and seized computers, cellphones, digital cameras, an iPad and other gadgets.

Business Insider has Chen's firsthand account of the raid here.

*Updated: New York Times gets a response from Gawker:

Gawker’s chief operating officer, Gaby Darbyshire, said it expected the immediate return of the computers and servers.

“Under both state and federal law, a search warrant may not be validly issued to confiscate the property of a journalist,” she wrote in a letter to San Mateo County authorities on Saturday. “Jason is a journalist who works full time for our company,” she continued, adding that he works from home, his “de facto newsroom.”

Four in the morning

1. Wisconsin is set to pass a journalists' shield law. State Journal

2. "Revenue promiscuity" is the new buzz phrase for investigative journalism - but doesn't the number of partners you have, as in other types of promiscuous behavior, increase the risk of something going wrong? Nieman Journalism Lab

3. The Supreme Court overturns a law banning animal cruelty videos on free speech grounds. Wa Po

4. Forbes makes an offer many people can and should refuse. Gawker

Claim: For-profit HuffPo nests nonprofit HuffPo investigations unit

The commercial website Huffington Post is the only major news outlet to regularly use the work of the nonprofit Huffington Post Investigative Fund, according to a story in Gawker. Unless the latter can show that outlets other than HuffPo benefit from the fund's work, it could run into trouble over its tax-exempt status.

(found via LA Observed)

Four in the morning

1. Did the straight party-line vote for new Assembly Speaker John Perez reflect a bias against homosexuals? Capitol Weekly

2. Nondisclosure agreements for Los Angeles Times editors. LAO

3. Reuter's editor-in-chief says he spiked a story about a hedge fund manager that "could have run." Gawker

4. When hit counts trump ideology. LAT

Drudge, Reuters and the Breitbart connection

Gawker has an interesting story about a profitable arrangement between Reuters, Andrew Breitbart and Matt Drudge.

Here's the setup:

...a large percentage of the stories the Drudge Report links to are newswire stories, which can be licensed by any entity willing to pay for them. An Associated Press story, for example, may be carried on literally hundreds of sites – and Drudge is free to link to whichever one of those sites he chooses, for whatever reasons. In turn, the lucky site he links to is rewarded with a huge blast of monetizable traffic through no reportorial work of its own.

How does it pay off for Breitbart?:

Over the course of a year, the Drudge Report links to thousands of AP and other newswire stories. At some point, Breitbart realized this was basically like pouring money down a drain, only worse. It was like pouring money down a drain that some random newspaper publisher was sitting under, cackling gleefully as the money poured down on him.

Why, Breitbart must have wondered, couldn't he be that cackling publisher? A newswire portal would require little investment other than the newswire licensing fees, and yet with the Drudge Report sending it a thundering river of traffic every day, it could potentially make millions of dollars in advertising too.

And so, in 2005, Breitbart launched Breitbart.com, which is basically a portal for newswire stories. Links to Breitbart.com from the Drudge Report followed. A study found that in the year the site launched, 25 percent of the links on Drudge pointed to Breitbart.com.

So how did Reuters, a bastion of "liberal media," hook up with Breitbart, the self-appointed basher of "liberal media"? Well, Reuters was one of the wire services Breitbart had a license with. Then they broke up. Then Reuters came back with a new idea:

Typically, newspaper sites pay newswires to license their content, and that's what Breitbart was doing until Reuters cancelled its original contract with him. Now, it wanted to switch things up.

Under the terms of the new proposal, Breitbart would not be able to publish complete Reuters stories on his own website. Instead, he'd merely publish headlines and summaries that would link to Reuters' own page.

How did this change Drudge Report's link habits?:

The Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com just 29 times from January 1, 2005 to October 14, 2005. Then, Breitbart signed his new deal to drive traffic to Reuters.com for money. From October 15, 2005 to December 31, 2005, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 229 times. ... In 2006, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 1888 times.

Read the whole story here.

AP layoffs under way*

The Associated Press is expected to shed 70 or more jobs by the end of the year and Gawker reports that the layoffs have gotten under way today.

*Update, 11/19: Gawker has compiled list of those laid off at AP and is updating it as more names come in.

The Denton rule*

Last week, Gawker's Nick Denton told his writers to post quickly and fix any falsehoods with updates. So I wonder what Denton would say about Reuters' decision to write a story based on a bogus memo that said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had essentially reversed itself on a pending climate change bill?

*Update: Dana Milbank writes that the Yes Men perpetrated the memo hoax and even held a mock press conference yesterday that, to the surprise of the journalists sitting among the actors pretending to be journalists in the audience, was rudely interrupted by a member of the real U.S. Chamber of Commerce and then broke down into a bizarre argument about legitimacy.

So how can a reporter separate truth from fiction? From Milbank:

There were clues, of course, such as the name of the Chamber "spokeswoman" listed in the original news release: Erica Avidus. Reporters and bloggers later figured out that "avidus" comes from a Latin word meaning greedy.

But in an instant news culture, who has time to check out such things?

Four in the evening

1. Oberjuerge overseas: Former San Bernardino Sun sports reporter Paul Oberjuerge has finally found job in print - in Abu Dhabi. Oberjuerge will work on the Revise Desk for The National, a newspaper funded by the United Arab Emirates government. The paper certainly pays well and all earnings are tax free. Oberjuerge

2. Premature publication: Nick Denton of Gawker sent a memo encouraging his writers to publish first and to confirm later. The Awl

3. Transcontinental press: A look at what the New York Times' inaugural Bay Area edition looks like. Nieman Journalism Lab

4. The public option: NPR releases social media guidelines for its journalists. NPR

Journalizm

Former People's Court analyst Harvey Levin stopped by Columbia Journalism School to tell the students how proud he was that dying newspapers credited his website, TMZ.com, with being the first to report singer Michael Jackson had died and then thanked Britany Spears and her many breakdowns for making the future of journalism profitable. He let the students show their appreciation by handing him copies of their resumes.

Burying the lede, and everything else*, **

David Folkenflik had a fascinating and highly disturbing piece today on Morning Edition about a story written by reporter Scott Anderson for GQ that was buried so deep it's been scrubbed from the Internet. The story was entitled "Vladimir Putin's Dark Rise to Power." From NPR's web story:

[Anderson's] investigative piece, published in the September American edition of GQ, challenges the official line on a series of bombings that killed hundreds of people in 1999 in Russia. It profiles a former KGB agent who spoke in great detail and on the record, at no small risk to himself. But instead of trumpeting his reporting, GQ's corporate owners went to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure no Russians will ever see it.

The corporate owners don't seem to have any concerns over the accuracy of the story or with Anderson's safety. An email from Jerry S. Birenz, a lawyer for Conde Nast, the corporate owner of GQ, indicates financial motives were at play:

[Birenz] ordered that the article could not be posted to the magazine's Web site. No copies of the American edition of the magazine could be sent to Russia or shown in any country to Russian government officials, journalists or advertisers. Additionally, the piece could not be published in other Conde Nast magazines abroad, nor publicized in any way.

It wasn't just that there was no reference to Anderson's piece on the cover of this month's GQ, which featured a picture of Michael Jackson, a reference to tennis star Andy Roddick's wife and a ranking of obnoxious colleges and top drinking cities. At this writing, I cannot find any reference to Anderson's piece on the Internet.

Listen to the Morning Edition piece here.

*Update: Gawker is working on a Russian translation of the GQ story. The site has also scanned the article from the magazine for anyone who wants to read it.

**Update II: The New York Times picks up the story.

Four today

1. Is George Will's wisdom really scoop-worthy? Opinionator

2. Bottoms up: Did Gawker trigger a State Department investigation? Bloggasm

3. Apparently it's so easy to dismiss criticism of Ariana Huffington as jealousy that Jon Friedman, in the second part of his glowing two-part series on the founder of Huffington Post, has decided to do just that:

When Huffington speaks, it is sometimes hard to know who is doing the talking. Is it Huffington the entrepreneur? Or the optimistic visionary who routinely triumphs over obstacles, grinning devilishly all the way?

Then again, some in the media who don't like, trust or believe her suspect she has a bit of the carnival barker in her persona. It's easy to chalk up the skepticism to simple jealousy.

4. The line between reinventing journalism and dissembling about journalism is a fine one. This story on Nieman Lab serves as a good example. Wrap your head around this:

Reporting ≠ journalism. Sure, Swart worries about the future of the media. But don’t wait for him to weep for the vanishing beat reporter. He’s been watching the local web, and he doesn’t see an information shortage on the horizon. Instead, there’ll be shortages of reliability, priority and presentation.

Four today

1. Who does David Segal think he is writing about the Weinsteins!? The Wrap

2. Salon.com drops six from editorial department. Gawker

3. Huffington Post and Facebook team up and make social news. BoomTown

4. Former CityBeat and LA Weekly writer Matthew Fleischer ends up at True/Slant. True/Slant