This NYT story talks about the pitfalls that the new media might pose for pols, with a particular look at one Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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If you want to be a foreign correspondent for a major U.S. newspaper, you might be 20 years too late. The business people say those resources would be better off spent on local coverage.

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This NYT story looks at the genesis of a story designed to smear Sen. Barack Obama, candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, over something that allegedly happened when he was seven.

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NYT public editor Byron Calame wrote about the ethics of freelance contributors in his Jan. 28 offering.

I note this sentence with a raised eyebrow:

"THE ability of The New York Times to maintain its ethical standards among its far-flung outside contributors continues to be a major concern of mine. As these freelancers fill column after column at a lower cost than full-time reporters, readers have a right to expect that editors ensure the integrity of that journalism."

However, the second-last of these grafs made me smile:

In a push in the right direction, the (Jan. 16) memo (from Craig R. Whitney and William E. Schmidt, two assistant managing editors) requires editors to ask freelancers if they are “familiar with our ethics rules” the next time each is given an assignment — and to “make it clear that continuing to contribute to The Times depends on observing those rules.” If a freelancer “deliberately disregards” the paper’s Ethical Journalism guidelines, “we stop giving assignments to that person,” the two editors warned.

So how did the freelancer conflicts on these stories escape detection before publication?

The freelancer who took the Samsung junket, John Biggs, had responded to the online ethics questionnaire for outside contributors in May, shortly after it became a requirement. “Have you accepted any free trips, junkets or press trips in the last two years?” one question asked. His negative response was accurate at that time, according to Mr. Whitney, who is also the paper’s standards editor.

After taking the October junket, primarily to write for CrunchGear.com, a blog about electronic gear, Mr. Biggs told me, he “simply forgot” about updating his ethics questionnaire response so Times editors would be aware of his conflict of interest and not assign him any Samsung stories. His editor doesn’t share his vague recollection that he mentioned Samsung’s role in his trip. In any case, comments he posted on CrunchGear on Oct. 17, the day he arrived in Seoul, make it clear to me that he understood the unethical aspect of junkets. “I’m here with Samsung,” he wrote, “suckling on the sweet teat of junket whoredom.”

Unfortunately, The Times’s online ethics questionnaire system requires updating of freelancer responses only every two years. Mr. Biggs, who in recent months has been writing brief articles almost every week for the business section, wasn’t asked to update his responses before writing the two stories about Samsung products in November.

Amir Bar-Lev made a documentary called My Kid Could Paint That, about a four-year-old in Binghamton, N.Y. who is supposedly an art prodigy. Bar-Lev set out to make a film supporting the kid, Marla Olmstead, and her family -- who has been accused of helping her.

But he came to believe that Marla might not be the prodigy she was being made out to be. And when his film came out, the Olmsteads -- who came to think of Bar-Lev as their friend -- felt terribly wounded by the choices he had made.

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Kevin Wilson at Mack the Hackistan has a post saying that Toronto Sun ME Gord Walsh is the latest to be departing from 333 King St. E. (the Toronto Sun Family blog, which Kevin linked to, has the same thing).

That can't be a particularly fun place to work these days (that's me -- a master of understatement).

A school district in Federal Way, Wash., got into hot water after putting a moratorium on the screening of the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth, which has been nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary. Here's why one parent opposed its screening.

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Saw an amusing squib of an interview between U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Wolf Blitzer, host of CNN's The Situation Room, on The Daily Show on Thursday night.

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Daniel Kitts, a producer with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, thinks there's enough evidence to suggest that human-influenced global warming is a reality. While there are parts of the climate-change issue worth debating, that reality isn't one of them.

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From the Washington Post:

Memo to Tim Russert: Dick Cheney thinks he controls you.

This delicious morsel about the "Meet the Press" host and the vice president was part of the extensive dish Cathie Martin served up yesterday when the former Cheney communications director took the stand in the perjury trial of former Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
 
Flashed on the courtroom computer screens were her notes from 2004 about how Cheney could respond to allegations that the Bush administration had played fast and loose with evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Option 1: "MTP-VP," she wrote, then listed the pros and cons of a vice presidential appearance on the Sunday show. Under "pro," she wrote: "control message."

"I suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used," Martin testified. "It's our best format."

How bad reporting led to death threats for a scientist researching homosexuality in sheep.

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I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby Jr. will be in a courtroom for the next few weeks as his perjury and obstruction of justice trial in relation to Plamegate, unfolds. A number of witnesses will be journalists.

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Turkish police have arrested suspects in the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who had been in trouble for "insulting Turkishness" for his writings on the Armenian genocide.

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