Bloggasm

The New York Times published photos by Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins who shot photographs around the United States of abandoned construction projects left unfinished because of the housing and securities market collapse.

When you go to the page where these photographs were published, you find this:

Who pointed out this alleged fakery? The community at Metafilter

I call bullshit on this not being photoshopped. Look at that wooden ‘triangle’ right near the top center.

This actually is (or should be) a major embarrassment for the NYT. The simple mirroring could almost be forgiven, but the photographer decided to get cute and photoshop in a few stray boards propped here and there to distract the eye from the perfect symmetry. It might seem a minor thing, but I think there really serious issues of journalistic ethics at stake here

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N.Y. Times mines its data to identify words that readers find abstruse

If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations, if the newspaper’s profligacy of neologisms and shibboleths ever set off apoplectic paroxysms in you, if it all seems a bit recondite, here’s a reason to be sanguine: The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary.

As you may know, highlighting a word or passage on the Times website calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway, it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news editor Philip Corbett, who oversees the Times style manual, offered reporters a fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009. We obtained the memo and accompanying chart, which offer a nice lesson in how news sites can improve their journalism by studying user behavior.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece out today reporting that the “most popular” lists you’ll see on the sides of news sites to denote the most-viewed articles are significant traffic drivers to those articles. It creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy by making them even more popular. I attended an event hosted by YouTube a few months ago and a spokesperson there said that the company’s “related videos” section can keep users on the site for an hour or more clicking through videos.

This certainly mirrors my own reading habits. The New York Times has a “most emailed” and “most blogged” list and I’ll often click on stories from there after reading an article. But I’ve always wondered how many blogs would have to link to an article before it makes it onto this list?

To find out I copy and pasted the links to each of today’s top 10 most-blogged items on the NY Times front page into Google Blogsearch.

The average number of links required was 46. Though one of the articles had as few as 17 inbound links, most fell between 30 and 50. The most popular of the articles had 95 inbound links.

Below are the stats:

1. Overhaul Likely for Credit Cards
Inbound links: 95

2. U.S. to Offer New Mileage and Emission Standards
Inbound links: 51

3. Ex-U.S. Envoy in Talks for Key Role in Afghan Government
Inbound links: 31

4. Dan Brown’s America
Inbound links: 55

5. Senate Passes Bill to Restrict Credit-Card Practices
Inbound links: 50

6. Senate Democrats Won’t Provide Money to Close Guantnamo
Inbound links: 64

7. Changes Planned for Guantnamo Trials May Lead to Familiar Challenges
Inbound links: 17

8. Seeking a Missing Link, and a Mass Audience
Inbound links: 34

9. In Praise of Dullness
Inbound links: 32

10. San Francisco Mayor Wants Smokers to Pay for Butt Cleanup
Inbound links: 31

This morning I was reading a NY Times article on Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson and his struggles to keep the magazine’s advertising afloat, and I decided I wanted to tweet a link to the article. But when I clicked on the “share” icon, I found buttons for Mixx, Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, but nothing for Twitter. Also, why Mixx and no Reddit? The latter has a much larger readership.

Earlier today, a blogger for TPM Cafe provided stunning evidence that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd had lifted an entire paragraph from a blog post written by TPM founder Joshua Marshall.

Here’s the Dowd paragraph:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

And here is Marshall’s paragraph:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

The Huffington Post reached out to Dowd, who said, “i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.”

I reached out to both Josh Marshall and the TPM Cafe blogger who broke the story. Marshall responded with a polite, “I really don’t have any comment.”

The TPM Cafe blogger (I believe his first name is Joshua as well but I don’t know the last) said, “Honestly, I’d rather not. I’m pretty sure I can’t add anything that isn’t already clear cut. Obviously, I don’t know what happened, but I am interested in hearing what Dowd’s explanation is though – considering how big a role she played in Joe Biden’s plagiarism problem in 1988. ”

I can’t help but wonder why Marshall doesn’t want to comment on this issue. Either way, a virtual “lynch mob,” as one blogger called it, has already been set loose within Twitter and the blogosphere. The New York Times will be feeling the repercussions of this for weeks.

I’ve long wondered why the NY Times and other newspapers don’t regularly engage in affiliate links — turning book review sections into potential money makers, and this Vanity Fair profile of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. finally answers that question for me:

Her biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative partnership with Amazon.com, already the biggest bookseller on the Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in the paper’s prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls. Baker knew that Amazon.com planned to eventually sell everything under the sun, to become the first digital supermarket. Not only would the deal have produced revenue from book sales, it would also have cemented a partnership with a tremendous future. She envisioned the newspaper as a virtual merchandising machine. Instead of the old carpet-bombing model of advertising, it would in effect target ads to readers of specific stories. “You know what they said?,” Baker recalls. “They said, We can’t do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”

I understand why opinion columnists are not put under the same fact-checking scrutiny of regular reporters. After all, their writing is comprised of opinions which can never definitively be proven right or wrong, correct?

Not really. Though it is true that the opinions can not be fact-checked, the events upon which they are based can. This is why I can’t wrap my head around how hack columnists like Bill Kristol can make egregious error after error every week in a publication like the New York Times without an editor at least requesting that Kristol turn in a sheet listing his sources so a college intern can skim over them.

Take this week’s screw-up for instance. Kristol writes:

On Tuesday night, while the G.O.P. Congressional candidate was losing in a Mississippi district George Bush carried in 2004 by 25 points, Barack Obama was being trounced in the West Virginia Democratic primary – by 41 points. I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin.

Really Bill, you can’t find a single instance?

As others have documented, Mitt Romney won 90% of the vote in Utah and Huckabee beat McCain in Arizona (his home state, mind you) by 40 points and in Kansas by 36 points.

But the news here isn’t that Kristol was wrong. After all, he’s wrong all the time. The news is that the New York Times is aware that he has made several significant, easily-fact-checked errors during his brief stint at the Times and they haven’t done anything to correct this. When I said that a mere intern could fact check his columns, I wasn’t kidding. Most of his mistakes could have been caught with a simple Google check.

So how many more weeks are going to go by before an editor starts taking the heat for not fact-checking Bill Kristol? If this isn’t proof that the neocon was a an affirmative action hire (to try to deflect criticisms of liberal bias), I don’t know what is. They’re letting him play in his little corner and then pat him on the head and give him a lollipop once he turns in the latest column of drek.