Hey, if the newspaper editor did it, it must be ok. </snark>

Posted August 20, 2007 3:42 AM by Michael R. Bernstein

Now, now. Mr. Skube is a Very Serious Person. We know he's a Very Serious Person because his piece was published in the opinion section of the LA Times.

This is also how we know that Jonah Goldberg is a Very Serious Person.

Posted August 20, 2007 4:59 AM by julia

Classic example of "It's OK If You Are a Newspaper Journalist" (YOKIYANJ). I predict that nobody from "the serious news companies" (which in a few year will all be "serious News Corporation companies") will pick this up. Caste systems do exist in the western world.

But it's ok, they are the past, they will disappear in less than a generation. If only they wouldn't ruin this world too much, with all their oil wars and fixed popularity contests...

Posted August 20, 2007 6:21 AM by GiacomoL

Over at Yglesias' blog, Jim Henley posed the intriguing possibility that this was a case of Matt Welch, assistant editorial page editor, playing rope-a-dope with Skube.

It'd be funny if it were true.

Posted August 20, 2007 6:46 AM by Jon H

From the TPM piece :

To which I got this response: "I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples ... "

"Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun."

-Tom Lehrer, Wernher Von Braun

Posted August 20, 2007 7:04 AM by Josh Jasper

Is anyone else thinking of a really, really unimaginative cop?

Posted August 20, 2007 7:13 AM by Randolph Fritz

And of course I note that his list of examples is very limited ideologically and geographically speaking, which means he gets to ignore bloggers who do put themselves in harms way to do original reporting.

Off the top of my head (and moving roughly from progressve to conservative) we have had Majikthise in New Orleans, Rodney Balko on noknock drug raids, numerous bloggers doing original reporting in Iraq (Michael Yon, Michael Totten to name but two) and here in Europe the EU Referendum folks have managed to do more with respect to the British Army's procurement cockups from their armchairs than any number of professional journalists (the hacks at the Torygraph and the Wapping Liar frequently copy the EU Referendum blog).

And that ignores all the debunking of sloppy reporting that blogs do all the time.

Posted August 20, 2007 8:05 AM by FrancisT

One of the great things about blogging is the wide distribution of talent.

Mainstream journalists do not have on tap several pro authors, editors, an EMT, librarians, personnel from several branches of the military, scientists, programmers, etc...

Here in this one blog, you get all that. And more. And expert blogs are fairly popular. I read Science Blog on occasion, Armchair Generalist, Intel Dump, and others. It's great to be able to read and interact with people who actually know what they're talking about, so when someone blathers about chlorine attacks in Iraq, I can wander over to Armchair Generalist and pull up the post where he authoritatively calls bullshit on those cases as being worth worrying about. yeah, they happened, but no, they;re not really like a sarin attack

Posted August 20, 2007 9:30 AM by Josh Jasper

#2, Julia:

i are serious journalist
this are serious editorial!

Posted August 20, 2007 9:45 AM by midori

I can has credentials?

Posted August 20, 2007 10:01 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

It's nice that the law of grammatical and spelling complaints -- that any post or comment pointing out someone's poor spelling or grammar will contain a spelling or grammar mistake itself -- holds for journalists complaining about the lack of "thorough fact-checking and verification" in blog posts. What's not nice is the ramifications of this kind of mistake.

Posted August 20, 2007 10:09 AM by Stephen Granade

For those who haven't read Jay Rosen in Kos this morning: Skube's done this before.

Posted August 20, 2007 10:44 AM by Jon Meltzer

from: Editorial
to: Skube
cc: self, production
re: notification on text changes

This Is Just To Cite

I have edited
the words
that were in
the inbox

and which
you were probably
writing
for posterity

Forgive me
it was vague,
so dry
and so un-sourced.

Posted August 20, 2007 1:14 PM by midori

Can I take it that loljournalists is the next trend?

Posted August 20, 2007 1:21 PM by linnen

"But the blogs he singles out include sites such as Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, which regularly features original reporting of very high quality. "

And two others, Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias, write blogs for the Atlantic right beside James Fallows, in addition to journalistic work for print and web and they even write books - which are only 'new media' if you prefer scrolls.

It's almost like the editor sneakily inserted those specifically to subvert the op/ed. (See above, re: ex-blogger, now LA Times asst. op/ed editor Matt Welch).

The last example, DailyKos, is a square peg because it's massive group site with contributions along the whole spectrum of quality. On the other hand, they have the ability to commit news themselves, through candidate appearances at YearlyKos, and by supporting candidates.

Posted August 20, 2007 1:25 PM by Jon H

You two nearly cost me a keyboard with the wording of that last paragraph of "Update". Fortunately only a small amount of coffee went onto it and I seem to have gotten most of it off.

Posted August 20, 2007 1:43 PM by Clifton Royston

Those of us in the LA area grieve for a once great newspaper. The Tribune group has an awful lot to answer for.

Posted August 20, 2007 1:59 PM by Sammie

I read the whole Times piece, and beneath the top layer of lousy journalism it seems to be just a big helping of "you're not a writer unless you write as I do," with "blogosphere" thrown in there and stirred vigorously to give it some contemporary flavor.

Too bad he hasn't bothered to read the labels on any of this stuff. Samuel Johnson always leaves a moldy aftertaste.

Posted August 20, 2007 2:02 PM by Mary Dell

i is seryis jernamalist

Posted August 20, 2007 4:45 PM by julia

Julia @15: jornololist, surely?

Posted August 20, 2007 4:59 PM by NelC

Lack of journalistic standards. Sort of like creating a news story out of a sensationalist tidbit that, with little doubt, was handed out as a sneaky character attack?

I almost understand the logic of "well, it will sell more papers" but at some point you'd think someone would realize they're becoming a sock-puppet.

Posted August 20, 2007 4:59 PM by Dolloch

NelC @20: Julia @19, shirley?

Posted August 20, 2007 5:01 PM by NelC

Nels: not cal me shirley, pls. tx.

Posted August 20, 2007 5:59 PM by julia

Nels: not cal me shirley, pls. tx.
boom, ting
She's here all night folks :D

Posted August 20, 2007 11:53 PM by marty

If the newspaper editor did it, is he going to give the writer a chance to print a correction? Prolly not.

Posted August 21, 2007 1:50 AM by Earl Cooley III

Dolloch @21: It goes without saying that this is probably a case of manufactured news, in that the jornololist called up all manner of scandalous characters, asked them their opinions of Clinton, and published the ones that were most quote-worthy.

Posted August 21, 2007 7:04 AM by NelC

"I is an editor kitteh! Whur my onion rings?"

But nobody heard. They don't when you're actually a moderately simple python script, one of thousands running across the virtualised server banks of Autonews, Ltd, even if you really believe you're a lolreporter..

Posted August 21, 2007 12:32 PM by Alex

NelC @ 26

Just imagine if all of that "old-style gumshoe reporting" effort were put into stories of consequence!

Posted August 21, 2007 3:28 PM by Dolloch

Of course, with the news that Murdoch now owns the Wall Street Journal, this could also be a case that the corporations and puppetteers who own the papers are appointing editors who

a) are not capable English speakers;
b) are demanding these changes from the writers -- or putting them in over objections -- regardless of accuracy; and
c) believe, as Hearst once said, that since they are editting the news, they are also creating it [i.e. "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war"]

Either way, "Hooray for the free press! Bartender, an order of petards all around!"

Posted August 21, 2007 3:31 PM by pedantic peasant (journey-a-list)

I do find myself wondering just how much news in the media comes from press releases and sources such as AP and Reuters. The result can be a bit more than mindless copying, but it's one of those shoulders of giants situations.

Posted August 22, 2007 8:51 AM by Dave Bell

30: a lot. For example, anything with a survey result in it comes from a press release - except in the minority of cases where it's, say, an opinion poll carried out by the paper itself. Always read that sort of article asking "who paid for this survey and why?"
Note that "based on a press release" isn't always bad; a lot of financial writing is based on releases, such as annual earnings.

Posted August 22, 2007 9:24 AM by ajay

ScienceDaily always says just whose press release is behind their stories. Of course, the sources don't tend to involve much (if any) politics or PR, so these won't be major revelations.

Posted August 22, 2007 10:18 AM by Faren Miller

#31 ajay:

I gather that a lot of local TV news is also basically done from a press release, albeit one with video footage and scripts to make it really easy for the local news guys to control the length of the story and customize it to look like something they did themselves.

Posted August 22, 2007 11:14 AM by albatross

Trust me; you don't want to know how many press releases go into a typical news. It's like an informational sausage!

Posted August 23, 2007 7:57 AM by Alex

#33: Sometimes DVD releases of old movies--the Criterion release of Spartacus, for example--include old footage of their stars getting interviewed by nobody. Literally. The actors look attentive, as though listening. Then they launch into the answer to a question no one asked.

Studios would send this footage to local TV stations. Local reporters dubbed in the questions, and on the news that evening pretended they'd scored an interview with Peter Ustinov.

It sounds hokey... but, in the days before the internet made video from all over America available for comparison, it probably worked.

Posted August 23, 2007 8:44 AM by Wesley

Wesley:
Sometimes DVD releases of old movies--the Criterion release of Spartacus, for example--include old footage of their stars getting interviewed by nobody. Literally. The actors look attentive, as though listening. Then they launch into the answer to a question no one asked.

A friend who still has all her British Beatle Fan Club records tells me that there is a record where the Beatles do something similar--I believe it was made before their second tour of America.

Posted August 26, 2007 10:27 AM by Bruce E. Durocher II

As excuses go, this is right up there with “I didn’t plagiarize my term paper from someone else’s; the roommate who wrote it for me did so.”

That is one of the greatest analogies I've ever heard. I'll use it next time something like this comes up. (It reminds me of the Republican who confessed to deliberately buying cocaine, but said he wasn't planning to use it -- as if that made him less culpable. What *was* he planning to do with it?!?)

Posted September 2, 2007 11:51 PM by Nathanael Nerode