Below is the complete list of finalists.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Not good, right? Especially when the Journal’s parent, News Corp., is already dealing with the phone hacking incident. Even if this ends up being not as big of a deal as it seems, it’s still enough to make people — once again — question the company, and that’s never a good thing.

Here are a few other reactions to the scandal from the media world.

Jack Shafer thinks that the scandal could go away quickly, considering that the alleged advertiser friendly copy in the Journal was all in special sections:

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today, Adweek caught up with Ledbetter, and he confirmed the move. “We really want to be a leader in the space of opinion and commentary, which has never really been an explicit goal for Reuters in the past,” said Ledbetter. He also stated that the hiring spree isn’t over either, and that the opinion section should mesh perfectly with the other content:

You don’t have to look very hard at the staffing levels of American newspapers to realize that places where you might have had local columnists or a local opinion staff commissioning pieces—in many places those jobs no longer exist. We think that there is a role within the traditional Reuters marketplace for opinion and commentary.

The shift to a more complete site is a good idea, but will it work? Reuters is certainly not the first place most people mention when discussing columnists or moving think pieces. Ledbetter thinks otherwise, and wisely will be leaning on the site’s ace in the hole. “If, six months from now, you haven’t read a Jack Shafer column, call me,” he added.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Jack Shafer

Congats to Reuters, grabbing Shafer is a huge score.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

AgencySpy: Those hamsters that Kia loves so much are back. We guess this means rodents help sell cars?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Jack Shafer

We’re sure Shafer will have some interesting things to say, as always. And if you happen to squeeze in any comments about how fantastic FishbowlNY is, that would okay with us.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Because we’re big fans of Shafer, we thought we’d pass along the interview he did with Adweek last night. In true Shafer fashion, he was blunt, sarcastic and enjoyable. Below, a few choice quotes.

On why he was let go:
“I’m not the only one who has been let go by Slate. Slate has expanded ambitiously, and right now it’s responding to the industry-wide recession in a sensible fashion by cutting some costs—and I’m one of those costs.”

On where he’ll write next (he will still contribute to Slate):
“I haven’t phoned-up Rupert Murdoch and asked him if he wants another columnist at the Wall Street Journal.”

On his writing style:
“Let’s start some fights and see who wins.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If you’re no Murdoch fan yourself, here are our favorite of Shafer’s gleeful takedowns of the media mogul for your reading pleasure:

1. If Rupert Murdoch could be slain by a mere scandal, he would have been embalmed and entombed long ago.

2. We expect the worst from Murdoch, and he lives up to our expectations.

3. The genocidal tyrant has successfully swept away every scandal—major and minor—he has ever faced because of his special skill at normalizing his malefactions.

4. Murdoch’s instinct, of course, will be to sacrifice [Rebekah Brooks], but I doubt that the mob that is gathering will be satisfied with one body. They’ll want strong, tough, old meat, too. Something that’s fit for grilling on the barbie.

5. Send recipes for grilled Murdoch to slate.pressbox@gmail.com and monitor my Twitter feed for a prayer for Rupert’s soul.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“Jesus spent three days in Hell. … I could only handle one,” —wrote Richard Morgan, who quit Gawker after one day in January 2008.

And another favorite: “Don’t worry about me; I’ll land on my feet. I don’t regret coming here, even though I’ve been laid off now. In fact, my only regret is that you haven’t come to visit the Beacon Journal. I would have loved to piss on your shoes,” wrote Mark Schlueb, in a letter to Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder, in April 2001

Unsurprisingly, Tina Brown gets a few mentions. Who knew she wasn’t popular?  “If some ditzy American editor went to London, took over the Spectator and turned it into, say, In Your Face: A Magazine of Mucus, there would be a big uproar, but here in America, we expect turnover,” wrote Garrison Keillor, after Brown replaced Robert Gottlieb as editor of The New Yorker in April 1995.

And after his Newsweek blog was canceled by incoming editor Brown in 2011, Mickey Kaus wrote, “The people at the Daily Beast seem to be having a desperate sort of faux-fun as they try to madly generate paying hits before Barry Diller‘s money runs out subsidizing Ms. Brown’s big bucks staff.”

The whole collection, well worth the read, is at Slate.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Horton’s piece begins with the premise that not only has President Obama failed to close Guantanamo, he may be more implicated in horrors that have occurred there than has previously come to light. It begins:

[N]ew evidence…suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Joe Pompeo at The Cutline gathered up some of the reactions around the media. Slate’s media critic, Jack Shafer, had the most biting criticism over the win:

I am dumbfounded. The Harper’s piece is a souffle of conjecture. Did the judges actually read it? Do they really think the Obama administration is covering up murders committed during the Bush administration?

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In recent months, The Times has slipped a shiv into others on several occasions. Some readers don’t like it when that happens, and I can understand why. It’s unseemly and makes The Times, which is viewed as journalism’s top dog, look like a bully.

FishbowlNY’s reaction to the article was that there’s no need for the Times to stop attacking others, in fact, we sort of enjoy it when the newspaper goes on the offensive. Jack Shafer at Slate echoes our thoughts in a post today, but he does it in a much better way:

What would Brisbane prefer? That the Times view the Murdoch papers’ conduct, the Gannett pay packages, and the frat-boy shenanigans at Tribune from the perspective of a guidance counselor? That the Times pussyfoot while composing its stories? Give me the bully treatment any day—even though I don’t think any of the pieces cited by Brisbane comes remotely close to bullying. Or would Brisbane prefer that the Times recuse itself from covering all critical stories about the press and publish only positive ones?

Click through to Shafer’s article and see if you don’t come away with a newfound respect for shivs.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Huffington brings up Jack Shafer saying “We’re becoming a nation of Winklevosses who file legal motion after legal motion every time a pot of money is spotted,” repeats a comment from a New York Times article that asks “So, does this mean when YouTube was sold to Google that all the people who posted videos on YouTube should have been compensated?” and she even cites a lawyer explaining that there was no contract broken.

She then sums up her feelings with this:

It seems that AOL’s purchase of HuffPost suddenly opened his eyes to the fact that we are a business. I guess he’d missed the ads that appeared on the same page as his blog posts the 216 times he decided, of his own free will, to post something on our site.

We certainly wish that all writers would get paid for their work, but the more we think about it, the more the lawsuit really doesn’t make any sense. Filing a lawsuit after you’ve already agreed to work for free isn’t going to get you anything other than angry replies like Huffington’s.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Jack Shafer at Slate says that Assange comes across as a complicated egomaniac who has become increasingly difficult for the media to work with.
• Kat Stoeffel of The New York Observer grabs a few excerpts from Ellison, including one that disagrees with Shafer’s notion that Assange’s ploys were purely selfish in nature.
• Jack Mirkinson discusses how Assange almost sued The Guardian over at The Huffington Post.
• Nicholas Jackson of The Atlantic applauds Ellison for pointing out little known details.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This has not been a good month for looking over your shoulder and copying your classmates work: Just last week, Gerald Posner from The Daily Beast resigned after he was caught by Jack Shafer copying portions of The Miami Herald in his columns.

Now New York Times writer Zachery Kouwe has resigned from his business beat over at the newspaper after it was discovered that his role at Dealbook involved at least six instances of copying of press releases and other news sources word for word.

So what was Kouwe’s excuse for the misdeed? Apparently they keep him so busy at Dealbook that he didn’t have time to realize that he was inadvertently stealing other people’s words.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

There is little doubt the Novacks had a volatile relationship. In 2002, 11 years into their marriage, Narcy and two others tied Ben Jr. to a chair, threatened to kill him and took money from his safe, according to the police report filed at the time.

“If I can’t have you, no one else will,” she told him, according to a divorce petition Ben Jr. filed and then dropped.

Narcy told police investigators at the time that the entire episode was part of a sex game. And she also showed them porno snapshots of women with artificial limbs having sex, claiming her husband had a fetish for them.

And here is the Herald article, written by Julie Brown only two days before:

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.