Over the weekend Arthur S. Brisbane, the Public Editor of The New York Times, wrote a piece lamenting the way the Times has attacked other media companies. The choice quote from Brisbane was this:

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.

Arianna Huffington has issued a reply to the lawsuit that she and The Huffington Post are facing, and in true HuffPo style, gathers some of the best articles that condemn the case, then adds a little more herself.

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.

Sarah Ellison, former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has a sprawling, in-depth look at Julian Assange and his relationship with The Guardian and other media entities in Vanity Fair, and it just went online. Naturally the Internet is buzzing with reviews of the piece, so instead of giving of our take (we could be bribed though – think king-size Snickers), below are a collection of views from places we like to read:

• 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.

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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Gerald Posner, an investigative journalist and contributor to Tina Brown‘s The Daily Beast (not to mention a frequent guest on MSNBC’s Hardball), has admitted to plagiarizing a juicy celebrity death story straight from the pages of The Miami Herald. Jack Shafer at Slate was the first one to notice the…well…lack of discrepancy. Here’s Posner’s article on Fontainebleau heir Ben Novak and his suspicious death for The Daily Beast on February 4th:

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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Magazine and newspaper publishers may have missed the boat when it comes to the Internet, but they are determined to be ahead of the curve when the tablet e-reader — or something similar — comes out. Esquire and GQ have already launched iPhone-downloadable versions of their magazines and Time Inc. and Bonnier Corp. have unveiled demos of their tablet-ready magazine concepts.

But Slate.com‘s resident media watcher, Jack Shafer, says it might be too soon to hail the tablet as the savior of the publishing industry. Shafer compares the tablet technology to CD-ROM’s of 1992, using Newsweek‘s product, called Newsweek Interactive, as an analogy:

“Newsweek President Richard M. Smith told the [New York Times] that his company’s early experience with the CD-ROM product would give it a valuable head-start on the competition.

A head-start to last place, I should add. The CD-ROM and its fellow technologies flopped for a variety of reasons. Too expensive, too cumbersome, too wedded to a propriety platform, and not much fun.”

Are all those publishers seeking to pump out tablet demos before the device is even released on a similar race to the bottom? We are excited to see what these new devices will mean to the industry — because they look pretty darn cool — but they’ll only be the hip new thing until something new comes along. As Shafer concludes:

“That’s not to say that the tablet has no future. It’s just if the past is any guide, the future of the tablet won’t look like the SI or Wired prototypes — any more than Pathfinder turned out to be the future of the Web. I find it more likely that some young people at a startup will figure out the highest uses of the tablet form before SI or even Slate does. As Newsweek‘s president ultimately learned from his CD-ROM debacle, not all head-starts turn out to be valuable.”

The Tablet Hype –Slate

Previously: Bonnier Debuts Plans For Highly Anticipated Tablet Device

Last night at the Thomson Reuters building in Times Square, Jack Shafer of Slate.com moderated a panel for millennium journalism entitled “Audience and the Media: A Shaky Marriage.”

The speakers at the event each came from a mainstream news outlet, with differing ideas on how to keep credibility and objectivity in their field while maintaining their audiences’ interests.

Michael Oreskes, editor of The Associated Press, came out swinging. “We’re in an era of mistrust…[the mainstream media] have done a truly lousy job [explaining] why we mattered,” he said. “We got away with it for a long time until the Internet. Suddenly why we failed to explain who we were really mattered.”

Lisa Shepard, ombudsman of National Public Radio, shared a similar sentiment, “The public does depend on the media, and loves to kick us,” she said, explaining that news organizations have been “horrible at marketing themselves” as credible resources, even as they have become more transparent and willing to admit their mistakes.

“Lets be realistic,” Shepard told the crowd. “When you are putting out a 24-hour news product, you are going to have mistakes every day.”

But does admitting those mistakes and issuing corrections make a publication seem more credible, or less? Read on for more from last night’s panel.

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WebNewser: MSNBC.com and Onvia have teamed up to launch The Stimulus Tracker, which monitors Stimulus-funded projects across the country.

Huffington Post: One day before fired New York Post editor Sandra Guzman filed a suit against the paper, the Post let another minority staffer go, black reporter Austin Fenner.

New York Post: Hearst Corp. may have $1 billion war chest.

New York Times: After speaking at New York City private school Dalton, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, “widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values,” insisted on reviewing a copy of any story written by the school paper before it ran.

Slate: Jack Shafer takes down Rupert Murdoch. “Murdoch is simply jawboning. Three months ago he promised that News Corp. would start charging for its newspapers by June 2010. Now he doubts that the company will hit that mark. In typical Murdochian fashion, he’s sowing confusion and harvesting bewilderment.”

The New York Times reported last night that — starting this morning — Slate.com is replacing its “Today’s Papers” aggregator with a new “Slatest” feature that will collect news three times a day.

Slate’s editor David Plotz told Brian Stelter that the “Today’s Papers” format was outdated and the online publication had started discussing a year ago how to change and update it:

“In an editorial meeting, Jack Shafer, the media columnist for Slate, observed that the news cycle had three distinct parts: an overnight shift led by newspapers, a daytime phase when other news media entities react to the overnight news, and an afternoon phase when, as Mr. Plotz put it, ‘the day’s news events break and are digested.’”

Today, Plotz wrote about the history of “Today’s Papers,” which says good-bye today, along with the site’s “In Other Magazine” feature. He also explains why the site decided to make the change. “‘Today’s Papers’ was hilariously backward by contemporary standards,” Plotz said. “The authors originally collected front pages by fax from newspapers that barely had online editions. (Our first ‘Today’s Papers’ didn’t even have links.)”

But despite the long-running column’s success and devotion from readers, “We saw a need for a new kind of aggregator, one that was intelligent, witty, entertaining, fast, comprehensive, and responsive to the new news cycle. So we created it,” Plotz said.

So we wanted to know, if you got your daily news round-up from Slate’s “Today’s Papers” how do you feel about the first reveal of Slatest?

What do you think about Slate’s new aggregator Slatest?(opinion)

The paid content conversation rages on. One suspects that at some point before the end of this year the financial situation of newspapers may be so dire that readers will be faced with the choice of paying for content or relying on TMZ.com for their news. Until that fateful days arrives here’s the where the conversation currently stands:

• Jack Shafer says the key is to figure out what customers will pay for: “Not all successful paid sites are alike, but they all share at least one of these attributes: 1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable. 2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use. 3) They are stupendously authoritative.”

• Howie Kurtz says it’s going to be a battle of hearts and minds as much as wallets: “It was arguably a mistake for newspapers and magazines to hand out their goodies to anyone with a computer screen, but the culture of the Net was — and is — that everything should be free. The question now is whether that mind-set can be changed.

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