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How Some Parents Changed Their Politics in the Pandemic - The New York Times

Ms. Longnecker and her fellow objectors are part of a potentially destabilizing new movement: parents who joined the anti-vaccine and anti-mask cause during the pandemic, narrowing their political beliefs to a single-minded obsession over those issues. Their thinking hardened even as Covid-19 restrictions and mandates were eased and lifted, cementing in some cases into a skepticism of all vaccines. Nearly half of Americans oppose masking and a similar share is against vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, polls show. But what is obscured in those numbers is the intensity with which some parents have embraced these views. While they once described themselves as Republicans or Democrats, they now identify as independents who plan to vote based solely on vaccine policies.

Inside the New York Times’ Heated Reckoning With Itself

So the staff turned to Slack, taking aim first at the column (“It’s very Bolsonaro of Op-Ed to run this”); then at the op-ed section’s editor, James Bennet (“We’re tiptoeing around the elephant in the room, trying not to notice the stink of the huge pile of crap it’s just dumped. Should JB be replaced?”); and, eventually, at the Times itself. Employees of color felt unheard — “We love this institution, even though sometimes it feels like it doesn’t love us back” — while tech reporters worried the Times’ defense of the column, in the name of an open consideration of a wide range of opinion, was making the paper look like the companies its reporting was taking to task: “It is frustrating to hear some of the same excuses (we’re just a platform for ideas!) that our journalists and columnists have criticized tech CEOs for making.”

The Media Must Learn From the Covington Catholic Story - The Atlantic

How could the elite media—The New York Times, let’s say—have protected themselves from this event, which has served to reinforce millions of Americans’ belief that traditional journalistic outlets are purveyors of “fake news”? They might have hewed to a concept that once went by the quaint term “journalistic ethics.” Among other things, journalistic ethics held that if you didn’t have the reporting to support a story, and if that story had the potential to hurt its subjects, and if those subjects were private citizens, and if they were moreover minors, you didn’t run the story. You kept reporting it; you let yourself get scooped; and you accepted that speed is not the highest value. Otherwise, you were the trash press.

Excerpts From Trump’s Interview With The Times - The New York Times

Which I did and then won Wisconsin and Michigan. [Inaudible.] So the Democrats. … [Inaudible.] … They thought there was no way for a Republican, not me, a Republican, to win the Electoral College. Well, they’re [inaudible].

Trump dumps on Dowd, NYT guffaws

TRUMP: And by the way, if you see something or get something where you feel that I’m wrong, and you have some info — I would love to hear it. You can call me, Arthur can call me, I would love to hear. The only one who can’t call me is Maureen [Dowd, opinion columnist]. She treats me too rough. I don’t know what happened to Maureen! She was so good, Gail [Collins, opinion columnist]. For years she was so good. [cross talk] SULZBERGER: As we all say about Maureen, it’s not your fault, it’s just your turn. [laughter]

New York Times closes editing and press operations in Paris, cuts up to 70 jobs

the proposal we announced today would result in the closing of the editing and pre-press print production operation in Paris, with those responsibilities moving to Hong Kong and New York. France remains a vital market for us and we will maintain a robust news bureau in Paris as well as a core international advertising office there.

Requested anonymity 'to avoid betraying' or 'because betraying' ?

Two people interviewed, who are in direct communication with the elder Mr. Bush but requested anonymity to avoid betraying a confidence, said Mr. Trump had revived painful memories among the Bushes of another blunt populist: H. Ross Perot.

What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You — Amazon strikes back

While we were talking, I also realized that you were envisioning a story that is basically a stack of negative anecdotes from ex-Amazonians. But if we were using that story form, we’d just come to you for responses and be done.

Sometimes things are simpler than they look

The underwhelming results for “Vacation,” written and directed by Jonathan M. Goldstein and John Francis Daley, follow poor turnout for R-rated summer comedies like “Entourage,” “Magic Mike XXL” and “Ted 2.” Released in March, the R-rated “Get Hard” did only modest business, especially for a Will Ferrell vehicle. “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” which also carried an R rating, bombed in February. That run has left Hollywood scratching its head. What’s happening? And what does it mean for R-rated comedies in the pipeline? Start with quality. Most of the comedies that have missed the box-office mark also received largely negative reviews from critics. (“Vacation” generated reviews that were 76 percent negative, according to the website Rotten Tomatoes.) Notably, the two recent R-rated comedies that have succeeded — “Trainwreck,” starring Amy Schumer, and “Spy,” with Melissa McCarthy — both received excellent reviews.

Why the Naysayers Are Wrong About the Iran Deal

Iran’s people are perhaps the most pro-American and secular of those of any country I’ve been to in the Middle East. (On my last trip to Iran, I took two of my kids along, and Iranians bought them meals and ice cream, and served them illegal mojitos.)

Was Dianne White Clatto first!?!

Establishing whether Ms. Clatto was actually the nation’s first full-time black weathercaster is problematic. “I have checked with numerous sources, and they all agree: She was the first black female weathercaster on television in the United States,” said Bob Butler, a reporter with KCBS Radio in San Francisco and the president of the National Association of Black Journalists. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story An article in the Sept. 4, 1963, issue of Variety headlined “St. Louis’s KSD-TV Sepia Weather Gal” said she would be “the first of her race to be booked as regular on-the-air talent in some years at a local commercial TV station here.” Jet magazine unequivocally credits Trudy Haynes, a New York native, as the nation’s first black weathercaster and television reporter. She joined WXYZ in Detroit in September 1963. But Ms. Haynes said in an interview that if Ms. Clatto began in 1962, then she would have indeed been the first. The reference guide “Contemporary Black Biography” describes June Bacon-Bercey as the first black female television meteorologist in the country, in Buffalo in 1970. (That was the same year that John Amos began playing Gordy Howard, the black weatherman on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”) “Weather on the Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology,” by Robert Henson, says only that Steve Baskerville became the first black weathercaster on network television, for the “CBS Morning News,” in 1984. And in 1996, Mr. Roker began working as the regular weekday weather anchor on the “Today” show. Ms. Clatto was unquestionably a hometown pioneer who, she told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “felt the weight of the world on my shoulders” as a role model during her early years of broadcasting.

Remembering David Carr - Twiangulate Blog

This amazing man -- the boy from Hopkins, Minnesota, brilliant writer, father of three, recovering crack addict, recovering alcoholic, cancer survivor -- was followed by more Times-tweeps than powerful newspapers (WSJ: 300 NYT followers), presidents (Obama: 244), former Presidents (Clinton: 181), stars (Lena Dunham: 182; Jon Stewart: 175), moguls (Bloomberg: 172), or political honchos (David Axelrod: 159.) David also had far more NYT followers than fellow staffers like @nickkristof (1,563,804 followers, 378 from NYT staff) or @NYTimeskrugman (1,309,170 followers, 263 NYT staff.)

NYT best seller list excludes Amazon ebooks

It has not helped Amazon Publishing that most of its authors have been unable to get on The New York Times’ best-seller lists. While the Times tracks e-books, it does not look at titles “available exclusively from a single vendor,” according to its written policy. It is presumed that’s because the Times does not trust Amazon to report sales figures on its own titles without independent verification.

@carr2n: NYTimes losing its differentiator with buy-outs?

I work closely with a few longtime employees who are considering the buyouts. The deadline for putting up their hand is Monday, and it seems clear that we will be losing people with many decades of professional experience, journalists with deep sources and remarkable levels of productivity.

UrbanGlass Introduces Barware Inspired by Loos

“I made an ironic comment on this by using trashy, not very ecological things, which are around us every day,” he said. The carafe-and-five-glass set is $700.

Alexander Grothendieck, Math Enigma, Dies at 86

Alexander Grothendieck, who for an unknown reason was named Raddatz at birth (not Schapiro, Tanaroff or Grothendieck), was born in Berlin on March 28, 1928.

The lipstick index, as reported by NYTimes

After Estée Lauder chairman Leonard Lauder revived the truism that the cosmetics industry is recession-proof and actually suggested that the “lipstick index” could indicate economic fluctuations in 2001, writers in the business section and the magazine, including pop economist Adam Davidson, simply repeated it and attributed it vaguely to economists. (So did Maureen Dowd, but in pure Dowd fashion.) Only in the Styles section did reporters ask economists about it and look at some numbers, much less correctly attribute the concept’s revival to Lauder. Also, they noted that it had “been largely discredited.”

Radical Chic night, as reported by NYTimes' Charlotte Curtis

The wild side of the mild side

Women’s reporting could be a place where reporters wrote pieces that were wryly complicated, even critical of, their subjects and topics. Judy Klemesrud wrote some of the paper’s earliest and best coverage of the women’s movement. In 1966, the year Klemesrud was hired, a story about the founding of the National Organization for Women appeared under a piece about Thanksgiving recipes.

The NYTimes and (a few) women

From its earliest days, the New York Times was a particularly difficult place for women to work. Maybe a dozen or so women worked as reporters and editors in the paper’s first 100 years. From 1896, when Adolph S. Ochs bought the Times, to his death in 1935, only four women wrote for the paper. He hired one of them, Anne O’Hare McCormick, as a freelance contributor in 1921. She was not officially on staff until 1936, the year after his death and the year before she won a Pulitzer Prize for her work as a foreign correspondent. Like McCormick, many of these exceptional women worked as general assignment reporters, city room staffers, and correspondents, even if they also served time on the society desk or the women’s pages.

So NYTimes editors think rapping reflects on a teen's character. Do they know any teens?

Mr. Eligon said he pressed his editors to make changes on parts of the article that dealt with rap. “Rapping is just rapping. It’s not indicative of someone’s character,” he told me.

How many "angelic" teenagers do you know?

Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.
the Times had what it needed to make a call. “Perlstein plagiarized Shirley” was a checkable claim. Shirley’s accusations were online. Perlstein’s source notes were online. The Times knows what plagiarism is. Its writers and editors have to guard against it every day. Under these conditions, “leaving it there” amounts to malpractice, even though it still feels like normal practice and, as I said, the safer choice.
The New York Times ended the second quarter with just 32,000 more digital subscribers than it had started with. CEO Mark Thompson told investors Tuesday morning that the new sign-up options represented "the majority of the growth in the quarter." […] But it's been a challenge, he acknowledged, to get these new offerings in front of potential subscribers. For one thing, "we underestimated the challenge of presenting the new, wider range of choices to our users and left some consumers confused as a result -- obviously we are working hard to pivot and correct that." […] "We'll need to build and flex some new marketing muscles," Thompson said.
Yet Thomas Friedman also has a reputation to maintain— as a person that dumb people think is a smart foreign policy thinker.
I met Hillary Clinton the first time in 1978. I was writing for a political consulting firm, and Bill was running for governor and was one of the firm's clients. I went to Little Rock for two weeks to gather material. I was impressed that Bill Clinton had this very smart lawyer wife and this very brash woman as his top political lieutenant, Betsey Wright. Later, I went to work at American Lawyer, and I relied on Hillary as a source. Any time I was calling her for her own expertise, she was fantastic, friendly, and helpful.