The Platform Archive     Email    Printer-Friendly Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 2/22/2006 Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. His column "The Platform" appears each week at www.tcf.org. Sign up to receive new columns by email here. Past Columns The Platform: Amazon, Apple, and Caravan 1/27/10 It is fascinating and encouraging to see the titans of technology competing to distribute digital books. The new Apple reader will feature multi-media applications that have proved to be hugely popular on the iPhone. Amazon’s Kindle, among other devices, already has validated the e-book experience for significant audiences. The Platform: The Future of 3D 1/20/10 In case you haven't heard, James Cameron's Avatar is a huge success. By now, global revenues have surpassed $1.5 billion, with its backers projected to earn a $1 billion or more over time. The Platform: What Is a Magazine? 1/13/10 An unexpected highlight of the recent holiday interregnum was a discovery in a random file of old family letters and clippings. It was an immaculate copy of the first issue of Esquire from autumn The Platform: Paying for the Goods 1/6/10 A fierce battle ensued at the beginning of 2010 over News Corporation’s demands that Time-Warner Cable increase fees for the right to distribute the Fox Broadcasting network. The Platform: A Lesson from History 12/16/09 Earlier this fall, Foreign Affairs asked me to write a review essay for the January-February issue about Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting by John Maxwell Hamilton, founding dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. The Platform: Sarah Palin, the Book Business and the American Dream 12/9/09 Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life is a smash. It sold more than a million copies in the first two weeks and heads into the Christmas peak with enough momentum to anoint it as probably the best selling nonfiction book of the season. Considering that the contenders include the late Senator Edward Kennedy, Mitch Albom and Jon Krakauer, two multi-million copy masters of narrative writing, and Fox News' Glenn Beck, the current superstar of rabid right-wing rhetoric, Palin has bested an impressive field. The Platform: A Few Words About Andy Rooney 12/2/2009 Andy Rooney turns 91 on January 14, 2010. For 31 of those years he has delivered the closing essay on CBS's 60 Minutes. These pieces are the main reason Rooney is so famous. Walk (actually shamble) through an airport with him, and everyone who is not a foreigner offers a smile, a nod, or a friendly comment. But celebrity is not Andy's own measure of his professional worth; writing is. He has published sixteen books, and for the past two decades, I have been his publisher. The Platform: The Future of Journalism 11/24/2009 “The Future of Journalism” has been the subject these many months of conferences and confabs from coast to coast. Some experts and pundits seem to be omnipresent. The problems under discussion are certainly acute. The prescriptions focus on a mix of entrepreneurial and nonprofit models. Contemplation has its place. But the real tests will be in what actually gets done as journalism under force majeure is reinvented. I have just been reading the spring 2010 master of science curriculum at the Columbia University School of Journalism. The Platform: What Is It About Google? 11/11/2009 In 1985, Ken Auletta published Greed and Glory on Wall Street, a national bestseller. This was a colorful account of the battle for control of Lehman Brothers and was the first book that turned the machinations of previously discrete bankers into a topic for public fascination. In 1991, Auletta wrote Three Blind Mice, as the three great broadcast networks "lost their way," in the words of the book's subtitle. Then in 2001 came World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies, which was about the anti-trust cases that nearly brought the software giant down. The Platform: Harry Evans, Ace Newsman 11/4/2009 For the past twenty-five years, Harry Evans (formally, but rarely, known as Sir Harold Evans) has been based in New York in a succession of high-profile media roles, including publisher of the Random House Trade Division, founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler, best-selling author, and husband of Tina Brown. But before all that, Harry already had made his name as hands-down the best newspaper editor in Britain of his era, mainly at the Sunday Times. Now 81, Evans has written his memoir, covering the full arc of his very full life. His youth and early career take nearly half the book and have an elegance and generosity of style. Harry does everything with verve, and this autobiography is, to use a time-honored encomium, rollicking. The Platform: Introducing the Chicago News Cooperative 10/28/2009 Chicago was the quintessential twentieth-century newspaper town. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play Front Page, which premiered in 1928, captured the city's zest for breaking news. Tribune Tower, a monument to Colonel Robert McCormick's vision of his daily as the "World's Greatest Newspaper," was also a buttressed symbol of power. In its pre-World War II heyday, the Chicago Daily News had the premiere cadre of foreign correspondents in the country. In later years, New York was the financial and media capital of the nation. Los Angeles had the movie business. Washington had politics and government. Chicago had The Mayor (Richard J. Daley) and the ne plus ultra of big-city columnists, the great Mike Royko. The Platform: Encore! Encore! And Journalism. 10/21/2009 Journalism's Great Depression has meant the loss of many thousands of jobs: 16,000 in 2008 alone, according to estimates cited by the Columbia Journalism Review. These departures are characterized and paid for on a scale that goes from lucrative buy-outs to firings with virtually no severance. Overwhelmingly, the cuts represent a break from expected career patterns with resulting personal and family upheaval. Not surprisingly, a fin de siècle gloom tends to hang over newsrooms these days, especially in the once-proud metropolitan dailies and in many magazines. The Platform: Books: Get Them While They're Hot 10/14/09 Two announcements lately highlight the growing and increasingly glamorous role of the digital delivery and distribution of books. HarperCollins, publisher of Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, said it was rushing the book to sale on November 17, months earlier than originally planned. But the publisher is withholding the e-book version to be offered on the Kindle, Sony Reader, and their emerging competitors until the day after Christmas because the hardcover price, listed at $28.99, will be so much higher than the digital book, which certainly will go for much less ($9.99 on the Kindle, for example). Meanwhile, Tina Brown and my colleagues at the Perseus Books Group launched a new imprint, Beast Books, which will feature works by writers from Brown's Web site, The Daily Beast, first as e-books, and a month or two later as paperbacks. Toasting Craig Whitney of The New York Times   9/30/09 On September 30, Craig R. Whitney retires from the New York Times after forty-four years, during which he was a correspondent or bureau chief in Saigon, Bonn, Moscow, London, Paris, and Washington. He was foreign editor and twice an assistant managing editor. Whitney is leaving because the paper requires editors listed on the masthead to do so at age sixty-five. The Platform: Judgment Day for the Google Book Pact 9/23/2009 Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers (in unlikely fraternity) have bowed to the very large number of petitioners who oppose their agreement that would profoundly affect the digital future of books. A hearing long scheduled for October 7, before District Court Judge Denny Chin in New York is now expected to be postponed while all concerned consider objections to the accord  reached a year ago that gave Google vast rights to scan books and devised a system for paying authors and publishers for the right to do so. The Platform: Mad Men at Risk 9/16/2009 Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, now in its third year on AMC—are triumphs of a cinematic genre, featuring plots, characters, and settings that are terrific, with enough edge to bring sophisticated viewers back week after week. Next Sunday, Mad Men is up for sixteen Emmys. Last year it won for best drama. Okay, so much for encomiums. The Platform: What Would Liebling Say Today? 9/9/2009 A. J. Liebling was the principal writer of the New Yorker's "Wayward Press" column from 1945 until his death in 1963. These columns were widely regarded as the ne plus ultra of journalism about journalism because of their combination of reporting, insight, and wit. Liebling's appraisals could be scathing, but always derived from his respect for what could be, but rarely were, the standards of the trade he practiced. The Platform: Do You Subscribe to Fox News? 9/2/2009 At every opportunity this summer, I would ask people, random strangers to close friends, whether they subscribed to Fox News. In the circles I tend to travel, the answer was some form of dismissive, "Are you kidding?" Well, actually, I was not. By the most recent estimate I found, 80 percent of Americans have either cable or satellite television service, which means that all of them are subscribers to Fox News, AMC (Mad Men), Lifetime (Project Runway), and many dozens more. The Platform: Don Hewitt's Secrets 8/26/2009  The deaths of Don Hewitt, producer extraordinaire, and earlier this summer of Walter Cronkite highlight from both sides of the camera the passing of broadcasters who epitomized the best in television news: great storytelling that combined journalism with showmanship of the sort that television, from its earliest days, has always demanded. It is striking and sad that both men in their later years talked openly of their disappointment with how news on the airwaves had been degraded in favor of profit. In fact, these frustrations were nothing new. The Platform: Robert S. McNamara: In Memoriam 8/18/2009 The family of Robert S. McNamara sent out cards recently to those who offered condolences after he died last month. In accordance with his wishes, said the card, “there will be no funeral or memorial service and his ashes will be placed in Snowmass, Colorado and Martha’s Vineyard.” I can hear McNamara’s gravelly voice and picture him waving his hand to lend emphasis to his determination not to be extolled—or denounced by a protestor—at a posthumous event. In different circumstances, he might have been persuaded otherwise. After years of saying he wouldn’t, McNamara did finally reflect deeply in print and on film about the Vietnam War and his role in it. But it would be inconceivable, I suppose, for his survivors to overrule McNamara’s fiat that the scattering of his remains be the only ceremonial recognition of his very full, very long, and very controversial life. The Platform: Books: The Next Chapter 8/11/2009 Four summers ago, pondering a way to define how publishers could take advantage of emerging technologies for delivering information in a variety of formats, I came up with this slogan: Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now. The point was that books, basically unchanged in centuries as handheld objects composed of printed pages and covers, needed to adapt to the growing importance of screens, mobile devices, earphones, and the sense among readers that they should be able to get whatever they want on demand instead of searching for it. The Platform: Remembering a Remarkable Jewish Mother 8/4/2009 A documentary feature making the art house rounds this summer with the jolly title of Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg is a fascinating and revealing look at the story of Gertrude Berg. She was the star, writer, and producer of an enormously popular radio and television series in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, which was also a movie and Broadway play. In retrospect, this warm-hearted portrayal of a New York Jewish family without reference to anti-Semitism, ethnic insecurity, or the Holocaust seems amazing, all the more so because the program eventually was undermined by a different scourge, the anti-Communist fervor of the post World War II era. The Platform: Superpowers 7/28/2009 On October 1, the People’s Republic of China will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the revolution that gave Mao Tse-tung and the Communist party control of a vast, chaotic, and depleted nation. Today’s China has become a superpower, a country that in scale, ambition, and demonstrated success will be a dominant global force in the twenty-first century. As it happens I was a correspondent in the Soviet Union in 1977, the year it marked the sixtieth anniversary of its own Communist revolution. It too was then an acknowledged superpower that, along with the United States, sought to project military capacity and ideological hegemony the world over. Yet only fifteen years later, the Soviet Union disappeared, its empire shattered, its economy in ruins. The Platform: Reading Lolita in Beijing 7/21/2009 The preferred shopping environment in China is captured in the characters for “renao,” which translates as commotion or, more literally, hot and noisy. By that standard, the Beijing Books Building is idyllic, five floors of books packed with excited customers, overwhelmingly young on a weekday morning. There is an astounding cross section of Chinese and international titles with a breadth and depth that would—and actually did—impress an American publisher on an informal mission to find out what is readily available to China’s 1.4 billion people. This bustling vista overwhelmed the inclination to measure what is there against what was not allowed or to dwell on the problem of piracy. The Platform: What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google? 7/14/2009 The buzz inside Google is overwhelmingly positive about what the company does and how we will all benefit from the results—including the embattled denizens of newspapers and magazines who increasingly see Google as an enabler of their demise. Barely a decade ago, Google received its first $25 million investment, based on search technology developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the company’s cofounders. By the time it went public just five years later, “Google” was a verb. The Platform: A Serious Business 6/30/2009 The thrilling escape from his Taliban kidnappers by New York Times correspondent David Rohde, the release from an Iranian jail after months of detention and trial of NPR and BBC contributor Roxana Saberi, and North Korea’s imprisonment for nine years at hard labor of Current-TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee are reminders that choosing to cover what are among today’s best stories around the world is a very serious business. The Platform: Obama, Reagan, and the Media Glow 6/26/2009 Barack Obama has "enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either of his two predecessors," according to the analysis of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. That is not really surprising. Bill Clinton's early months were chaotic, mainly because his White House staff was weak and his personality, while engaging was, well, untidy. George W. Bush scrambled into office after a contested election that left more than a residue of bitterness and fatigue all around. A better measure of comparative coverage for Obama so far is with Ronald Reagan. Both administrations were/are led by charismatic and popular men with a clear vision that sharply differs from the presidents they replaced, who were from opposing parties and left economies in a mess and crises in Iran and Afghanistan. The Platform: Media Policy: Read This Report! 6/16/2009 At a crowded lunch at New York’s Harmonie Club last week, Syracuse University’s S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications presented its Mirror Awards for excellence in media industry reporting. Ariana Huffington was honored with a gushing video extolling her accomplishments and the success of her Huffington Post as a model of innovation. Prizes went to writers for Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Wired.com, and the New York Times. The Platform: Poking at History 6/9/2009 When George W. Bush left the White House in January with the economy in free-fall, Americans fighting two wars, and record-low approval ratings, it was widely reported that he assured himself time would vindicate his years as president, as it has Harry S. Truman. That may seem very far fetched now, but who knows? The judgments of history are the outcome of a tug-of-war between facts and interpretation that get rendered by those deciding what to make of them. Summer Hours, an IFC Hit 5/26/2009 French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours was called “a masterpiece” by A. O. Scott in the New York Times. Entertainment Weekly’s respected critic Lisa Schwarzman gave it an A. In its first weekend, it grossed $24,100 per theater (there were only two), which made it the most promising opening of a “specialty” film in months. It now has expanded to ten top markets and will be in twenty-five by the end of May, according to indieWIR. The Platform: The Kindle Surge and Beyond 5/19/2009 In elections, it is (usually) safe to project from expert exit polling what the final results will be. Something like that is happening with the still early numbers for the sales and use of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. It looks like a winner. Since its launch in November 2007, and despite being out of stock for long stretches, about a million units of the two versions have been sold, according to the best estimates I’ve seen, barely more than a dent in the gadget marketplace. The Platform: Green Shoots, Media Version 5/12/2009 Like the mayhem in the broader economy, the media business crisis is far from over, and in the case of newspapers and magazines is nowhere near the end of the shakeout. But outlines for the future of news are clearer now than they were a few months ago, with even some hopeful signs of positive change. The Platform: Newsweek and the Alchemy of Buzz 5/5/2009 As long as words and images have shaped information and entertainment, their impact has been measured in two ways: the quality of content and the effectiveness of distribution. In the viral Internet age, a third element has become increasingly important: buzz, the ineffable ingredient that can give a semblance of success when content and distribution alone cannot. Some venerable word enterprises have ingrained, or retro buzz (the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Economist, Paris Review, Foreign Affairs), which used to be called prestige. For most other publications—and in the past decade, Web sites as well—the cultivation of buzz is a major preoccupation. The Platform: A Visit to Politico 4/21/2009 In Washington, Politico (www.politico.com) is now an established and respected competitor in news and comment about its subject. Lots of media entries in the Inter net age have started strong and faded when they were unable to convert online audiences into cash flow or to find a buyer who could. Politico seems to be different, and it may have one of the vaunted new models for journalism so desperately being sought these days. The Platform: Remembering America Online 4/14/2009 There is so much financial distress and diminished content in the media landscape these days that the thirtieth anniversary of C-SPAN (Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network) is an occasion worthy of breaking out the bubbly. While the focus now is on new models for news and information, C-SPAN is a venerable enterprise, albeit unique, that demonstrates what ingenuity can accomplish. The Platform: The Future of Books, Spring Edition 4/7//2009 So far 2009 has been a very big year for the expansion of e-book reading. There was the release of the Kindle 2, which got rave reviews in places such as Slate and BusinessWeek. Sony added 500,000 out-of-copyright books to its Sony Reader catalog. E-book use on the iPhone exploded, with over a million downloads of the Stanza application alone. The Platform: The Power of Experience 3/24/2009 Leslie H. Gelb arguably has the most extensive “establishment” credentials of our time. So what he has to say in his new book, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins), should be of considerable value to those now in command in Washington in the unlikely event they can read and reflect in the midst of myriad crises. The Platform: World News Is Not Dead 3/17/2009 One of the ingrained beliefs about the current crisis in newsgathering is that foreign reporting is disappearing, and to a considerable extent that is true. Newspapers and news magazines that were pillars of coverage have drastically reduced their cadre of correspondents abroad. The Tribune Company newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and (until last year) Newsday—all had reporters in China. Now there is one left, from the Los Angeles Times. The other bureaus are closed. If you’ve read this far, you probably know the litany of losses. The Platform: The Great Google Debate 3/10/2009 Did you know that magazines are now part of Google Book Search? It turns out that last December, Google announced “an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.” The Google announcement said nothing about payment, and after hunting through the links, I found on eReport: Digital Publishing Downunder a note that said “in common with the deal agreed with book publishers . . . (Google) offered to split advertising revenues.” The Platform: A Return to Vietnam 3/3/2009 Returning to Vietnam thirty-four years after the end of what is known here as the “American” war, it is safe to say that this is one of the few places in the world that the United States has absolutely nothing to worry about. The horrendous twentieth-century battle to contain Red China and protect Indochina’s dominoes from the menace of communism seems utterly irrelevant now to the development of a bustling, overwhelmingly young, and, in many ways, impressive country. Having lived in Vietnam as a correspondent during the war years, the immediate sense is of a country at peace. The Platform: The Future of News 2/17/2009 It didn’t start out this way, but the newspaper survival crisis has taken on some of the trappings of the broader financial calamity in the country. Last week there was a Time cover story, a New York Times online round-table of experts, a Charlie Rose panel, and a torrent of punditry elsewhere on what must be done, including now the piece that follows. All of those opinions being amassed in search of solutions recall the notion that, with so much debris, “there must be a pony in there somewhere.” The Platform: The Rules of the Game 2/10/2009 In more than four decades at the Washington Post, Leonard Downie, Jr. has done it all—investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, local and national editor, and in the paper’s top newsroom job for seventeen years, he led the Post to twenty-five Pulitzer Prizes, including three Gold Medals for public service. Now, in his first year since leaving that position, he has published a novel called The Rules of the Game (Knopf). Timing can be an essential ingredient in the impact of a book, even one of fiction, and Downie (a friend as well as a former colleague) has scored a direct hit. In the early weeks of the Obama administration, the big story, aside from the collapsing economy and the frenetic efforts to do something about it, has been whether our young president can change the way Washington works; more on that in a moment. The Platform: Google’s Coming Monopoly and the News 2/3/2009 In a period of epic economic crisis, Google, Apple, and Amazon still are doing fine selling advertisements and/or media online. Their dominance over how we get entertainment and information of all kinds is increasingly clear, and the suppliers of that content have to reckon with the fact that the mighty tend to use their power to extract ever more in revenue and influence The Platform: A Writer Becomes President 1/27/2009 In the heady days around the Obama ascension and his much anticipated inaugural address, I went back to Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, completed when the president was in his early thirties, to look again at the young writer for insight as to what kind of person he was then and would become. I called my colleagues on the small publishing team that worked with Obama on the book, released in August 1995, and asked them to shake out recollections of what has turned out to be, after all, their brush with history, supporting a memoir already considered a classic and an epic bestseller. The Platform: E-Books—This Time It’s Real 1/13/2009 In the face of the latest headlines—“Barnes and Noble Had Weak Holiday” (Wall Street Journal); “Putting Off The Ritz: The New Austerity of Publishing” (New York Times) and, grimmest of all, “An Autopsy of the Book Business” (The Daily Beast) by the correctly described “publishing legend” Jason Epstein—I feel like Voltaire’s ridiculous optimist Pangloss in saying that there is significant news to report that is wholly positive for anyone who cares about books. The Platform: A Letter from Jerusalem 1/6/2009 Israel is, yet again, at war. But you could still get a smile in Jerusalem last week by suggesting that there is some mystical message for the Middle East in the name of America’s incoming president. Bara(c)k is Israel’s Defense Minister, leading the air and ground assault against Hamas in Gaza. Hussein is a quintessential Arab surname, carried by an old enemy who ended up in a noose, and Obama is one letter away from the name of our era’s paragon of Islamist evil. The Platform: Front Pages 12/30/2008 A surprise bestseller this holiday season is The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851–2008 (Black Dog and Leventhal). It got as high as number 13 on the New York Times Book Review nonfiction list, was sold out at Amazon, and retailing at $60 was a pricey gift, for a book. The Platform: Lessons in Disaster: A Book for Obama 12/16/2008 McGeorge Bundy had a lead role in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, his ironically titled epic portrait of illustrious Kennedy and Johnson era advisers responsible for America’s disastrous foray into Vietnam. The Platform: Beyond the Great Press Crash of 2008 12/9/2008 Years ending in the number 8 have an unusually high record of being historic pivots: think 1918, 1948, and 1968. Unquestionably, 2008 was a turning point in politics, the economy, and what for generations we have called the press. This was the year when the printed media crashed with a sudden velocity and with consequences that are irreversible.  (As of Monday, the iconic Tribune is in bankruptcy.) So the big question as we approach the New Year is how to manage what happens now. Given that it was the Internet that has brought about the transformation of our information culture, then corralling the Web is job one and two and three. The Platform: What Zell Bought and Wrought 12/2/2008 By now, it is clear that Sam Zell loathes the newspapers he acquired when he took control of the Tribune Company. In every interview, he is contemptuous of what he says has “historically been a non-business business. . . . I can tell you unequivocally that model is a failure. The Platform: Revisiting Barack Obama and the Book Business 11/19/2008 Among other distinctions Barack Obama brings to the White House is the fact that he is the most successful author ever to occupy the presidency. Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, and The Audacity of Hope, the manifesto he wrote in his first year as a senator, have sold millions of copies in the United States and around the world. No other books by a political figure come close in terms of sales, or in the case of Dreams, literary skill, with the possible exception of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. The Platform: The Very Valuable Associated Press 11/12/2008 The Associated Press (AP) is the most venerable major enterprise in the American news business. It was founded in 1846 (five years before the New York Times) and is a nonprofit cooperative owned by its members, the country’s newspapers. In many respects, it is to news, what AT&T and Western Union were for so long in communications, an invaluable utility. The Platform: Make Google Pay 11/3/2008 There was a lot of major news last week, but for the media business nothing was more important than Google’s settlement with book publishers of law suits challenging the right to digitize copyrighted books for search and distribution without paying for them. Google will pay $125 million to the plaintiffs, publishers, and authors, and will cover legal fees for what was a protracted haggle. The Wise Men 10/29/2008 Amidst the ruined reputations and lost fortunes of the global financial crisis, three men emerge with their stature significantly enhanced. To put it simply: If the Masters of the Wall Street Universe and their Washington patrons had listened to Paul Volcker, George Soros, and Warren Buffett, the current catastrophe probably could have been averted. The Future of Public Radio 10/14/2008 If you’ve read this far, you are almost certainly a listener of public radio. National Public Radio (NPR), American Public Media, and the 800 or so stations around the country that carry their signature programming, and to varying degrees create programs of their own, have become a major source of quality information and entertainment. When Big News Breaks 10/6/2008 What is now established, without hyperbole, as the greatest upheaval of the financial system since the 1930s has all the trappings of really big news: banner headlines in the national newspapers (even for the first time in the Wall Street Journal), round-the-clock broadcast and Web coverage, and in the publishing world, a stream of announcements about books that will tell the definitive, behind-the-scenes, sure-to-be-newsmaking story about the great events. Let’s focus on the books. The Future of Publishing, and an Afterword on the Debate at Ol’ Miss 9/30/2008 In April 1960, Nan Talese, then a young editor at Random House and now a publishing sage, came home and said to her husband, Gay, a reporter at the New York Times, “Oh God, it’s the end of publishing.” The Perils of Putin 9/23/2008 Vanity Fair’s annual listing of “The New Establishment” has a surprising number 1 this year: Vladimir Putin, prime minister of Russia. He beat out last year’s topper, Rupert Murdoch, with Sergey Brin, a Russian by birth and the co-founder of Google, at number 3. Number 8 is Roman Abramovich, one of a slew of new Russian billionaires who was up from number 30 on the strength, according to Vanity Fair, of his “investing and spending on a czar-like scale.” All in all, to Vanity Fair (and the compilers of a similar list at Esquire), today’s Russia is on a roll. First Run Movies 9/16/2008 An end of summer feature in the New York Times listed the top “art” films of the season. With the exception of Woody Allen’s entertaining Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is still in relatively wide distribution, the other films were limited to a handful of urban markets. Unless you had time and energy to locate their whereabouts, the odds of seeing these movies before and unless they arrive on DVD are negligible (as a quick check of their domestic grosses on MoJo.com confirms). Support Your Local Newspaper 9/9/2008 On an otherwise mellow outing a few weeks ago, about the time the Chicago Tribune was implementing another substantial round of buy-outs and lay-offs, a leading Chicago financier unexpectedly snarled: “So what. The paper isn’t very good anyway. I get the New York Times and most people in Chicago don’t need to know what is happening in Kazakhstan.” My response was, well, more about that below. Passing the Torch 9/2/2008 Every four years there is a debate about coverage of the national political conventions, with the assumption that scripted extravaganzas aren’t worth the attention. And yet as many as 15,000 news people were in Denver for the Democrats, servicing television, radio, the newspapers, magazines, and Web sites with reporting, analysis, video, blogs, and twitters, parsing the events at every angle from earnestness and depth to satire and derision. Hot Books 8/26/2008 As summer winds down, books have been making cheesy news. Here is a take on three controversies, unrelated but sharing this characteristic: positions on all sides have been notably self-righteous and/or disingenuous, overwhelming the principles at stake—and they are real—with explanations that fall well short of impressive. The Demise of "Middlebrow” News 8/19/2008 In mid-twentieth century America, as more and more people graduated from high school and college, an array of means were devised to meet their demand for continued ”self-improvement” of the brain. This was the heyday of what author Alex Beam calls “salubrious intellectual diversions finding favor with the middle class.” The Platform: A Note about Images 7/29/2008 The splashy political images of mid-summer came from Barack Obama’s triumphal trip to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and Europe, beamed back to us to be viewed on television, in news photographs, and in various formats on the Internet. The Platform: Saving the Neighborhood Bookstore 7/22/2008 In the early morning of July 4, a fire broke out in the basement of Café Moxie, a popular restaurant in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard, destroying the building and severely damaging the adjoining Bunch of Grapes bookstore next door. The store, owned by the Nelson family for almost thirty years, was piled high with inventory in anticipation of the summer season. The Platform: Change at the Washington Post 7/15/2008 What is happening to newspapers is a tragedy. The layoffs and cutbacks in staff and content are an incalculable loss to the core mission of journalism: keeping a beady eye on government, business, and society as a whole. The Platform: The Power of Amazon 7/8/2008 It may not be everybody’s idea of summer reading, but I am engrossed in Michael Dobbs’s One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (Knopf). After reading excellent reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post, I flipped the switch on my Amazon Kindle, and within a minute for $9.99, the book was mine to read at leisure. The Platform: Scott McClellan Makes News Again 6/23/2008 Last Friday, at the invitation of Chairman John Conyers (D-Michigan) of the House Judiciary Committee, Scott McClellan testified under oath about the issues raised by his book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception published by PublicAffairs. The Platform: The Murdoch Way 6/17/2008 Ten years ago, the venerable publisher HarperCollins was a demoralized mess. NewsCorp’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, wanted to sell it, but when that proved impossible at an acceptable price, he took a whopping write-down of its value and hired Jane Friedman of Random House to run it. The Platform: Scott McClellan Makes News 6/10/2008 The release of Scott McClellan’s book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, was a sensation. As the founder of PublicAffairs, the book’s publisher, I was understandably gratified that our judgment on the importance of McClellan’s story was validated by the furor and its position as the #1 best seller on the New York Times nonfiction list for June 15. The Platform: The Kennedys 5/28/2008 By coincidence, we are again being reminded this spring of our depth of feelings about the Kennedy brothers, a relationship of hope, grief, and gratitude that has lasted now for half a century. The Platform: Buyouts, Layoffs, and the Future 5/20/2008 We are in high season for journalism’s prizes and graduations; more on that in a moment. But this spring’s buyouts, layoffs, and cutbacks confirm that much of print media is in the midst of a business depression. The Platform: The Clintons 5/13/2008 Early in the 2008 primary marathon, Hillary Clinton, her husband Bill, the former president, and their daughter, Chelsea, became “the Clintons,” which was much more than their collective family name. It captured a media and political mind-set, an attitude toward everything they are and represent in contemporary America. The Platform: The Myth of Free News 5/6/2008 One of the most persistent explanations for journalism’s present financial troubles is that consumers no longer have to pay for news. The notion that everything these days is “free” on the Web is an article of faith—which happens to be wrong.

The Platform: Elitists and the News Business
4/29/2008
In politics, “elitist” is now an epithet, surpassing even “liberal” as a description to be shunned. In the media, however, the “elitist” sector is doing better than most of the mass purveyors of news: the networks, news magazines, and the metropolitan newspapers that flourished so long as all things to all people.

The Platform: The Soundtrack of Our Lives
4/22/2008
Of all the ways we are entertained, music has a distinctive pattern. Over decades, we will spend hundreds, even thousands, of hours listening again and again to our favorites, adding new ones along the way until there is a vast repertoire in our minds.

The Platform: A Fancy Museum about News and an Afterword about the Couric Case
4/15/2008
The Newseum was officially opened in Washington, D.C., the other night with a lavish black tie reception for about three thousand people and a resplendent buffet catered by Wolfgang Puck of Hollywood.

The Platform: A New Paradigm for Publishing
4/8/2008
On March 24, George Soros delivered a finished manuscript by e-mail to PublicAffairs, his publisher (where I am founder and editor-at-large). Soros had concluded that the current turmoil is “the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.” He wanted his analysis, titled The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, available immediately.

The Platform: The Newsroom Morale Crisis
4/1/2008
The business downturn at America’s newspapers is very serious. The Newspaper Association of America reported last week that, in 2007, the industry had its sharpest drop in advertising revenue—9.4 percent—since the association began measuring these numbers in 1950. On-line revenues are up—they now represent 7.5 percent of newspaper ad revenue—but that increase doesn’t nearly offset the print plunge.

The Platform: Race, Infidelity, and the Tyranny of Revelation
3/25/2008
In his brilliant oration on race in America last week, Senator Barack Obama spoke, in closing, of the great honor he had in speaking on Martin Luther King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta. Obama was on the political defensive not for anything he had done, but because in video clips of sermons, his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, had portrayed the United States as a vicious perpetrator of racial hatred and violence.

The Platform: Dith Pran, One of Journalism's Heroes
3/18/2008
Dith Pran, who worked with New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg in Cambodia in the 1970s and became famous when their story won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into the movie The Killing Fields, is very ill with cancer.

The Platform: Made Up Stories
3/10/2008
One of the striking aspects of the siege of bogus memoirs and made-up journalism in recent years is that the most celebrated perpetrators—James Frey and Margaret Seltzer; Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair—were actually talented writers whose downfall came from the admiring attention they received for their work.

The Platform: William Buckley's Melancholy Media Legacy
3/4/2008
William F. Buckley was a twentieth-century man with the manner, caste of speech, and political perspective of someone suspended in an Anglophiliac universe of the past, except that his brand of conservative ideology became a dominant force in American political life during the second half of the century he inhabited.

The Platform: The Public Television Debate, Again
February 28, 2008
“Nothing ever gets settled in this town . . . a seething debating society in which the debate never stops, in which people never give up, including me. And so that’s the atmosphere in which you administer.” —George P. Shultz, Secretary of State, 1982–89

The Platform: The Power of Media On Demand
February 19, 2008
A unifying fact has now emerged among the dizzying changes in the ways we access information and entertainment. It is increasingly provided on demand, delivered on a screen or digital device when you hit the key or push the button. People have always chosen the time and place where they will read a newspaper or a book, watch a movie, or listen to music.

The Platform: Obama and the World’s Media
February 12, 2008
For years after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, travelers would report seeing his picture on the walls of huts in remote corners of the globe as an icon of hope. Considering that much of the world was barely reachable by newspapers, radio, and television, the lasting impact of JFK’s presidency was an intriguing indicator of what an American leader could mean outside the United States itself.

The Platform: Reading Newspapers on the Kindle
February 5, 2008
The other morning, when the New York Times had not arrived by 8:00 a.m. (which, I should add, is very rare), I decided to try reading the paper on my Kindle, the Amazon digital reader (Platform, December 4, 2007). Settled into an armchair, I bought the paper for $0.75 and it downloaded, through Wi-Fi, in seconds. It could not have been easier.

The Platform: James O’Shea’s Valedictory
January 29, 2008
Anthony Lewis’ new book, Freedom for the Thought that We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, is a survey of free press and free speech matters by a master of the subject.

The Platform: Political Coverage Considered
January 23, 2008
On the morning of November 6, 1980, David Broder, the Washington Post’s national political correspondent led the paper with a thorough assessment of the presidential election of November 4, in which Ronald Reagan had decisively beaten Jimmy Carter in what Broder characterized as the country’s “sharpest turn to the right in a generation” and, perhaps, “the start of a new era of conservative and Republican dominance.”

The Platform: Reading William Kristol
January 15, 2008
William Kristol’s appointment as a weekly columnist for the New York Times was announced at year’s end and precipitated public excoriation—in blogs, mainly, and in complaints to media writers—from those who saw it as a neo-con assault on the integrity of the New York Times’ op-ed page, the supreme court of opinion in the United States.

The Platform: Howard Kurtz: Sine Qua Non
December 18, 2007
Howard Kurtz is the media reporter for the Washington Post. If you have read this far, the odds are you know that. Put Kurtz’s name in to the Post’s print archive back to 1987 and you get 5,521 entries, or about 275 stories a year.

The Platform: The New Year at Dow Jones, Tribune and Thomson-Reuters
December 11, 2007
As 2008 nears, three major transactions that will significantly impact the news and information business are preparing to close: Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones, Sam Zell’s takeover of The Tribune Company, and Thomson’s acquisition of Reuters.

The Platform: Amazon, Kindle, and the Future of Books
December 4, 2007
The launch of Amazon in the mid-1990s was a profound development in the annals of bookselling. The efficiency of the shopping process (one-click ordering, for example), the breadth of the inventory, and a consistent policy of “under-promise and over-deliver” when it comes to service set a new standard in a venerable marketplace. A decade later, Amazon is a colossus

The Platform: What Is a Story?
November 27, 2007
Early last week, PublicAffairs posted the contents of its spring 2008 catalog on the Web, the first step in the publicity roll-out of books to be published between March and August. One book, Scott McClellan’s account of his experiences as press secretary to President George W. Bush, caught the eye of the publishing trade press, and twenty-four hours later the book had become a media sensation.

The Platform: The Health of Science Journalism
November 20, 2007
Cristine Russell is a leader in the field of science and health journalism, and a former colleague at the Washington Post (as well as my very good friend). She is president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, a past president of the National Association of Science Writers, and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her bona fides for assessing the field are plainly impeccable.

The Platform: On Being “Self-Published”
November 6, 2007
The publishing of books, like other information and entertainment fields, is a pyramid with a pinnacle of fame and fortune descending to a vast base of progressively less acclaim. At bottom for many decades was something called “vanity publishing,” in which the would-be novelist, memoirist, and get-rich-quick hustler would hire an outfit that advertised in the back of magazines to print the book and usually (for an additional fee) list it somewhere as for sale along with others who had paid for their own work, making them pitiable wannabes in the world of letters.

The Platform: Notes on the Pace of Change
October 31, 2007
Returning from a trip away from the reach of most daily media (you can get Wi-Fi e-mail in Nigerian cities, and fancier hotel rooms do have CNN, the BBC, and even Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show: Global Edition), it is startling to be reminded how much is being reinvented in the world of information and how fast it is all happening.

The Platform: The Nigerian Paradox, and an Afterword about Cell Phones
October 23, 2007
I have just spent a week in Nigeria as part of a delegation of Human Rights Watch board members and staff. We visited Kano, the country’s second biggest city in the Muslim dominated North, and Abuja, the federal capital, whose modern skyline is a misleading façade to the country’s deeper character.

The Platform: The Clinton Phenomenon and an Afterword about O. J. Simpson
October 2, 2007
There has never been anything quite like Bill and Hillary Clinton in American life. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were certainly a formidable pair, and she endured as a paragon of good causes. But theirs was another era in which private lives were not a public spectacle. The Roosevelt style was very old school.

The Platform: The Media’s Free Market
September 25, 2007
The pace and tone of change in the media world has been intense for over a decade now, since the Internet transformed the way information and entertainment can be delivered.

The Platform: Iraq Now: What Would Molly Ivins Say?
September 18, 2007
The friends of Molly Ivins gathered last week at New York’s Society for Ethical Culture to mark her passing last winter. Maya Angelou, Gail Collins, Calvin Trillin, and others spoke with wit and sentiment. But what made the occasion so memorable was hearing Molly’s warning words about Iraq—before and after the invasion in 2003.

The Platform: What Murdoch Will Do to Dow Jones
Sept. 11, 2007
For a second year, Rupert Murdoch is number one on Vanity Fair’s “annual power ranking.” He’s ahead of Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Bill Clinton, Bill and Melinda Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and other many other stellar moguls and media mavens.

The Platform: Lying Is the Cardinal Sin
Sept. 4, 2007
Dan Popkey is a soft-spoken metro columnist and award-winning reporter for the Idaho Statesman, a McClatchy-owned newspaper, where he has worked for twenty-four years. He spent, by his account, five months researching Senator Larry Craig’s sexual behavior, but the story was shelved until Roll Call in Washington disclosed that Craig had plead guilty to a charge of “disorderly conduct” in the men’s room of the Minneapolis airport

The Platform: Giving Book Readers What They Want
August 28, 2007
Here are some recent tidbits about books. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll found gloomily that one in four adults read no books at all in the past year. “At the same time,” the AP added, “book enthusiasts abound. Many in the survey reported reading dozens of books and said they couldn’t do without them.” Supporting that cheerier view, the 2006 Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast said that time spent with books went up slightly in 2006 and will stay that way in 2007 despite competition from the internet and television.

The Platform: “Goodbye to Newspapers?”
August 21, 2007
For weeks this summer, the bustling newsstand at the corner outside my office has been displaying the current issue of the New York Review of Books featuring a piece by the great, now retired New York Times columnist Russell Baker, with a headline that reflects a widespread and downbeat question these days: “Goodbye to Newspapers?” Baker’s columns were always infused with subtle irony and humor that made them a pleasure to read. But this piece is grim.

The Platform: Summer Movies
August 8, 2007
There are three powerful documentary films—two dealing with the Iraq war and one about Darfur—making the rounds of festivals and a few theaters in this traditional season for lighter fare. They reflect the changing ways important subjects reach selected audiences.

Harry Potter and the Rest of the Book Business
July 30, 2007
The publication of the last of the Harry Potter series has been a spectacle. There are many reasons to be in awe of J. K. Rowling’s accomplishment. She has written books that are brilliant as story-telling and are matched as commerce in the way they have been marketed. Rarely does an author combine the creative act of writing books with a branding sense that is aggressive yet, in its way, respectful of the characters. The Harry Potter juggernaut of movies and related product is an enterprise so vast that Rowling is now a billionaire, richer than Queen Elizabeth.

Norman Pearlstine Tells All
July 24, 2007
Norman Pearlstine was the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal in what were certainly some of its best years. He guided the paper through the period in the 1980s during which business reporting evolved into tough-minded investigative journalism combined with narrative momentum. Based on their work for the Journal, his writers framed that booming era in books such as Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate and James B. Stewart’s Den of Thieves. Bankers and financiers became superstars, and the ones that got carried away with greed ended up in prison.

Ronald Reagan’s Private Thoughts
July 10, 2007
The Reagan Diaries have been a number one bestseller this season, selling over 200,000 copies in about six weeks. Edited by the historian Douglas Brinkley, the diaries certainly will be the best selling of Reagan’s presidential oeuvre. By contrast, Reagan’s presidential memoirs, An American Life, published in 1990, were a significant disappointment despite a multi-million dollar advance and consequent hoopla. The New York Times pretty much sealed the book’s tepid reception with a review by Maureen Dowd, who had covered the Reagan White House. She wrote that a better title for the book would have been The Mannequin Speaks.

The Blair Paradox
June 26, 2007
Whatever their accomplishments, Britain’s prime ministers often get popular comeuppance. The two most formidable prime ministers of the latter twentieth century were dumped: Winston Churchill at the end of World War II, and Margaret Thatcher after a decade rousing Britain from its post-imperial funk. Now Tony Blair is on the way out, not exactly on a rail, but certainly not in triumph. The British press and public have been fed up with Blair for some time now, complaining about many things at home and abroad, mainly his support for the U.S. misadventure in Iraq.

Reporting's Future, with an Afterword on Murdoch and Dow Jones
June 12, 2007
One of the best examples of the extraordinary reporting since September 11 about the background to those events and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and against Jihadists everywhere is Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower.

Who Lost Al Gore?
May 29, 2007
Al Gore is everywhere. Here’s a short resume update: Oscar winner, senior adviser at Google, board member of Apple, Time cover subject, best-selling author, investment banker, visionary who has been right on everything since (and it turns out, before) he was outmaneuvered in a presidential contest by George W. Bush in 2000.

Caravan Goes Live
May 22, 2007
With a minimum of fanfare, www.caravanbooks.org went live last week.

The Platform: Perpetrators
May 15, 2007
Former CIA director George Tenet’s book At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA will be #1 on the New York Times Book Review bestseller list on May 20. I’m told Tenet received an advance of $2 million for the book.

How Dow Jones Can Protect the News
May 8, 2007
Rupert Murdoch is the defining media mogul of our age. No one has amassed a more extensive array of properties: studios, networks, newspapers, book publishers, Web sites. At 76, with a third wife, a young family, and a $44 million triplex in renovation, Murdoch seems to have it all, but wants more. His $5 billion bid for Dow Jones is so aggressive that some of his closest business advisers think it is not anchored in business reality.

Nixon, Bush and the Writing of History
April 24, 2007
The presidency and persona of Richard M. Nixon are getting a comprehensive round of examination this spring. Sunday night, the London smash “Nixon-Frost” came to Broadway, depicting interviews in 1977 between David Frost, the British journalist and talk show host, and Nixon, recovering from his humiliation and taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for admitting that what he did in Watergate was wrong

Make Imus Pay
April 17, 2007
It is hard to feel sentimental about the firing of Don Imus. His noxious remark about the Rutgers women’s basketball team was every bit as offensive as its harshest critics contend. Imus put his head in the noose, squirmed, and then instead of a reprieve, got hanged.

Sam Zell's Committment to Excellence
April 10, 2007
Last week, Sam Zell acquired control of the Tribune Company, a media giant and publisher of sixteen newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, in what, from any perspective, seemed like a distress sale. He put up a few hundred million of his own cash, leveraged billions, and is the effective owner of the empire.

Some Advice to Authors
April 3, 2007
Finishing a book is like climbing a mountain. Getting to the summit is hard, so it is easy to underestimate what happens after that goal has been achieved and you need to get back to ground. Writing a book and publishing it are two separate journeys, requiring comparable commitment, but different types of discipline.

Push Back
March 27, 2007
In the cycle of dizzying change that digital delivery has caused for everyone in the world of news and entertainment, we may be reaching a critical moment. Think of it as “ push back,” the point at which the guardians (and grandees) of the old order summon the fortitude to challenge the assumptions of the upstarts that they will prevail in the contest for audience and revenue.

Vladimir Putin and the Media
March 20, 2007
Shortly after his selection as Russia’s new leader, one of Vladimir Putin’s media-savvy aides asked me how this essentially unknown man could introduce himself to the world. I suggested that he sit down with a group of Russia’s leading journalists for extensive interviews, which he did.

The Future of Book Reviews
March 13, 2007
At some point in the past twenty years or so, someone in the advertising ranks of the New York Times had the idea of selling placement for teaching and health care jobs as small display ads in the venerable News of the Week in Review section.

The XM-Sirius Merger and You
March 6, 2007
The nation’s two radio satellite companies—XM and Sirius—are intending to merge. Given their combined losses in the many billions and with only the vaguest time line toward profitability, the likelihood that both can go on alone is very remote. So the merger makes business sense.

Great Reporters and Their Heirs
February 26, 2007
There is so much bad news around about print journalism these days that any contrarian viewpoint seems dangerously naïve. The declining circulation of many of our best newspapers, the cuts in staff and standards, and the prevailing view that shareholder value is more important than quality are real problems.

The Libby Case: Everyone Lost
February 20, 2007
The great Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams used to say that in the nation’s capital it is customary “to burn a witch every three months.” The current witch is I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Jr., former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, whose perjury and obstruction trial is in its final days.

Jewish Liberals, Anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Media
February 8, 2007
A piece spread across the top of the New York Times arts pages the other day was headlined, “ Essay Linking Liberal Jews and Anti-Semitism Sparks a Furor.” The essay appeared on the American Jewish Committee’s Web site, www.ajc.org. It was written by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, a professor at Indiana University and director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts.

How Newspapers Can Cover the World
February 5, 2007
The closing of the Boston Globe’s foreign bureaus the other day was startling. One of the nation’s best newspapers, serving a community that wants and has a right to expect sophisticated coverage of the world, can no longer support its own reporters based abroad.

The Small Screen
January 30, 2007
The grisly cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein’s hanging a few weeks ago was, in its way, a seminal moment.

Heroes
January 22, 2007
The other day a well-meaning friend seemed to be disparaging (or maybe it was despairing) about coverage of the war in Iraq. The criticism was that we don’t really know what is going on apart from the mayhem in and around Baghdad and the political machinations in the Green Zone. In a sense that is true.

Is Smaller Better?
January 16, 2007
On January 2, the Wall Street Journal appeared in a new, more compact format with an updated typeface, jazzier graphics, and a greater emphasis on why things happened than on breaking news, which, it is argued, has been covered at WSJ.com. Is the Wall Street Journal a better newspaper as a result of these changes?

The Platform: One Year Later
January 9, 2007
In the first of these pieces a year ago, I focused on three media issues that seemed both eternal and acutely topical. They are best understood as tugs of war.

The Iraq Study Group Report, a National Bestseller
December 12, 2006
The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward—A New Approach has now ascended into a particular pantheon of blue-ribbon official documents. It is a national bestselling book. There have been others: The Warren Commission Report, the Tower Commission Report on Iran-Contra, The Starr Report, and most recently, the 9-11 Commission Report.

The Documentary Age
December 5, 2006
In 1964, the British television company Granada commissioned a film called Seven Up!  for its World in Action series that featured fourteen British seven-year-old children from across the country’s social spectrum in interviews about their lives. The notion of the film was to test a Jesuit motto “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Every seven years since, the director Michael Apted has added to the material in a series of films, with the latest 49 Up simultaneously still in a few theaters and now available on DVD.

Buyers and Sellers
November 28, 2006
There has been a great deal of discussion lately about the buying and selling of news and information companies. So here is an off-the-top-of-the-head list of companies bought, sold, and/or merged over the past twenty years, in some cases more than once: ABC, CBS, NBC, Time Inc., the Reader’s Digest, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, New York, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, newspapers in Des Moines, Boston, Los Angeles, Louisville, Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, book publishers such as Random House and Simon and Schuster, and on and on.

Powell, Rumsfeld, Reporters, and Reputation Rehab
November 13, 2006
Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld arrived at the Departments of State and Defense as the biggest celebrities of the Bush administration. Powell was one of the most admired people of our time. Had he chose to run in 1996 or 2000, he might well have been president.

Tower Records RIP? And an Afterword about Obama
November 6, 2006
It is hard to get sentimental about the second and probably final bankruptcy of a major national chain that sells CDs, DVDs, games, and assorted related bric-a-brac. But the demise of Tower Records and the closing of all eighty-nine of its stores by the end of the year is a significant reflection of what is happening in the bricks and mortar world of retail entertainment and information. Stores with deep, eclectic inventories of music and with clerks whose expertise in niche areas such as classical, opera, jazz, and folk made them an important part of the in-store premium are disappearing.

Barack Obama and the Book Business
October 30, 2006
If Barack Obama becomes president of the United States after an excruciating two year test of will, fund-raising, and a determined effort by opponents to take him down, he will have to figure out not merely what to say about lofty issues, but what can actually be done. Here, as an indicator of how Obama operates in a practical realm, is the way he came to terms with the book business. In the process, he displayed ambition, real talent, luck, ruthlessness, and, in my view, questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday.

Public Radio Nation
October 23, 2006
In election seasons, Americans tend to be grouped as Evangelicals, Hispanics, Labor, soccer-moms, and so on. Here’s another community that plays a major role in our political and social lives and yet is rarely defined as a core constituency: public radio listeners.

Great Books and the Newspaper Reporters Who Write Them
October 16, 2006
Whatever their personal politics, the shambles of the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq makes journalists uncomfortable. In the aftermath of September 11—with such experienced stalwarts as Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney at the helm—the consensus was that the White House team knew what it was doing in the War on Terror. Skepticism was confined to the inside pages of newspapers and to pundits whose judgment was deemed more about reflex than strategy.

Bob Woodward, and a Word about Johnny Apple
October 10, 2006
Bob Woodward has done it again. State of Denial, his latest bestseller (which was number one on the New York Times list after one day on sale) has all the earmarks of Bob’s previous blockbusters over nearly thirty-five years: revelation, ritual, non-denial denials (that never take down a critical fact), winners, losers and an icy tone that leaves out his judgment but shapes those of the rest of us.

Blogs, MySpace, and Flaubert
September 26, 2006
One of the many ways in which the culture of today seems to clash with that of the past is in the writing and sending of letters. Because so much of our communications take place on the Web and the telephone, it is argued, history will be denied the eloquence and revelation of letters mailed, preserved, and later cherished.

Convenience and Quality
September 18, 2006
Every so often in the daily perusal of information—in print and online, over the air, over cable or beamed from a satellite—something leaps out that actually changes the way the world looks. I had that welcome sensation recently from an article on the front page of the Money section of USA Today by Kevin Maney under the headline: “Your Answers Will Play a Big Role in the Future of the Media.” The message of the piece is that the transformation of today’s world of news and entertainment is about consumer choice. “We” and not “They” are in charge of what we want to read and watch and where, when and how we choose to do it.

If You Can't Beat the Enemy, Beat the Media
September 11, 2006
It is impossible not to read Thomas E. Ricks’ Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq without a growing sense of outrage. When Ricks first proposed Fiasco as the title for his book, it probably seemed shrill. That the Iraq war has turned into a debacle is now so undeniable that even John Negroponte, the quintessentially measured career diplomat who heads up the new national spying apparatus, has publicly called the misuse of pre-war intelligence, the ultimate epithet for policy: a fiasco.

Reporters in the Dock
September 7, 2006
On a shelf near my desk at home, I have a photograph of a group of grim-faced reporters, clustered in front the of the KGB’s Lefortovo Prison in Moscow on a June afternoon in 1977. There are, among others, correspondents from Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, and me. Inside, our colleague Bob Toth of the Los Angeles Times was being interrogated as a material witness in the treason case against the young Jewish dissident then known as Anatoly (later changed to Natan) Sharansky.

The War of Perception
August 28, 2006
The media will not determine the outcome in Israel, any more than the media lost the war in Vietnam and/or was responsible, one way or another, for what has happened in Iraq. The media reflect reality and therefore shapes it, but it is the political, diplomatic, and propaganda skills of the combatants as much as their war making ability that defines victory.

Summer Inventory
August 21, 2006
There is an intriguing interplay between the things that are eternal in this countryside and the ones that change. Nature and familiar routine are in a tug-of-war with technology and the entertainment and news they convey.

Sears, Roebuck and The Long Tail
August 15, 2006
This summer’s big-idea media book is The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, published by Hyperion, the book division of The Walt Disney Company. Its author is Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, a magazine owned by Conde Nast. One message of the book is that behemoths like Disney and Conde Nast face a future in which they must hold their audiences when gazillions of options are available in the infinite space of the Internet.

Israel, Palestine and the Media
August 1, 2006
The wars against Hezbollah and Hamas, the implosion of the Palestinian authority, the descending chaos in Iraq, and Iran’s revived global ambition create as grim a canvas as the region has ever had.

A List
July 24, 2006
A short list of media favorites, not merely because of their quality, but because they do what they do with limited resources of money or staff, with unusual ingenuity or against the odds of today’s trend toward the breezy and hip.

A Lively and Independent Press
July 18, 2006
In recent turbulent years, the noble but very tenuous moves toward what we think of as democracy have had one positive result, at least initially: a lively, independent press.

Newspapers: A Priceless Asset
July 12, 2006
If the owners of our leading newspapers are pressured by investors or bullied by politicians into muting the impact of their publications, the results to the country could be disastrous.

Oprah for President?
June 27, 2006
Oprah Winfrey is by any measure an extraordinary character. Maybe we should find out how she’d do in a primary.

Knight-Ridder, R.I.P.
June 19, 2006
By the end of June, Knight-Ridder, until recently the country’s second-largest newspaper chain, will disappear. What happened to take it down? And what can we learn from the unraveling?

Birthdays and Anniversaries
June 12, 2006
Reflections on Robert McNamara's 90th birthday and the anniversary of the publishing of the Pentagon papers.

What Should Happen to Books?
June 8, 2006
The future is a not a just a contest among technologies. Search engines, hand-held devices, and whatever else is in the offing, provide tools, pipelines, and plumbing for information, but they are only as useful as the material that they carry.

A Graduation Plan
May 30, 2006
Media companies should replace the current practice of newsroom buy-outs with a system of term limits for staff journalists.

What Is an Editor?
May 15, 2006
The passing of A. M. Rosenthal is an occasion for reflecting on what exactly an editor does, in this case a newspaper editor in the sixties through the eighties when Rosenthal flourished.

What Would Izzy Say?
May 9, 2006
With so much focus on news of the day and the changing ways it is being disseminated, there is something bracing about stretching back 50 years and finding that much of what was on my old friend and boss I. F. Stone’s mind is still topical.

Convergence: Then and Now
May 3, 2006
Convergence in the media industry is leading to a new model of information delivery, with companies forsaking traditional forms for a seamless product defined only by brand.

The Man They Used to Call Deep Throat
April 24, 2006
Insights on the most celebrated whistleblower of modern times, his family, and his ultimate impact on the country.

The Power of Psst
April 19, 2006
Anything that happens behind a protective barrier of anonymity, whether gossip or leak, is prone to abuse, especially when the role of editorial gatekeeper has been diminished.

In Your Dreams
April 11, 2006
What Katie Couric's anchor appointment could mean for the CBS news broadcast, and network news at large.

Good Books: When, Where, and How You Want Them
April 5, 2006
After decades of upheaval, bookselling may be on the edge of another transformation that could actually secure, albeit in updated fashion, links to a cozier past.

An Ever Vaster Wasteland
March 29, 2006
Newton Minow’s famous description of television programming and its failings remains accurate today, only there is a great deal more to complain about.

More Secrecy, Fewer Reporters
March 21, 2006
Secrecy—not transparency—is in high vogue in post–9/11 Washington.

Irrational Exuberance
March 13, 2006
The news that Alan Greenspan will receive an $8.5 million advance for his memoirs marks yet another example of publishers paying huge fees to public servants despite a book's questionable prospects.

The Proprietors
March 8, 2006
Unique leadership at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times during the 1960s and 1970s shaped the most comprehensive and creative newspapers America has ever produced

From Pigeons to Pixels
February 28, 2006
The need for instant information in a 24-hour news cycle is lifting the “wires,” especially those whose main outlet is the web, to a position of prominence.

All News is Local
February 22, 2006
Today, newspapers once famed for their local coverage are relying more on syndicated services and standard lifestyle features to fill their pages than on the grittier news generated by ground-level coverage.

No Joke
February 13, 2006
The mayhem unleashed among Muslims from Indonesia to Africa over a Danish newspaper’s cartoon portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad is a reminder of the power of caricature.

Homer, Hemingway, and the Palm Pilot: The Changing Business of Books
February 9, 2006
After over 20 years as a book person, I remain a believer in the durability of the book object and its enormous value to society.

The Discerning Eye
February 2, 2006
The "Discerning Eye" regularly hones in on one or another piece of work, demolishing its author, the sponsoring institution and raising again the questions about truth and integrity that are central to storytelling.

Dangerous Beats: Journalists in Iraq and Vietnam
January 30, 2006
The coverage of the Iraq war has been profoundly affected by the acute danger of working there.

Media and Journalism: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
January 19, 2006
Will great newspapers survive? Hard to say. But there will always be a place, indeed a need, for great journalism.