Jack Shafer

There are no slower slow-news days than the ones that fall between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Washington depopulates, Wall Street evacuates, and corporate America vanishes, creating a massive news drought that not even bad college football bowl games can fill. Journalists respond not by digging deeper for news but by imitating the hot-shot vacationers: Newsroom bosses and their hot-shot reporters escape if they can, leaving their newspapers, wire services, and broadcasters short-staffed and snow drifts of wire-service copy fill newspapers everywhere.

So, if Cheetah (the spelling varies, with some outlets using “Cheeta”), an elderly chimpanzee who died at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, Fla., on Dec. 24, wanted a Viking send-off from the press, he couldn’t have picked a better time to expire. The Tampa Bay Tribune appears to have been the first to break the story of his death yesterday in a short story. According to the Tribune, this wasn’t just any dead chimpanzee, this was Johnny Weissmuller’s co-star in a couple of Tarzan films from the early 1930s. Sanctuary spokesman Debbie Cobb told the Tribune that Cheetah, roughly 80 years-old, had been acquired from the Weissmuller estate in Ocala, Fla., sometime near 1960. Hundreds of news organizations repeated the Tribune‘s claims, either by republishing the Associated Press rewrite or by creating their own derivative accounts, including Reuters, CNN, MSNBC.com, the Washington Post, and the London Telegraph. Even the New York Times published a credulous Cheetah story on its Arts Beat blog today at 9:53 a.m., mostly based on the Tribune piece.

The death of Tarzan’s Cheetah at a Florida roadside zoo was “too good to check,” as journalists like to put it—especially during a holiday week. Had anyone bothered to make a few phone calls, plumbed a few news databases, or relied on common sense, they would have instantly discovered how improbable it was that the chimp had worked in the movies with Weissmuller.

For one thing, it’s unlikely that a male chimp would live to the age of 80. The oldest chimp residing in an Association of Zoos and Aquariums-accredited facility, says Steve Ross of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, is Lil’ Mama, and she’s in her early 70s. The Suncoast Primate Sanctuary is not the greatest animal facility in the world. It’s not AZA-accredited and it has a bit of a dodgy history. Previously doing business as Noell’s Ark Chimp Farm, the attraction had been closed for about a decade when the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) ran this 2008 article about its reopening. The paper reported:

In 1999, the USDA stripped the sanctuary of its license for public exhibitions, citing small, rusty cages used to house the apes and improper record-keeping.

Two years later, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission declined to renew the facility’s state license for keeping exotic animals, citing similar concerns.

Other incongruities argued against the claim that this chimp was Tarzan’s Cheetah. Sanctuary spokesman Cobb told the Tribune that Cheetah arrived at the attraction around 1960, yet the earliest mention preserved in Nexis of his residence there is a June 3, 2001, Tallahassee Democrat article, which also states that the Noell family established the place in the mid-1950s as a “retirement home” for old circus and movie primates. (If you housed the original Cheetah in a cheap roadside attraction, wouldn’t you make a bigger deal about it?)

A 2002 St. Petersburg Times piece gave a more dramatic spin to Cheetah’s arrival, stating that he “ended up in a research lab after Hollywood replaced it with another chimpanzee.” A St. Petersburg Times article from 2006 declared that Cheetah had been a resident for “about three decades,” which would place his arrival at the roadside attraction at about the time of the Jimmy Carter inauguration. That the sanctuary never gave the animal a consistent biography indicates that several somebodies were making things up as they went along.

By early afternoon, Cheetah’s Viking funeral was sinking. At 1:44 p.m., the New York Times updated its earlier, credulous piece, noting that “the announcement drew skepticism and recalled a previous incident of mistaken chimpanzee identity,” a reference to an AFP story that cited a brilliant 2008 Washington Post feature about a West Coast chimpanzee purported by its owner to be the real Cheeta. Miami New Times noted, along with other debunkers, that several chimps played the role as Tarzan’s sidekick, and that the most famous of them, Jiggs, had died in 1938. “Jiggs seems to be the only animal actor whose role in the films has been established thoroughly,” Miami New Times reported. Weissmuller was involved in a Titusville, Fla., attraction called Tropical Wonderland or Tarzan’s Jungleland, the newspaper reported, but it closed in 1973. “Is it possible this Cheetah came from Weissmuller’s tourist trap and not his actual movies?”

Possible? I’d say almost inevitable. The lessons to draw from Cheetah stories, in their order of importance. 1) Always verify what unknown spokesmen tell you. 2) Don’t trust fantastic stories about animals. 3) Discrepancies in obituary details often signal something awry. 4) And beware of holiday news.

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How long would it take 20 Hollywood chimpanzees to write this column? Send your best number to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Channel your inner ape through my Twitter feed. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Cheetah, a chimpanzee who died on December 24, was purported to have starred in Tarzan movies. Courtesy Suncoast Primary Sanctuary.

Just what the country needed: Another political Web site.

At the beginning of the week, ABC News launched OTUS, its political news supermarket with its top political reporters (Jake Tapper, Jonathan Karl, Amy Walter, and George Stephanopoulos) hunkering on the site’s home page. OTUS threatens to dice, grind, sieve, and aerosol the complex business of campaigns and the affairs of the state into inhalable powder.

As Tapper says in this promo, OTUS (short for of the United States as in, POTUS, president of the United States, or SCOTUS, supreme court of the United States) is all about the “power moves, the mini-dramas, the scheming” in politics. Tapper promises that OTUS will flag both the “urgent and the ridiculous,” offer games, display correspondents’ Twitter feeds, and create a stock market-style ticker that assesses the rising and falling worth of candidates with social media.

ABC News has expanded its Web efforts at what is obviously a late date. Salon, Slate, Talking Points Memo, Yahoo Politics, Politico, RealClearPolitics, Red State, Huffington Post Politics, FiveThirtyEight, Mother Jones, National Review Online, Daily Beast, Daily Caller, Roll Call, The Hill, CNN Politics, NBC’s First Read, Time ‘s Swampland, National Journal, specialty sections at the Washington Post, the New York Times, New York magazine, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and Reuters, as well as numerous other sites already cover the beat, and cover it well.

That ABC News would join the specialists speaks to both the audience’s insatiable appetite for political news and the network’s confidence that nobody owns this market. It’s a good call: Such is the Web audience’s fickleness, the ease with which they can skip pages, that nobody can own the market for news anymore. They can’t even rent it. News organizations can’t own their journalistic stars the way they used to, either. In the old days, the only place for a reporter or editor at a top-tier newspaper or magazine to migrate was another top-tier newspaper or magazine, or maybe a TV network, or maybe a career in books. But not anymore. Reporters now move from the New York Times to the Huffington Post with such regularity that the MTA is thinking of digging a special subway line to accommodate them.

Not to oversell the current scene, but the proliferation of political news sites—and my apologies to those I didn’t name—means we’re living in a bit of a golden age of political reporting. At least when it comes to national politics and national government, there have never been more reporters competing to break news. Not everything on the menu tastes great, but there’s no denying it’s a feast.

If the winners are readers, the losers are the Times, the Post, and the evening news broadcasts, which have lost their quasi-monopoly power over political coverage, and especially the print versions of the newsweeklies, which specialized for so many decades at giving the quanta of political news a narrative context. Ned Martel, who covers politics for the Post, says it wasn’t that long ago that how much you knew about Washington was measured by how many pages in the last issue of the print version National Journal you’d turned. Also taking a hit has been the political press; The New Republic, which went from weekly to fortnightly in 2007, in part because they didn’t have the money to sustain a weekly any more and in part because weekly was no longer frequent enough to stay on top of politics. The job of wrapping politics into comprehensive narratives now belongs to the monthlies like Vanity Fair and the Atlantic or books like Game Change and Renegade.

Other winners include the cable news chat shows and the Sunday morning programs, which gorge on the baitball of Web news like hungry yellowfin tuna. The cycle is completed when the Web news hounds attack the baitbail formed by the chat show chat, and the chat shows eventually dine, somewhat cannibalistically, on the remains.

For political journalists, this is the best of all possible worlds. They’ve gained new leverage over their editors, who in the green-eyeshade days of journalism could use their power of the limited number of column-inches available in print to cut and otherwise simplify their stories. Now, with there being no shortage of space to fill, the writer calls the shots and the editor, fearful that he’ll get the blame if he’s beaten by the competition, is more likely to approve stories he might once have dismissed as too technical, too inside baseball, and too complicated for a news outlet. (“Save it for your book, kid.”)

Thus liberated, the political journalist can write at wire-service speed, even availing himself to tiny microbursts of reporting, while dumping many of the conventions that make wire reporters miserable—such as the inverted news pyramid that puts the most important news at the top so that distant newspaper editors can cut two, three, four, or five paragraphs at the bottom to make it fit their pages.

The newly liberated political journalist need no longer dumb down his story so that everybody can understand it. He can point to explanatory information with a link or skip it all together, figuring that anybody who is reading him already knows what the Federal Reserve Bank is and what it does. (You laugh, but I recall Washington Post stories from the past that paused to define “pinata” and “slam dunk” when it used those phrases metaphorically!) As victors over their beaten-down editors, political writers can now insert humor, opinion, history lesson, minutiae, and policy wonkery in their pieces without having to justify the digressions and elaborations. (Of course, another part of the new culture can be, depending on the outlet, lower salaries and reduced job security. But that’s my problem and that of my colleagues, not yours.)

Not that long ago, Ben Bagdikian was publishing the seventh edition of his book-length argument, The Media Monopoly. Bagdikian’s neverending gripe was that the news business was consolidating into fewer and fewer voices, and that government action was needed to break up newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters. We don’t hear much of that talk anymore–you’re more likely to hear people complaining about too much political news. The current state of our political press ain’t perfect, but when the exemplar of the new order is Ezra Klein and not Joe Klein, how bad can it be?

Welcome, OTUS, you goofy-named little bastard. I hope you have a good 2012.

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Scientists working in the Netherlands and Wisconsin have engineered a version of the highly lethal H5N1 “bird flu” that easily transmits in ferrets, the best animal model for human spread. This news has so alarmed a federal advisory panel that it has now asked the two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, to censor the papers each lab has submitted for publication lest the information fall into the hands of terrorists. (Here’s the Page One coverage of the story from the New York Times and Washington Post.)

The request has roiled the scientific community, with some researchers backing the panel’s request, which is not binding, others lamenting the fact that the research was ever done, and others defending the bird flu work as essential research.

The panel—the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity—was established in 2004 as a response to the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States. The scientific community resisted the direct controls the Bush administration wanted on biological research, the Times reports, and eventually agreed to the advisory panel that could be called upon to review potentially dangerous research. “I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one,” NSABB chair Paul Keim, an experienced anthrax researcher, told Science Insider Reporter Martin Enserink in November. “I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.”

That the H5N1 variant is scary deadly is conceded by one of its creators, Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. In November, he told Enserink that it is “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” Normally, H5N1 is only transmitted from chickens to farmers working in extremely close contact with infected birds. (Of 570 confirmed cases of H5N1 infection in humans, 335 died, writes science reporter Helen Branswell.) But the laboratory mutated H5N1 does not require close contact to infect: ferrets sickened by the virus transmitted it to other ferrets living in adjoining cages via coughs and sneezes.

Even an unenforceable request by the government to suppress the flow of information rankles free-speech radicals like me. We believe in open inquiry and unfettered communications, and battle the redaction machine whenever the censors start its engine.

That’s the romantic notion, but in practice not every newsroom teems with free-speech radicals, and even many of those who consider themselves such are much more accommodating of authority than their rhetoric would imply. For instance, the American press has historically consulted the government when reporting on “sensitive” national security issues, something documented by veteran journalists Jack Nelson (pdf) and Allan M. Siegal (pdf) in separate papers they wrote as Shorenstein Center fellows. This is not to say that journalists are pushovers who bow to all national security establishment commands and wishes, but the press does routinely give the government an opportunity to make the argument for non-publication when working on a big story.

When Dana Priest and William Arkin published their stunning three-part series, “Top Secret America,” in the Washington Post, an editors’ note explained that the Post had allowed government officials to see the Web site that accompanied the article several months before publication so that they could “tell us of any specific concerns,” and obliged some of the government’s requests while declining others. When CIA contractor Raymond A. Davis was arrested in Pakistan after a Lahore shoot-out, the New York Times and other publications temporarily withheld publishing Davis’s CIA connection at the request of the Obama administration, which told the Times that publishing that information would put his life at risk. (The Times disclosed its Obama administration agreement in this news story about Davis.)

Moving away from journalism and back to science, the government has long placed prior classification on bomb-related physics, which seems defensible. “The secrets of fission, and implosion, and so on had little or no near-term civilian application. So restricting access to them did not seriously impede scientific development in other areas,” says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who I consider a conscientious free speech radical. But Aftergood says bird flu research isn’t precisely analogous because the H5N1 findings may be valuable for medical investigation, including those working on vaccines. “It’s a difficult balance to achieve,” he says.

One argument for publishing the H5N1 journal articles in unredacted form is that the information contained in them has already been released—Fouchier gave his findings earlier this year at a conference and the paper has already been shared among bio-scientists. To quote Tom Waits, you can’t un-ring a bell. Another is that the complete articles will, as Aftergood points out, give vaccine scientists an edge should the genes in H5N1 mutate in nature the way they did in the laboratory. If that happens, we’ll all wish that the papers had been widely distributed and studied so that, as Enserink writes in Science Insider, researchers would have been able spot the mutated virus in the wild and “test whether H5N1 vaccines and antiviral drugs would work against the new strain.” (By the way, you could argue that this whole controversy is of the U.S. government’s making, seeing as its National Institutes of Health sponsored the H5N1 research.)

Setting aside the issue of censorship for a moment, the H5N1 studies shake us at the core because they tap into the Frankenstein myth. We’ve been trained by novelists and filmmakers that scientists who create contagions, poisons, and monsters will lose control of them, and that as a result thousands, or millions of us will die.

That Frankenstein relationship doesn’t apply to scientists who merely “uncover” information about contagions, as my friend Jon Cohen points out in a July/August 2002 Atlantic feature, even though their findings could also be used to devise bioweapons. Cohen writes that in 2001, several days before the 9/11 attacks, Science published two important papers about the flu: One about the genetic changes that may have created the Spanish flu that killed millions in 1918 and another about the small genetic change that had made what was then called the 1997 Hong Kong flu—now known as the H5N1 bird flu virus—more deadly. Neither article provoked coverage about how a bioterrorist might capitalize on these studies. Nor did scientific panic ensue in 2005 when Science published an article about the reconstruction of the virus behind the 1918 flu. In fact, the current advisory panel signed off on the publication of that study for good reason: To help stop the next killer flu.

Let’s proceed with the understanding that the researchers aren’t Osama bin Ladens in laboratory coats. They surely have good reasons for wanting to publish expansively from their findings. Also, consulting with the U.S. government, as our journalists friends have shown, does not equal censorship, so everybody who is on that horse, kindly dismount. As currently constituted, the government committee is an advisory body, not the Myanmar Press Scrutiny and Registration Division, and asking a scientist or a scientific journal to withhold details about how to make a highly transmissible bird flu is not unreasonable.

What’s needed is a fuller debate between the fretting government advisers and the working scientists who are pushing to make everything public. I suspect that that’s what’s happening now behind closed doors. ‘Tis a shame we can’t hear it, too.

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PHOTO: A worker wearing a protection suit culls chickens at a poultry farm where the bird flu virus had been found in Takanabe Town, Miyazaki prefecture January 31, 2011.

The American entertainment complex—Hollywood, the networks, the stations, cable,  the record labels—has placed before Congress a simple request: Give us a law to punish Google, PayPal, the Web ad industry, and anybody else doing business on the Internet who may play some intermediary role in connecting foreign “pirates” to consumers seeking illegal access to copyrighted content.

The House of Representatives and Senate have bowed to the entertainment complex’s request. The House bill is called the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s genuflection goes by the name of the PROTECT IP Act. Rather than just punishing copyright violators, these bills would give the U.S. government new powers to black out Web sites, impose new monitoring rules on search engines and other Web services, rejig the architecture of the Internet, short-circuit the usual due process for Web sites, and authorize new surveillance for a government that just can’t seem to get enough. (See Alex Howard’s learned delineation of the bills from late November.)

So grand is the entertainment complex’s umbrage that I half expect its next move will be to petition the Department of Justice for the authority to shut down the electric utilities that provide power to any and all computers it suspects are pinching its intellectual property.

A survey piece about the SOPA/PIP controversy in yesterday’s New York Times gave Tom Rothman, the co-chief executive of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the opportunity to spout his industry’s pique. He says:

Our mistake was allowing this romantic word—piracy—to take hold…It’s really robbery—it’s theft—and that theft is being combined with consumer fraud…Consumers are purchasing these goods, they’re sending their credit card information to these anonymous offshore companies, and they’re receiving defective goods.

Oh yah, sure, youbetcha. The entertainment complex missed its big chance to suggest the word “murder” to describe illegal downloads. And it spends many sleepless nights worrying about all the victims of credit card fraud.

If allowing the word “piracy” to take hold was a mistake, that mistake is now more than three centuries old. Adrian Johns’s exhaustive history of the subject, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates (2010), explains that in the late-1600s, people were already comparing word thieves to cutlass-swinging brigands. One dictionary defined pirate as “one who unjustly prints another person’s copy.” The Oxford English Dictionary points us to these lines of verse in a poem from 1700: “Piracy, Piracy, they cry’d aloud, What made you print my Copy, Sir, says one, You’re a meer Knave, ’tis very basely done.” Also availing themselves to the word “piracy” to describe literary misappropriation were such writers as Defoe, Swift, Addison, Gay, Congreve, Ward, and Pope, Johns writes.

Piracy has lodged itself in the vernacular because it perfectly expresses the joy of taking a risk to get something for nothing (or get something for an  ”it fell off a truck” price). Surely an entertainment veteran like Rothman should understand the joy in defying authority, especially arbitrary, imperious authority.

I don’t doubt Rothman’s assertion that some consumers have had their pockets picked while purchasing pirated media, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who complains about it. Yet resorting to this sort of hyperbole is just the Hollywood way of winning an argument. In 1982, Jack Valenti, then head of the movie business’s trade association, told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was “to the American film producer and the American public what the Boston Strangler is to the American woman at home alone.” The happy Hollywood ending to that copyright Armageddon? The VCR made the movie industry ridiculously wealthy by creating a new sales channel.

Pirates and the “intellectual-property defense industry” (Johns’s delightful phrase) have been clashing at least once a century since the end of the Middle Ages. Sometimes cultural changes spur the fight, as in the Enlightenment era when the first modern copyright and patent systems took hold, he writes. But leaps in technology drive the conflict, too, as the histories of inexpensive movable type, the piano roll, the Victrola, the VCR, the personal computer, and the Internet prove. The faster that technology moves, the more vicious the fight. In recent decades, the piracy debate has moved to those new industries that have persuaded the government to expand the IP rights to their plant seeds and genes. (And, yes, the agriculture and pharmaceutical industries have allied themselves with the entertainment complex in this current political battle.)

What stinks about SOPA and PIP is that they would establish a new legal order to replace the imperfect but fair one created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Imagining a worst-case scenario precipitated by SOPA-PIP, Alex Howard writes:

Imagine a world where YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter had never been created due to the cost of regulatory compliance. Imagine an Internet where any website where users can upload text, pictures or video is liable for copyrighted material uploaded to it. Imagine a world where the addresses to those websites could not be found using search engines like Google and Bing, even if you typed them in directly.

Imagine an Internet split into many sections, depending upon where you lived, where a user’s request to visit another website was routed through an addressing system that could not be securely authenticated. Imagine a world where a government could require that a website hosting videos of a bloody revolution be taken down because it also hosted clips from a Hollywood movie.

The only way to stop piracy, the entertainment complex would have you believe, is to give its and the government’s warships the power to stop, inspect, and track any packet sent on the great sea of the Internet, and impound the ones it doesn’t like. As someone who creates “intellectual property” (I shudder at the phrase) for a living and works for a huge company that owns slews of it, I have a vested interest in this fight. But SOPA or PIP would do excess damage to free speech, free association, free commerce, and innovation in the name of scuttling the Internet’s scurvy pirates. As the character Ramon Miguel “Mike” Vargas says in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”

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To stay on top of SOPA-PIP, follow the ever-reliable Alex Howard. Send your romantic ideas to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and follow my Twitter feed if you must. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

My original commitment to Bloomberg BusinessWeek was so small it was almost negative.

About this time last year, US Airways, Delta, or some other crappy airline notified me that my soon-to-expire frequent flyer miles could be exchanged for magazine subscriptions, which is how I ended up spending something like 600 miles to add a year’s subscription to Bloomberg BusinessWeek to my Towering Reading Pile.

My Towering Reading Pile is governed by neo-Darwinian, survival-of-the-smartest-copy laws. With all the good stuff to read directly on the Web, stored on my RSS reader, and stockpiled by my Instapaper account, a mere book, magazine, or newspaper must be exceptional. Some publications (the New York Times) I read thoroughly because everybody I work with (and many of the people I write for) reads it. Other publications I first fillet for their prime morsels, like National Review for Mark Steyn’s ongoing chronicle of a planet gone retrograde and Vanity Fair for James Wolcott’s recombinant experiments with the American language. On Sundays, I make the weekend editions of the Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times play gladiator by tossing them into a 55-gallon drum and letting them fight it out. Upon returning a half-hour later, I collect the articles that were strong enough to defend themselves and consume them.

Into this cutthroat mix, BusinessWeek entered and damned if its feature well didn’t shove The New Yorker, New York, and the New York Times Magazine aside to become my primary source of long-form, print journalism.

Who would have thought that “Bloomberg” and “BusinessWeek,” the two most plodding names in the history of journalism, could merge to create a superb general interest magazine? I’m not saying that every issue is a treat, but nearly every issue contains one. The most recent issue, dated Dec. 12, contains several: Felix Gillette on real estate crime in Las Vegas, Brad Stone on the maker of military drones, and a short profile by Sarah A. Topol of the life and times of a Libyan tycoon. The Oct. 31 issue has three as well: Drake Bennett on David Graeber, the brains behind the Occupy movement, Vivienne Walt on a frozen yogurt start-up in Cairo, and Daniel Grushkin on a rare earth prospector/claimholder in Alaska.

Paging through my stack of recent BusinessWeeks, I find other winners: Paul M. Barrett on the coming shale gas economy, Christopher Churchill Brendan Borrell on the Gloucester fish war, Brendan Greeley and Alison Fitzgerald on the market for writing legislation, Ben Paynter on “synthetic pot,” Ken Wells on the pork rind business, and Felix Gillette again on Matthew Freud.

These are the kind of newsy, urgent features that you expect to find in the New York troika of great feature mags, not some biz mag that mogul-mayor-megalomaniac Michael Bloomberg purchased at a 2009 McGraw-Hill yard sale. Given the zombie prose that Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler forces on his scribes elsewhere in the Bloomberg enterprise, we can only assume that Mike and Matt don’t know that the company also runs a magazine named after him. If you like the magazine and hope to see it continue, please make sure they don’t read this piece. (Disclosures: Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg L.P. competes with my employer, ThomsonReuters, on a number of fronts. Several BusinessWeek writers and staffers are friends or acquaintances.)

I’m not the only one noticing the magazine’s delightful feature creep. I checked in with Max Linsky, who with Aaron Lammer runs Longform.org, the wonderful site that with the help of readers finds all the best non-fiction work on the Web and posts its recommendations. I asked Linsky to query his database for how many BusinessWeek stories Longform recommended this year compared to various other magazines.

His reply: The Times Magazine scored 52 features; New York 44; The New Yorker (which doesn’t make all features free) 42.

BusinessWeek scored 21.

“BW’s number would be higher if we had posted anything of theirs before April, which we inexplicably didn’t,” says Linsky. “At some point this year I realized that BusinessWeek was a general interest magazine—a really, really good general interest magazine—masquerading as a business publication.”

Additional points of reference: GQ stories scored 42 times this year; Vanity Fair 34. Fortune and Forbes, both of which Linsky says are “kinda off my radar,” got four and zero listings, respectively. Time got two, Newsweek one.

The masquerade extends to BusinessWeek‘s art direction, captained by Richard Turley, which approaches but never quite reaches the thumb-in-your-eye sensationalism that put the original Wired on the map. Earlier this year, Business Insider interviewed Turley and presented a slideshow of some of his more arresting BusinessWeek pages, some of which tip the hat to the old Spy. When Turley really gets going, reading one of his pages is like looking at a terrific building: The type provides both a story to read (duh!) and a superstructure to carry all the eye-engaging details—photos, illustrations, captions that are connected to their subjects by arrows, charts, annotations.

By donning the protective coloration of a general interest magazine, BusinessWeek begins to approximate a newsweekly, but a newsweekly divorced from the previous week’s news–sort of like the Economist but without shouting out its name the way that so many desperate newsweekly editors have before. If not for the publication’s title and its front of the book, with its Bloomborgian editorials and overt business coverage, your average reader would have a hard time identifying BusinessWeek as a business book. Perhaps that’s the plan. If it isn’t, please carry on as if it is, BusinessWeek. And, hey, if its editor, Josh Tyrangiel, is as proud of his magazine as I am admiring of it, he should take a bow. How about publishing a masthead, Josh, so I can identify all the most talented people and have ThomsonReuters hire them away?

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A dozen times while writing this piece, my BusinessWeek-trained fingers accidentally typed BloomBerg instead of Bloomberg. It looks good that way, doesn’t it? Sort of like a hyphenate that went on a diet. Try it on for size, Mayor BloomBerg. No charge. Send interesting abbreviations and contractions to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and see my Twitter feed for the maximum in compression. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

BuzzFeed, the aggregation/social-media site, has thrown itself into the content creation business with some big hires. Today, BuzzFeed’s co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti crowed about picking up Politico’s Ben Smith as its editor-in-chief. Smith, as Politico readers know, breaks news the way rioters break glass: Frequently and with glee. Last week, BuzzFeed added Whitney Jefferson and Matt Cherette from the Gawker enterprise, and a dozen new editorial hires are promised.

The addition of original content (also known as “journalism”) to the aggregator model isn’t without precedent. There are plenty of large Web sites that devote themselves to both, such as Huffington Post, Mediaite, Business Insider, Atlantic Wire, and Gawker, to name a few. But for an established aggregator like BuzzFeed to enter the original content sweepstakes at this point is a little like a slaughterhouse attaching a storefront to its entrance and opening a steakhouse in hopes of selling even more meat.

Actually, the BuzzFeed transition will be even bigger than from slaughterhouse to steakhouse. Today, it’s essentially an entertainment site, a place best known for its goofy distractions and silly videos. Smith tells Nieman Journalism Lab that his goal is to “hire reporters who get scoops the same way they have always have” with phone calls, “trips to Iowa, drinks with political operatives.”

The economics of adding original content to an aggregation site are strong. Take, for example, Fark, the popular social media and aggregation site that Drew Curtis started in 1999 and still runs. Curtis describes Fark as a bit of a closed loop: 96 percent of its traffic is “organic,” which means most of its users reach the site by directly entering its URL or by clicking a bookmark for it. Similarly, its inbound traffic of 50 million page views a month is equal to its outbound traffic of about 50 million clicks to other sites. This means that that on average, Fark visitors tend to click one link out to one original page for each page of Fark that they consume.

“I could double my traffic overnight if I started doing original content,” Curtis says. Original pieces would obviously attract additional page views. More elaborate summaries of other sites’s stories by staffers, especially summaries that are especially insightful or argumentative, could possibly capture many of the page views that Fark currently sends to the story originators (in its current iteration, Fark provides only a snappy headline for the outbound links).

Such a bundle of original copy and full-throated summaries could also attract links from search engines, something that the current Fark almost never gets. Curtis says he hasn’t staffed up with original content because he doesn’t have to—he’s self-funded with no investors to please. “We’re trying to retain what we’re doing,” Curtis says. Quantcast puts his monthly traffic at 1.7 million visitors, compared to 16.6 million for BuzzFeed and 62.4 million for Huffington Post.

“It’s difficult to self-fund that kind of expansion. I don’t have resources to hire 10 people right now unless there’s 100 percent chance of success because anything less would mean the increase in overhead would run us out of business in 3-6 months,” he adds.

BuzzFeed has a number of outside backers, making the editorial additions less of a gamble. According to the New York Observer, they include Softbank, Hearst Interactive, RRE Ventures, and Ken Lerer, who is Peretti’s BuzzFeed partner, and like Peretti helped found the Huffington Post.

The trick to leveraging BuzzFeed into a HuffPo competitor will be to 1) do what HuffPo does, only do it better or 2) do something HuffPo doesn’t do. BuzzFeed’s newsroom, which is outgunned by at least 10 to 1, can’t do what HuffPo does better. So it will have to settle for doing something different. Apparently that will be to use the social- and sharing-power of the site to, as Peretti told Nieman‘s Megan Garber, “build the definitive social news organization.”

How difficult will it be to attract the sort of readers who want to share political news or even care about it? The content tabs at the top of the current BuzzFeed home page tout “LOL,” “Cute,” “Win,” “Fail,” “OMG,” “Geeky,” “Trashy,” “WTF,” and “Random,” and the site’s official welcome to Smith gave him the extreme LOL treatment. That’s not to say that inserting a “Politics” tab into the mix will be impossible, but it will depend on BuzzFeed’s viral engine kicking in hard and Smith getting the scoops he promises.

I admire Smith’s work, so I have far fewer worries about him producing quality journalism than I do of him attracting the audience he deserves. Obviously, he can’t carry the site to new heights all by himself. BuzzFeed needs to add a couple more original content tabs—entertainment, business, tech, and lifestyle—just to pinch a few from HuffPo’s navigation banner, to make BuzzFeed a complete news destination rather than a fun niche.

And thus the daily newspaper is reborn again.

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ILLUSTRATION: Anthony DeRosa. Photo Daniel J. Sieradski via Flickr.

Is serial fabulist Stephen Glass fit to practice law?

That question—first posed in 2002 when Glass applied for admittance to the New York State Bar Association—moved to California in 2007, when Glass applied to join its bar. Glass’s California application has now traveled to the top of the legal food chain, where the state Supreme Court agreed in November to hear arguments on Glass’s moral fitness to become a member of the State Bar of California.

If Stephen Glass were an ordinary applicant, the California Committee of Bar Examiners would have readily approved the graduate of Georgetown University law school (magna cum laude, 2000) after he passed the California bar exam and applied for admittance. But Glass was an exceptional case: He gained worldwide notoriety in 1998 after dozens of stories he wrote while working as a Washington journalist in the mid-to-late 1990s were discovered to be fabricated. These pieces described incidents that never took place and attributed quotations to made-up people. Most of these tainted stories appeared in The New Republic, where he worked, but others were published in Policy Review, Harper’s, George, and Rolling Stone. (According to court documents, Glass settled a lawsuit filed against him by D.A.R.E., the subject of his Rolling Stone piece, for $25,000.) The scam ended in May 1998 after reporting and inquires from Forbes Digital Tool editor Adam L. Penenberg tipped the New Republic off about the fishiness of Glass’s piece about “Jukt Micronics,” and all of his journalistic work was scrutinized for lies.

The legal argument under debate in California isn’t whether Glass made stuff up willy-nilly in his journalism. That verdict was delivered long ago; you can read the eye-popping details in Buzz Bissinger’s September 1998 Vanity Fair feature. The question before the California Supreme Court is the 39-year-old Glass’s current moral state, and whether he has sufficiently rehabilitated himself to practice law today.

Glass ‘s legal struggle to join the bar goes back almost a decade. According to court filings, Glass passed the New York Bar Examination in 2000 and applied for admission to the bar in July 2002. But he withdrew his application on Sept. 22, 2004 after the bar notified him he would not likely be approved on moral character grounds. He moved to California that fall and passed its bar exam in 2007, but the Committee of Bar Examiners rejected Glass on moral character grounds in 2009. The committee holds that Glass has not rehabilitated himself, waiting more than 11 years to fully list and identify all of the fabrications in his journalism.

Glass appealed the decision to the State Bar Court of California hearing department, where Judge Richard A. Honn overturned the committee decision on Aug. 19, 2010, in Glass’s favor. The committee, still not wanting a confessed liar as a member of the California bar, appealed once more to a three-judge panel. But in the summer of 2011, the panel also found 2-1 for Glass. So the committee made its final appeal to the California Supreme Court, which accepted the case.

The pleadings and decisions in the Glass matter were held confidential under court rules until the state Supreme Court granted review. Depending on how you read them, the documents reveal a fully reformed Glass, or the same old Stephen, cutting corners and conning people as he did in the old days. Either way, they provide the most elaborate explanation by Glass for why he systematically lied and deceived in his journalism.

Siding with Glass during a 10-day administrative trial in 2010 were 22 friendly witnesses, who attested to his rehabilitation. They included two psychiatrists, four law professors, two judges, 10 attorneys, long-term friends, his life-partner, and even Martin Peretz, sole owner of the New Republic at the time the fabricated stories were published. “I don’t think what Steve committed, and his journey after, should condemn him to be exiled from respectable, ethical society,” Peretz told the court. All of the friendly witnesses endorsed Glass’s “current high standards for honesty and integrity,” as Judge Honn, ruling in Glass’s favor, writes in his Aug. 19, 2010, decision.

Judge Honn drew on testimony to summarize Glass’s childhood as a rolling series of psychological traumas. Among the alleged tormentors were Glass’s father, a doctor, and Glass’s mother, a nurse, both of whom are depicted as being hell-bent determined that their son win a medical degree. (Calls to the offices of Stephen Glass and his father were not returned.) Judge Honn writes:

Throughout his schooling, applicant’s parents put enormous pressure on applicant to succeed in school. In elementary school, applicant and his brother would be required to stand in front of their parents and recite answers to questions posed by the parents. If they produced incorrect answers, they were sent back to their rooms, and after studying the subject in more detail, they would undergo the same grilling by the parents. Often, if applicant or his brother disappointed their parents, that child would be “frozen out” by the mother. In such situations, the mother would not speak to or acknowledge the child for days or even weeks at a time. While denying attention to the wayward child, his mother would shower the other child with compliments and love, resulting in and exacerbating the first child’s feelings of inadequacy. Applicant’s father dealt with his disappointment in a different manner: he would fly into fits of rage against the children. As a result, applicant grew up with deep feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem, despite having an impressive academic record. His brother also suffered from the treatment, and spent a significant part of his childhood in therapy.

The Glass parents allegedly ran their home on “rigid rules,” prohibiting the children from opening the refrigerator or voicing any dissent. When Glass “showed some social deficiencies in high school,” Judge Honn writes, his parents leaned on him to date girls and drink alcohol in social situations to assist him in “fitting in.” Despite their social coaching, Glass was unpopular in school and suffered “feelings of inadequacy.” Such was their demand for their child’s success that they even hired a “tutor” to help Glass master rope-climbing. “Applicant noted that, at least in this case, their efforts were unsuccessful. He still could not climb the rope, even after tutoring,” Judge Honn continues.

The summary portrays Glass as a bundle of phobias and ailments. While in high school, the sight of blood caused him to faint. While waiting for letters of acceptance from colleges he became so anxious that he doubled over in pain and missed days of school. Despite all of his inadequacies, Glass won admission to the University of Pennsylvania, his father’s alma mater, and enrolled in pre-med classes.

Glass enjoyed great success as a student journalist at Penn, becoming the executive editor of the school paper, the Daily Pennsylvanian. But his parents viewed his enthusiasm for journalism as a detour from the med-school track they had plotted for him, Judge Honn writes. Glass temporarily overcame their meddling long enough to graduate from Penn in May 1994 and applied to New York University’s law school, where he was accepted. He then deferred law school for further adventures in journalism, which took him to Washington, D.C., where he got a job at Policy Review.

Readers may well wonder whether the sins of Glass’s parents—assuming they are true—in any way justify his particular brand of journalism. Is Glass really blaming his upbringing for what he did as a journalist? Bissinger’s Vanity Fair feature establishes that Highland Park High, the suburban Chicago school where he studied, is a famed hothouse of academic talent and achievement. Highland Park parents have long pushed “their kids to succeed,” Bissinger writes.

Glass’s parents continued to express their unhappiness with their son. Judge Honn wrote:

Applicant came home for Passover in 1995, having given his parents a subscription to TNR [the New Republic]. They did not appreciate the gift. They told him that they disliked his chosen occupation and felt he was failing—in their words, “doing a bad job, poorly.” Once again, they brought up medical school, and derisively referred to TNR as the “sandbox” and told him that it was time he “grew up.”

If Glass’s parents really spoke this way, he must have winced the same way many of us winced when we strayed from the future our parents had paved for us in their imaginations. But Judge Honn seems to think pushy parents are a cause of fabulism, writing:

This criticism hit applicant particularly hard. He had trouble sleeping and felt he could never achieve success in his parents’ eyes without going to medical school, something he did not want to do. He felt he had to find a way around this problem. He decided to create articles with “electricity” and excitement that even his parents would appreciate. To do so, he felt he needed to “embellish” the facts. Shortly thereafter, he wrote “The Hall Monitor,” his first article that contained fabrications. Applicant was clearly a gifted writer and was on a steep trajectory toward success in journalism. However, with that article a dark cloud began growing which would completely destroy his promising career in that field.

Glass had attended law classes at Georgetown while working at the New Republic, and continued his studies there after the magazine fired him for his fabrications. Judge Honn wrote that Glass felt “isolated” from his fellow law students and suffered their “rejection.” He did, however, become “friends with several faculty members, who understood the challenges he faced as a child and the failures he had as a journalist.”

The California bar has not been as forgiving as Judge Honn: Insisting that Glass has never rehabilitated himself in a manner that would make him fit to practice law, the Committee of Bar Examiners dissects his behavior since 1998 in the pleadings. It accuses Glass of misleading the New York Bar in 2003 during the admittance process.

Glass stated to the New York Bar that he “worked with all three magazines and other publications … to identify which facts were true and which were false in all of [his] stories, so they could publish clarifications.” This statement was false, the committee wrote, because Glass didn’t work with all the magazines. Glass later testified that he should have said that he “offered” to work with the publications, and “by ‘offered’ to work, he meant through counsel.” The committee found this Glass explanation “disingenuous.”

The committee also damned Glass for providing the New York Bar in 2003 with an incomplete list of articles that he fabricated, identifying only 23, and waiting until August 2009, when under the crosshairs of the California bar, to concede that the complete list contained at least 42 fabricated pieces. This argument made a strong impression on Judge Catherine D. Purcell, the dissenting judge in the three-judge panel review. She wrote:

[T]o gain admission to practice law in New York, Glass understated the number of articles he had fabricated and exaggerated his efforts to help the magazines indentify those articles. At a time when he should have been scrupulously honest, he presented an inaccurate application because it benefitted him—the same behavior as his earlier conduct. And as late as 2005, Glass told one psychiatrist that he was still in the process of understanding and accepting his past misconduct. Just two years later, in 2007, he applied for admission to the California bar.

This dissent captures in miniature the committee’s objections to Glass’s admission to the bar: Glass was still lying and deceiving in 2003, when he applied to the New York Bar. Because he didn’t come completely clean about his fabrications until 2009, he really hasn’t, as Judge Purcell puts it, “shown proof of reform by a lengthy period of exemplary conduct. …”

The majority opinion gave deference to Judge Honn and his opinion, and found “overwhelming evidence of Glass’s reform and rehabilitation.” Of Glass’s incomplete list of fabricated stories, the judges wrote, “Perfection is not required in these proceedings.”

The majority agreed with Judge Honn on the “quality of Glass’s character witnesses,” all of whom endorsed Glass’s “good moral character” and found him to be “exceptionally honest and trustworthy.”

In its Oct. 3, 2011, request for Supreme Court review, the committee takes a mallet to Glass’s assertion that the emotional distress he suffered after being found out at the New Republic threw him into a paralysis and a suicidal state that prevented him from atoning in a timely manner. For a paralyzed guy, the committee notes, Glass was very active. Between 1998, when he was busted, and 2003, Glass 1) completed law school with honors, 2) passed the New York Bar Examination, 3) clerked for a judge, 4) worked law-related jobs, and 5) wrote a novel.

According to the committee, Glass didn’t begin writing most of his 100-plus letters of apology until after he graduated from law school, with most of the letters sent between 2001 and 2004, and as earlier noted, he waited until 2009—11 years—before compiling his complete list of fabricated articles “and only then in connection with these moral character proceedings,” the committee writes. “[T]he full list of fabrications was only compiled when it suited him, and not when it was most needed by his victims.” (The official list now contains 35 New Republic pieces, one at Harper’s, one at Policy Review, two at Rolling Stone, and three at George.)

The pleading rejected Glass’s excuse that his transgressions were a product of his “youth” because he was between 23 and 25 years old and a college graduate when he committed his frauds. In other words, he was no longer a kid trying to learn how to climb a gym rope. Traducing Glass’s claim that he has acquired good character and is now rehabilitated, the pleading damns him for profiting from his deceit by fictionalizing it in The Fabulist, which earned him $190,000 minus agent’s fees. (Simon & Schuster took a beating on The Fabulist. They gave it a first printing of 75,000, but BookScan recorded sales of only 4,669 copies. The book did not go into paperback.)

The committee wrote of Glass’s conduct:

The concept of Applicant profiting from his wrongdoing appears inconsistent with the notion of moral rehabilitation. Applicant could have, and the Committee believes should have, used the money to correct his wrongs, to pay back the victims of his lies, or to fund charitable programs benefiting the journalism profession, which he damaged so greatly. These are not meaningless, futile gestures; rather, disgorgement of the profits would have demonstrated a basic act of repentance, integrity, respect, and good will toward others. In short, Applicant focused on cashing in on his infamy, while continuing to ignore his responsibility to assist his victims.

Glass’s lawyers give his updated side of the story in a September 2011 filing, insisting that their client’s youth at the time of the original scandal should mitigate in favor of his rehabilitation. On this note, a Glass psychiatrist maintains that his patient suffered from arrested development prior to therapy. Witnesses aplenty testified to his moral fitness to work as an attorney, the pleading states, and substantial time has passed since the fabrications, during which Glass has confessed to his wrongdoing on national television (a 2003 60 Minutes segment, in which he promoted his novel) and has repeatedly stated that his journalism is not to be trusted.

Even if you’re supportive of Glass’s legal quest—as you might have guessed, I’m not—the unsealed documents sketch a cringeworthy picture of him. How many people would make the sort of confessions and excuses that Glass does in this case, just to gain admittance to the bar? Take for example, the passage in Judge Honn’s decision, in which he recounts another high school humiliation of Glass. In a footnote, Honn wrote:

As an example, applicant took a family life class in high school where the boys and girls were paired and assigned to be a “husband” and “wife” to study the development of an egg into a baby. Applicant’s partner was distressed to be assigned to applicant, and she complained to her parents, who in turn, complained to the teacher. The next day, the teacher continued the theme by having the marriage “annulled.” As one would imagine, this caused applicant to be ashamed and humiliated.

I don’t know what’s worse—that Glass’s side introduced these “facts” to create sympathy for him or that the judge appears to have bought them. As high school humiliations go, annulments of family life class marriages rate pretty low. Yet this isn’t the lowest grab for sympathy recorded in the court documents. In another footnote to his decision, Judge Honn writes:

Although applicant has recently established a relationship with his parents by setting boundaries in their interactions, his brother has had more difficulty doing so. In fact, despite his brother having a wife and two-year-old twins, his parents have not actually seen the grandchildren for more than approximately ten hours.

What sort of person would enlist the story of his brother’s estrangement from their parents as legal leverage in a civil proceeding?

Glass may well have assumed that none of these documents would become public. Had the California Supreme Court not agreed to review the case, the proceedings would have remained sealed and confidential. Nobody outside the court would have ever learned how weirdly Glass groveled or how bitterly he blamed his parents for his shortcomings.

But perhaps I misread the hardness of Glass’s ego and the depths of his shamelessness. Perhaps the groveling that we interpret as weakness and the plaintive pleas for forgiveness and understanding that mark his character are his strengths. A 2006 feature by Gabriel Oppenheim in 34th Street Magazine, which is published weekly by the Daily Pennsylvanian, Glass’s old college newspaper, favors this interpretation. Oppenheim interviews Matt Selman, an old college newspaper colleague of Glass’s. Selman speaks of running into Glass at a party in Los Angeles, where Glass now lives. (As recently as 2008, Glass was making $154,000 a year working for a California law firm, according to court filings.)

Oppenheim writes:

Matt ribbed Steve about him being a maniac who forever sullied the journalistic profession. And when Steve took it in stride, Matt thought: “He could always absorb whatever abuse you threw at him. No matter what mean thing you said about his pants or his personality or whatever, he’d suck it up, like a beaten dog happy to get an open-fisted punch in the ear.”

It’s a brutal image, but it captures Glass’s tenacity and helps explain why he’s submitted to more than four years of legal struggle—nine years, if his 2002 New York Bar application is the starting point—to win the right to practice law. Does Glass expect membership in the bar to provide him with the forgiveness or the exoneration he’s obviously craved ever since Adam L. Penenberg caught him making things up in 1998? By becoming an officer of the court, does Glass expect to put the scandal behind him? That’s my hunch. If the bar considers him morally fit, who are we to question him?

What are the chances that the Supreme Court will certify Glass’s admittance into the bar? Surely there are worse people than Stephen Glass practicing law in California, but I don’t think the Supreme Court decided to review the case to affirm that position. Obviously, the easiest way out for the court would have been to deny review and leave the Glass onus on Judge Honn and the panel that agreed with him. But it takes at least four (pdf) of the seven members of California Supreme Court’s to grant review, and that indicates to my mind that the court may be as opposed to Stephen Glass practicing law in California as the committee is.

If it weren’t for the paper trail, this decade-long struggle to become an attorney, with all of its emotional striptease and maudlin confessions, might be mistaken for one more Stephen Glass fabrication. Maybe, when it’s all over, he’ll write about that.

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PHOTO: Employers of the private television station Siyatha TV sit behind a broken glass panel in Colombo July 30, 2010. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte