Jack Shafer

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

Giving testimony yesterday at the Leveson phone-hacking inquiry (PDF) in London, former News of the World features editor Paul McMullan took the only position on the scandal not yet occupied: That of an unrepentant tabloid journalist.

Don’t blame tabloid excesses on tabloid journalists, McMullan held, as he blithely parried the panel’s questions about how he could justify the tabloid press’s phone-hacking practices, its surveillance of subjects, and other intrusions into people’s lives.

Blame tabloid readers, McMullan said.

“Circulation defines what is the public interest. I see no distinction between what the public is interested in and the public interest,” he said. “The reason why News of the World sold 5 million copies is that there were 5 million thinking people and that’s what they wanted to read.”

Continuing his blame-the-readers-not-me tack, he said, “[Readers] are the judge and the jury of what is in the paper, and if they don’t like it—if they don’t like the fact that you’ve written a story about Charlotte Church’s father having two-in-a-bed—sorry, three-in-a-bed on cocaine, then they’ll simply stop buying the product.”

Asked by Lord Justice Leveson if the ends justified the means, McMullan let his interrogator have it. “Yes, I think so,” he said. “All I’ve ever tried to do is write truthful articles and to use any means necessary to try and get to the truth.”

Although the Leveson committee was asking the questions and not giving the answers, it seemed stumped by McMullan’s intransigence, even when he offered that “Privacy is the space that bad people need to do bad things in. Privacy is particularly good for pedophiles. … It brings out the worst in people.”

Obviously, just because News of the World—which owner Rupert Murdoch closed this summer as the phone-hacking scandal crested—commanded 5 million paying customers can’t justify the serial law-breaking attributed to its journalists. But McMullan’s moxie temporarily moved the topic to an area of non-consensus: How grounded to reality are the privacy expectations of politicians, sports stars, celebrities, and civilians?

In a recent Journal of Media Law & Ethics (PDF) article about the Max Mosley case, scholar Stephen Bates notes that the British law only recently embraced privacy.

“A dozen years ago, British reporters were less vulnerable to invasion-of-privacy suits than American reporters. Today, British reporters are far more vulnerable. Indeed, privacy lawsuits are outnumbering libel ones,” Bates writes. “As a result, freedom of the press in Britain has been constricted.”

Bates, who is a lawyer, surmises that the news coverage lavished on adulterers Mark Sanford, John Ensign, John Edwards, and Tiger Woods would have given all four randy fellows standing to sue for invasion of privacy under British law.

Sounding a little like McMullan (but without justifying law-breaking or other tabloid excesses), Bates writes:

The press does more than help create informed, active citizens. It seeks not merely to serve the public interest; it also seeks to serve the public’s interests, including interest in celebrities and scandals. The news media entertain as well as inform, and they serve the working class—the principal audience of tabloids—as well as the middle and upper classes. Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol once wrote, “It is probable that as much mischief has been perpetrated upon the human race in the name of ‘the public interest’ as in the name of anything else.”

The appetite for scandal news, both here and in the U.K., is so insatiable that tabloid journalists are forever creating or “discovering” new celebrities whose peccadilloes—especially sexual ones—can be reported. How else to explain the rise of the Kardashians? This appetite has no automatic right to a meal but the healthy market for the “red top” tabs in the U.K. and their U.S. counterparts—Star and Us, TV shows like TMZ, and celebrity columns in every U.S. daily newspaper—confirms how mainstream and widespread the consumption of gossip is. McMullan is right: The demand so demonstrably creates the supply that it requires us to pause long enough to figure out why we so love anything approaching a scandal, even if the exposé doesn’t contribute to the “public interest.”

Who among us will turn down gossip, especially of a sexual nature, about classmates, officemates, casual acquaintances, Hollywood actors, politicians, and all the way up to complete strangers? Bates helps us understand when he quotes C. Edwin Baker: “Gossip is an essential means of communication.” We crave intimate details of others’ lives because they give us a sense of power over them; because the intimate details of others’ lives help us understand our own; because the intimate details of others’ lives give us social currency and social standing. “Scandal news, like literature, illuminates human nature,” Bates writes.

Again, none of this is meant to defend reporters who break the law. But as the Leveson inquiry vectors from investigating law-breaking toward invasion of privacy questions, the closer it comes to criminalizing journalism. Most celebrity actors and musicians employ publicists to cultivate press for them, seeking, as Bates puts it, “positive publicity for their private lives,” as he approvingly quotes this passage from a 2009 legal case: “As there should be ‘truth in advertising,’ so there should be truth in publicity. The public should not be misled.”

If the Leveson inquiry ends up inspiring new, tougher privacy laws in the U.K., celebrities might sleep better. But so will U.K. government and corporate officials, and that’s not good. I encourage you to read the Bates article, not just because it’s learned and wise, but because it summarizes the issues in its kicker by quoting this splendid passage from Tom Stoppard:

“Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.”

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Keep your hands off my junk! Invade my inbox with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Track my most intimate utterances on 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.

Allow me to be among the first working journalists to welcome Chelsea Clinton to the Fourth Estate. Clinton, as you probably read in this morning’s New York Times, has taken a job with NBC News as a full-time special correspondent and will cover stories for the network’s do-gooder “Making a Difference” series.

Please read no snark into my Clinton welcome.

Yes, I know that many of you will deplore the fact that somebody like Clinton with no real journalistic experience but plenty of connections has won a high-ranking reporting position at a broadcast network. Your thought balloons about cronyism, already passing over my office, read, If Chelsea wanted to be a journalist she should have gone to journalism school or gotten an internship and parlayed that into a job covering crime for a paper in the boonies, and then over the years worked her way up.

But Clinton, who will turn 32 in February, isn’t the first high-profile political spawn to use the family name as a media-career springboard. The Times article notes that President George W. Bush daughter Jenna Bush Hager is an NBC Today correspondent, and presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain contributes to MSNBC. Caroline Kennedy has published nearly a dozen books about patriotism, the Bill of Rights, courage, and poetry and Susan Ford, daughter of President Gerald Ford, has published two volumes of mystery fiction. Ron Reagan, Michael Reagan, and Maureen Reagan all leveraged their father’s prominence into jobs behind the microphone. Maria Shriver, whose uncle was President John Kennedy and whose father, Sargent Shriver, ran for vice president, capitalized on her family connections to get a job as a reporter at a Philadelphia TV station in 1977 straight out of college at the age of 22. She moved to CBS News six years later. You know the rest.

The promotion of the under-talented sons and daughters of the politically connected to fancy media jobs seems to violate our great, national, meritocratic creed, as does the assignment of politicians such as Joe Scarborough, Susan Molinari, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Eliot Spitzer, and George Stephanopoulos to their respective media slots, and the addition of Republican hacks Palin, Huckabee, Kasich, Santorum, and Gingrich to the Fox News Channel payroll.

But the reflexive disdain for cronyism ignores the essence of TV news: Like the movies, TV news thrives on a star culture that is so devolved that almost anybody with name-recognition, positive or negative, can be considered a star, as hooker-happy Eliot Spitzer proved. And there’s nothing a network likes to do more than to steal a star from another network.

Only as a last resort will TV producers put nobodies on screen. They want somebodies, and even a minor member of Congress can qualify if they’re not too ugly, not too old, and not too tongue-tied. The political somebodies listed above may look like nobodies to you, but in the world of TV news they’re rainmakers whose status as semi-celebrities makes it easier to book other semi-celebrities on their political talk shows.

“Somebody” status appears to be inheritable, as the offspring of presidential stock keep proving. There’s something atavistic about our culture’s fascination with presidential sons and daughters. Do we consider them a kind of faux royalty, as American princes and princesses? (My friend Mark Feldstein says, “Maybe we should go direct to monarchy, and save everybody a step.”)

Or do network executives (and book publishers) detect genuine power in the children of presidents that the more discerning miss? Take Chelsea Clinton: If so much of what passes for network news is about celebrity wrangling, would any world leader, corporate chief, or movie star dare turn down an invitation from her to appear on NBC lest they offend her parents? Especially seeing that NBC has assigned Clinton to a feel-good news beat, there will be no downside to agreeing to talking to her on camera. As a NBC reporter, she won’t be a rainmaker. She’ll be a typhoon, flooding the airwaves with one big celebrity “get” after another.

The hiring of Chelsea Clinton doesn’t so much debase the TV news currency as reveal its true value. Lack of experience is no bar to becoming an on-air personality because there’s always money for staff to back up the neophyte. Journalism is less a profession than it is a description–that is, anybody with a good idea and some sources and a modicum of literary talent can commit a worthwhile (or watchable/readable) act of journalism. It hurts journalists to hear this, but there really are no bars to entry. If I can be a journalist, why can’t Chelsea Clinton?

Go ahead and beat up on Chelsea Clinton all you want. But the crony journalism that got her the job is an effect, not a cause of the quest for celebrity journalism.

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I ran out of time and space to include all the wonderful examples of the crony journalism that results in the hiring of the sons and daughters of famous journalists. Maybe next time. Send tips to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and monitor my meritocratic 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: Chelsea Clinton speaks during a panel discussion regarding technologies for economic empowerment at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, September 22, 2011. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Media columnist Jim Romenesko—who was scheduled to depart his full-time position at the Poynter Institute at the end of the year, anyway—vacated it abruptly yesterday after his boss, Julie Moos, publicly criticized his “incomplete” methods of attributing other journalists’ copy in his summaries of their work.

For those who haven’t followed the story—and I don’t blame you if you haven’t, because it’s so inside baseball it’s inside the laces of the ball—Romenesko has been writing a Web-based cheat sheet about the news business since 1999. The column, which the non-profit Poynter Institute picked up in 2000, has been an indispensable destination for journalists and civilians interested in the media. (Interests declared: Romenesko has cited my work many times since 1999. For the last 10 weeks, Poynter has been paying me to participate in weekly, hour-long Web chats with readers.)

In declaring a “pattern of incomplete attribution,” Moos pointed to a recent example from Romenesko’s work in which he ran whole sentences from a Chicago Tribune story in his summary of it without placing the words in quotation marks or block quotation to indicate its exact provenance.

Romenesko’s style was not Poynter’s style, Moos wrote, commenting that, “One danger of this practice is that the words may appear to belong to Jim when they in fact belong to another.”

Like Moos, I think that Romenesko should have placed in quotation marks (or block quotations) copy taken from stories he summarized. When I’ve worked as an editor, that has been my standard. As a writer, I follow the same code. If anything, I overdo the quotation-marks thing. You’re free to criticize the windy way Moos explains Poynter’s policy and its inquiry, but as the editor she’s well within her rights to set attribution rules.

But the perplexing thing about the Romenesko dust-up is that, as Moos notes, nobody ever noticed Romenesko’s style of non-attribution until Columbia Journalism Review assistant editor Erika Fry brought it to Poynter’s attention. Those nobodies include the Poynter editors who have been reading Romenesko’s work behind him for the last 12 years. (Romenesko has traditionally posted his copy without going through an editor.) Other nobodies apparently include the thousands of journalists Romenesko has summarized over the years. According to the Moos post, no writer or publication had ever told Poynter “their words were being co-opted.”

Moos continues, “That raises some questions of its own.”

How is it that the incomplete attribution escaped Romenesko’s readers notice for so long? Vain journalists—is there any other kind?—love to scream plagiarism. They love to scream it not just when their words are lifted but when they think their ideas have been purloined! Given that Romenesko’s blog is the most avidly read page in the journalism business, one would think that his “incompleteness” would have been uncovered earlier.

Yet it wasn’t. I’ve read every Romenesko condensation of my work since his column began, but as I tweeted yesterday, the only unusual thing I ever noticed about his work was a knack for locating my misplaced openings and highlighting them.

My theory of why careful readers have been blind to Romenesko’s incomplete attribution isn’t really my theory. I’ve pinched it from Richard A. Posner, a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He lays it out succinctly in his 2007 volume, The Little Book of Plagiarism.

Now, nobody at Poynter has accused Romenesko of plagiarism. I am not accusing him of plagiarism. I bring up the word, and Posner’s meditations on it, to help explain 1) why nobody previously noticed non-attribution in Romenesko columns and 2) why we shouldn’t be upset with Romenesko for his technique. Posner writes:

A judgment of plagiarism requires that the copying, besides being deceitful in the sense of misleading the intended readers, induce reliance by them.

By reliance, Posner means that the reader does something “because he thinks the plagiarizing work original” that he would not have done if fully informed of the full truth of the work’s provenance. “Lawyers call this ‘detrimental’ reliance,” Posner continues, “that is, relying to your detriment on a falsehood.” Posner gives the example of reader who would not buy a book if he knew it contained “large swatches of another writer’s book.” Instead, the reader would buy the original author’s book.

Moving from Posner back to Romenesko, it’s obvious to me and thousands of other readers that Romenesko made no claim that the primary findings in his posts were originally his. Quite the contrary, the style of his attribution—a link back to the original story, inclusion of the name of the publication and often that of the author—advertises in every possible way that the Romenesko version is the derivative, not the original. Indeed, the Romenesko gestalt has been to steer readers back to the original. His whole enterprise since 1999 has been to alert and direct reader attention to original work, from Manhattan to the boonies! Far from exploiting the work of others and hyping his product, Romenesko always seemed to tamp down the most excitable aspects of the work he summarized. He never tried to distort or sensationalize like our friends at Business Insider and Huffington Post. In his hands, a story about the coming Apocalypse would be summarized as impending bad weather.

We can argue whether Romenesko is guilty of “over-aggregation.” I’m not as bothered by over-aggregation as other journalists, a sentiment I expressed a few months ago at Slate. I’d also be more impressed by over-aggregation charges against Romenesko if the complainants were journalists he has summarized. But my anecdotal evidence is that they’re not. Yesterday, 15 or 20 minutes after the Poynter piece went up, the usual gang of press writers, whose every cough and fart end up in Romenesko’s column, stood up for the blogger on Twitter. They rendered a basketball court verdict of no harm, no foul.

Erika Fry, the Columbia Journalism Review staffer whose inquiries stirred Poynter to action against Romenesko, published her piece this afternoon accusing other Poynterites of over-aggregation. Based on the evidence Fry presents against them, again I’d say no harm, no foul here, too.

If Romenesko is guilty of over-aggregation, I hope he continues the practice when he gets www.jimromenesko.com rolling.

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PHOTO: Marcus Lewis (L) of the U.S. fouls Kelvin Pena of the Dominican Republic as they jump for a rebound during their men’s preliminary round basketball game at the Pan American Games in Guadalajara October 26, 2011. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Yesterday, The Daily was first to name Karen Kraushaar as one of the two women who worked with Herman Cain at the National Restaurant Association and accused him of sexual harassment. As the Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride wrote, Business Insider and the Daily Caller repeated the Daily‘s report that Kraushaar had made the sexual harassment claim, and NPR got her to confirm her identity as “Woman A.” Shortly thereafter, Kraushaar was talking to the New York Times, and the whole world knew who she was.

For what good reason was Kraushaar’s identity concealed in the first place?

Politico, which broke the sexual harassment claims story on Oct. 31, didn’t really explain why it did not name the accusers in its scoop, reporting only that it had “confirmed the identities of the two female restaurant association employees who complained about Cain but, for privacy concerns, is not publishing their names.”

Why grant accusers anonymity for reasons of “privacy,” but not the accused? It makes no sense, especially in the Cain episode. No legal finding of sexual harassment was made, and the only evidence that Cain committed sexual harassment is that cash settlements of $35,000 and $45,000 were reportedly paid to the two accusers. But that’s no evidence at all—the cost of defending a sexual harassment charge is so steep that paying severance of $35,000 is a bargain even if a case has little merit.

Mind you, I’m not saying that the charges against Cain have no merit. I’m as open to the argument that he created a hostile environment of sexual harassment as defined by the law as I am to other interpretations of his alleged conduct (that he’s fresh, that he’s a masher, that he’s a creep on autopilot, that he’s wicked Uncle Ernie, that he’s stepped out of line too many times, and that you’d rather have your daughter walk 10 miles home barefoot in the snow than to accept a ride home from him).

But I’m also open to the possibility that he’s no rampaging sexual monster—and you should be, too.

Politico’s decision to bestow a privacy setting on the accusers put Cain in a tough position. If he names them in an attempt to refute the charges he opens himself to charges of “violating” their privacy. By not naming them, he resigned himself to fighting phantoms.

As a phantom-fighter, Cain has not impressed, I should add. Combing through the various defenses he mounted, I was struck by their non-denial denial quality. Cain kept saying that he had not committed sexual harassment and that appears to be legally true. I know of no legal finding of sexual harassment against him. By definition, his alleged encounter with Sharon Bialek would not rise to a case of sexual harassment because she wasn’t working for him or with him at the time. (It may qualify as sexual assault, although it would have been difficult to prove as many have noted.) The question people want answered is not whether his behaviors fall under the definition of sexual harassment but whether he routinely violates current socio-sexual norms in the workplace. And Cain knows it.

Another Cain accuser—one who did not file a sexual harassment complaint—told her story to the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal last week. “She said the behavior included a private invitation to his corporate apartment” and that he had “made sexually suggestive remarks or gestures,” according to the AP. Both the AP and the Journal gave the woman anonymity because she feared “retaliation.”

Retaliation? What sort of retaliation? The accuser described in the AP and Wall Street Journal no longer works for Cain, so he can’t directly retaliate. Obviously, he could hire detectives or others to stalk and bully his accusers. But assuming that Cain knows who has made the charges—and I think that’s a safe assumption—he’s already in a position to stage such retaliation if they ask reporters for anonymity. The fears of retaliation are a journalistic fig leaf, designed to serve reporters who want to coax a story out of reluctant sources. Few sources are ever beyond the long arm of the accused bent on retaliation.

You could say that Bialek and Kraushaar are suffering a kind of retaliation now as the press questions the motives of Cain’s accusers. The AP reports today that Kraushaar filed a second complaint against employers at the job she got after leaving the National Restaurant Association, making her look like a bit of a serial accuser. Bialek, meanwhile, is being cast as a post-bankruptcy gold-digger in the press.

I doubt very much whether any of the accusers are much appreciating the scrutiny being directed at them. I know I wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean the press should conceal their identities. Under our system of law, bringing accusations of wrongdoing and other acts of whistleblowing is not an easy thing, nor should it be. It requires stamina and patience, and a willingness to be cross-examined. As it should! Sometimes false accusations are brought and the accused is innocent. He is just as deserving of justice as the accuser.

The shape of the Cain debate and the press treatment of the accusers both imply that we think sexual harassment is such an incendiary offense that we must observe a taboo against naming accusers. It also implies that we think that those accused of sexual harassment are so all-powerful in today’s culture that they can destroy accusers via “retaliation.”

I reject both of those views with the same vehemence that I reject the idea that women who bring civil charges of sexual harassment in the workplace must be treated like delicate flowers that will wilt and expire if scrutinized. If you’ve ever filed criminal or civil charges—or sat on a jury—you don’t need me to tell you that justice is never easy. The accused have the right to meet their accusers in court, even when it makes the accusers uncomfortable, a standard that the press—allegedly a bastion of openness and reproducible results—should observe, too. Privacy for accusers is a cop-out.

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I sketched out some of these thoughts this afternoon in a Poynter chat with Kelly McBride and Mallary Tenore. Make your complaints against me public by tweeting at my Twitter feed. Or send them via email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. 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: Sharon Bialek speaks during a news conference accusing Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain of sexual harassment in New York, November 7, 2011. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

As a man of habit, I resist all change, especially the change that’s forced on me. So this week I got steamed when one of the tools I rely on to do my work and nourish my brain, Google Reader, got a complete makeover and was pushed onto me whether I wanted it or not.

Which I don’t.

We users had been warned for weeks that a redesign of the popular (and free) RSS reader was in the making, so the appearance of a new version didn’t come as a shock. The only shock was how terrible the new version is. It subverts users’ needs in favor of Google’s. The company wants to fight Facebook with a uniform interface for its free suite of services—which also includes Gmail, Calendar, and Docs—that will encourage sharing of content on its newish social-networking product, Google+. But in making the whole Google product line visually consistent, the company has crippled one of its best offerings.

Seeing as Google doesn’t charge for its RSS reader I can’t complain much more than if a bar serving free beer suddenly switched from Sierra Nevada Pale Ale to Old Milwaukee. But to extend the metaphor, I don’t have to drink Google’s swill unless I want to.

Which I don’t.

I’m not the only user carping about the new Google Reader. Foster Kamer of the New York Observer collated the dissatisfaction yesterday, pointing to the critique blogged by former Google project manager Brian Shih titled “Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision?” The voices at Wired.com, Information Week, the Atlantic Wire, and Forbes all hammered Google Reader. Among the complaints: Its unique “shared feeds” feature is gone; it loads slower than the old Reader; it’s hopelessly gray; a giant, red, near-useless “Subscribe” button hogs valuable screen real estate; and there’s a lot of noise about how Google has reduced it to an adjunct to Google +. The former lead designer of Google Reader offered yesterday to rejoin the company for the three months it would take to fix his baby, writing:

Reader should not fall by the wayside, a victim to fashion. …

I will put my current projects on hold to ensure that Google Reader keeps its place as the premier news reader, and raises the bar of what a social newsreader can be.

What drew me to Google Reader five years ago was its compression. It wasn’t the ideal RSS reader, but it worked well with your Gmail sign-in and it condensed an extraordinary amount of information about publications and new posts into a single Web page. With a couple of clicks on my tiny netbook, I could catch up on the 116 news feeds that I follow, add a few new ones, or “star” the ones I wanted to save. Like an old couch, its shape had conformed to my dimensions. As a Google engineer described it in 2006, it was like an inbox for the Web.

Here’s what the old Google Reader looked like:

Here’s a view of the new Google Reader:

Have you ever seen such an exercise in loosey-goosey white space? White space is wonderful when used as a design element in magazines and books, but it’s absolute crap when brushed onto a pure-data medium like an RSS feed. Adding extravagant white space to Google Reader is like adding white space to the phone book. It defeats the mission of densely packing information. Just imagine if Microsoft decided that the new default setting for Excel spreadsheets provided for extra leading between lines, and the default was unchangeable. The nation’s accountants would storm Redmond and lynch Steve Ballmer and bury him in Elliott Bay.

In the old Google Reader regime, I could see about 13 headlines on my netbook without scrolling. Now I’m down to eight, which means endless scrolling to catch up on the news. Brian Shih puts it best with his rant about the new Reader’s misplaced priorities. “When you log into Reader, what the hell do you think your primary objective is?” he writes. “Did you answer ‘stare at a giant header bar with no real estate saved for actual reading’?” If you did, the new Reader is your prize.

I’m not a fussy person. I don’t fly off the handle every time Facebook or Twitter or Microsoft Word undergoes a redesign. I don’t much like the “new look” that Google has given Gmail and Calendar, but it’s not going to cause me to dump those applications. For one thing, the new Calendar isn’t that bad and if the new Gmail interface gets on my nerves I can always use Outlook to read and send from my account.

But there are other RSS programs out there which, unlike the new Google Reader, put the reading experience first. My Reuters colleague Anthony De Rosa recommends newsblur.com and I’ve grown accustomed to reading my feeds with NetNewsWire on the family iPad.

It’s been a great five years, Google Reader. I feel a little jilted by your crazed pursuit of the social media market, but I can’t be too angry with you for providing such a fine, free service for all that time. Thanks.

But with my thanks come retaliation: Somebody must pay for this corporate misdirection. I happily occupied Google Reader for five years. Today, in protest, I unoccupy it.

Addendum, 5:45 p.m.: I missed this Atlantic Wire piece about the effort to build a Google Reader replacement.

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The last refuge of a bogus trend story is the claim that it “got people talking.”

If the author and editors of “A Last Bastion of Civility, the South, Sees Manners Decline” from today’s New York Times have adjourned to a coffee shop to eavesdrop on the conversation, I suspect they’re hearing what I’m thinking: Does that bold assertion come with evidence?

Here are a few examples from the  “growing portfolio” of behaviors the Times draws on to plot the decline of Southern manners.

·         Two black men drinking at a bar were asked by a bartender to surrender their seats to two white women. They declined and a lawsuit ensued.

·         A professor of history and Southern culture at the University of Mississippi tells the Times, “Manners are one of many things that are central to a Southerner’s identity, but they are not primary anymore. Things have eroded.”

·         The South’s make-up has changed: More Northerners have moved in; modern communications technology has made parts of the South less insular; and changing politics and the recent economic upheaval have made the place more contentious and insecure.

·         A “media specialist” says manners have dropped so low that African-Americans can no longer automatically trust other African-Americans.

·         A second grade teacher in Birmingham says today’s classroom manners have drooped lower than any time in her 36-year career.

·         A wedding planner (and graduate of the Emily Post Institute!) says brides and grooms are more selfish than ever.

·         Gov. Nikki Haley, R-S.C., was mean to 10 state lawmakers.

·         Charlotte, N.C., is the home to “road rage,” “rudeness,” and NASCAR “riots.”

Hmmmm. Blacks who won’t give up their seats to whites. A professor who thinks things aren’t what they used to be. A “specialist,” a middle-aged teacher, and a wedding planner who agree that standards of Southern behavior have shifted.

I wouldn’t want to go to trial with this case.

If you really needed to establish that Southern manners aren’t what they used to be, you’d first have to pick a baseline period for exactly when “used to be” was. Was it 1980? 1960? 1940? 1840? But the Times piece never pegs the golden age of Southern civility. Even if it had, journalistic anecdotes like these aren’t any way to reliably measure changes in civility.

The piece wisely concedes at a couple junctures how “courtesy and deference” have been used to control women and blacks, and to limit public debate. One voice in the piece holds that Southern civility was a coping mechanism designed to mask animosity. “If someone is polite, you better be careful and consider what that politeness veils,” says William Ferris, a University of North Carolina folklorist. This provocative comment, and the failure of the Times to fully explore its meaning, reminds me of the way Interview magazine conducted interviews during the Warhol era: Whenever the interview subject said something remotely interesting, the interviewer would quickly change the subject.

Other examples of bogosity: The Times cites a source to assert that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Herman Cain all benefited from their “ability to pour Southern charm over the political process.” This is news to me. I missed Carter’s charm, saw through Clinton’s, and if anybody thinks Cain is charming, they’re crazy. The notion that Southern politics was once a bastion of good manners, a theme the story bangs on a couple of times, will jolt anybody who ever followed the careers of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Strom Thurmond, Orval Faubus, et al.

Anecdotal news accounts charting the decline of this thing or that thing often include a counter-example, a stick-figure who functions like the Japanese soldier hiding in the jungles of the Solomon Islands who won’t surrender, demonstrating that against all odds, some people just won’t give up the faith. The Times observes this tradition by concluding the piece by visiting Dorothy McLeod, a 70-year-old who teaches ballroom dancing and etiquette to Augusta, Ga., children.

“I will not give up,” she says of her struggle to instill kindness and manners in unruly children.

As bad as the Times piece is, it could be worse. It could be about the return of Southern civility. Maybe next week.

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Seen a bogus trend piece that needs a good beating? (Thanks to reader Matt Jezior for suggesting this one.) Forward it to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter, your reliable source of bogus-trend anti-venom. 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: A window washer cleans the windows above the front door of the New York Times building in New York, March 26, 2010. REUTERS/Gary Hershorn