The uplifting story of Times writer Nick Bilton, who rose from obscurity as a technology reporter to a prominent position as the paper's chief Pens and Twitter Arguments correspondent, gained a new chapter today with news that Bilton would write an "investigative book about the black market website Silk Road," and that the book has already been optioned by 20th Century Fox.
The perks of working at Bloomberg LP are legendary: free cereal, free yogurt, free espresso drinks, free Swedish Fish, free healthcare and more all thanks to the benevolence of former Mayor Mikey B.
The government of Paris plans to sue Fox News for airing several segments claiming the French capital contained “no-go zones” that prohibit entry to non-Muslims and are frequently avoided by city police. Fox has since retracted and apologized for airing the segments, which were widely mocked by French media.
CNN International correspondent Jim Clancy has left the cable news channel, where he worked for 34 years, according to an internal memo obtained by TVNewser. CNN confirmed Clancy’s departure in a separate statement: “We thank him for more than three decades of distinguished service, and wish him nothing but the best.” But the network declined to comment on a series of bizarre tweets—in which Clancy seemed to suggest that Israeli propaganda had a hand in the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris—which preceded his abrupt resignation.
It is common knowledge that House Speaker John Boehner is a notoriously hard drinker. So after the F.B.I. arrested a Cincinnati country club bartender for conspiring to poison Boehner’s Merlot, an editor at Boston.com wrote a post with the following light-hearted joke: “Had he been poisoned as planned, perhaps his pickled liver could have filtered out the toxins.” Predictably, Boehner’s office complained about the joke. Less predictably: The site retracted the joke about Boehner’s liver and issued a formal apology.
Sasha Frere-Jones, who is not a black French woman, has accepted a job with annotation start-up and ephemeral website Genius (formerly known as Rap Genius), leaving his comfortable perch as pop music critic at analog paper magazine the New Yorker. Presumably, Genius offered Frere-Jones the promise of an intellectually stimulating experience, a chance to mold editorial content in his image, and a trough of cash and stock options.
Last week, a U.S.C. journalism professor named Marc Cooper wrote on Facebook that New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet had demonstrated “absolute cowardice” by refusing to publish any Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting Mohammad in his paper. In response, Baquet called Cooper an “asshole.” We can disagree on whether or not Cooper is an asshole. But let’s agree on this: If Dean Baquet thinks someone is an asshole, he should say so in public.
