Pretty big personnel news on the East-coast media elite front: David Segal, an outstanding Washington Post feature writer, is jumping to the New York Times.

Here’s the release from the Times:

From: Timothy O’Brien
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 3:36 PM
To: [New York Times business journalists]
Subject: BizDay Hires David Segal

Read the rest of this entry »

*Want your Washington City Paper delivered with some flair? Creative Loafing Inc. may just have the answer.

*Interesting development on the comeback-from-disgrace beat. Sunday’s Washington Post has an opinion piece from an expert on how to regulate Wall Street. Well, that certainly couldn’t be Ayn Rand lover Alan Greenspan. Or just about anyone who’s held power for, lo, the last 16 years. That’s right! It’s Spitzer. The piece occupies the central spot in Outlook and carries this closer, which is blurbed on the page:

Although mistakes I made in my private life now prevent me from participating in these issues as I have in the past, I very much hope and expect that President Obama and his new administration will have the strength and wisdom to do again what FDR did.

Must applaud Outlook Editor John Pomfret here. I mean, here you got a guy who’s sat on the bench for half a year now, watching as deregulations threatens to push us into a second Great Depression, or at least a Pretty Damn Good Depression. And he is muted. Of course, I mean, he can’t really appear on tube–that’d be a laugher. And I can’t imagine he’d ever do a piece like this for the New York Times–they’re the bastards who busted him out on this whole traveling john thing to begin with. So why not a nice opinion piece in the Post?

*Deborah Howell just won’t give up. This week, after banging the drum for weeks on the “tilt” in the Post toward Obama, is at it again this week, talking about the various ways in which the tilt manifested itself and how to remedy it. Here’s a possible addendum to how this whole tilt manifested itself: Obama was smarter than McCain; understood the economy better than McCain; raised more money than McCain; understood the Web better than McCain; was attached to a party that hadn’t essentially ruined the country and the planet over the past eight years; got social networking and what it could do for him; connected with youth better than McCain; debated better than McCain; gave speeches more impressively than McCain; and had a more presidential temperament than McCain. Just a factor or two to take into consideration when evaluating media “tilt.”

WUSA Channel 9 reported live from Petworth last night, interviewing concerned citizens as well as City Paper’s own Ted Scheinman about recent neighborhood violence. (Scheinman and Jason Cherkis reported from Petworth here, here, and here). Lest anything be taken out of context, Scheinman warns, “City Paper sort of comes across as cop haters. Which we are not.”

Check out the video:

Herewith a little peek into exactly why the editorial board of the Washington Times has zero credibility.

On Sunday, in a controversial column, Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell slammed the Post’s news operation for a tilt toward president-elect Barack Obama–in news stories, in photographs, and in a failure to dig deeper on certain matters.

One of those matters, in the words of Howell, was this: “The Post did nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager.” Though I think Howell has been a great ombudsman, chiding the paper for failing to investigate the teenage drug use of any full-grown man amounts to a brain fart.

Now look at how the Washington Times editorial people are playing the Howell column. As a perch to denounce the liberal media conspiracy, of course. Check out how they paraphrase the bit about drugs: “The column also says that the president-elect deserved more scrutiny of his past relationships with Tony Rezko and his admitted drug use.”

“Admitted drug use”–sounds pretty powerful, pretty damning. Of course, if you do the responsible thing, and add in “teenage,” that takes away a bit of the sting. But the Washington Times editorial board, of course, doesn’t have time for such qualifiers. Admitted drug use. Better to leave that notion hanging there–the notion that, hey, perhaps this guy has been using drugs all along, that he pops ‘cid before he hits the Senate floor, that he gives his best speeches when high, that a quick snort or two keeps him going on the 24-7 campaign slog, that he can’t relax at night without eight or nine scotches….That’s what admitted drug use suggests.

But if any group of people is qualified to make such a judgment, it’s gotta be the people at the WaTi edit board. Nehi Grape–that’s the edgiest those people have ever gotten.

Thirty years ago, consumers of alternative journalism were less concerned with long-form narrative or the perilous state thereof.

Mostly, they liked to read about music. And get high. Really high. Richard Pryor-on-fire high.

At least that’s what’s indicated by the March 1979 copy of Unicorn Times that I found while packing up my office (CP’s business and editorial departments are moving to one floor at the end of the week; we don’t need so much space these days).

The editorial is a collection of things that no longer seem possible. The cover story is about a local band who, if this page is correct, had their promising career derailed–seriously–by a review in Rolling Stone.

There’s an avalanche of music coverage, including a review of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. Perhaps not coincidentally, there’s an ad for the original TokeMaster.

And there is an ad for equipment to freebase cocaine.

Seriously, this was even possible? I used to think my parents were unnecessarily harsh for restricting my D.C. visits to the immediate area around the Mall. Now I realize they were exactly right. In fact, they were probably too liberal having children at all during an era when PEOPLE ADVERTISED EQUIPMENT FOR FREEBASING COCAINE (a process whose product, the ad says, Colombians call bah-say). There’s no dancing around the subject like with water pipes (they smooth out harsh tobacco smoke) or whip-its (I always wondered why Penguin Feather, where I used to buy records as a kid, sold whipped-cream accessories)–no, this is an ad for equipment that will allow you to vaporize cocaine base in a highly flammable water-ether solution. The closest the ad comes to caution is the warning that freebase “does not toot well.”

Amy Austin, our publisher, says Earthworks (a “Smoke and Coke Shop”!) used to advertise in City Paper, which started up around the time Unicorn Times folded (years after this ad ran, by the way).

UPDATE: 11:14 a.m–I changed the headline because, duh, Unicorn Times was a monthly.

Because they’ll probably be airing some repurposed City Desk footage, alongside an interview with me.

No promises.  But tune in to find out.

In which Erik disses untrenchant Obama prophecies in the New York Times Magazine and scolds the Post for botching the your/you’re perplex. Family Magazine, meanwhile, sports a rather gruesome cover this week.

In other news, Erik gets a frio for gluing that Family Mag cover on the fuego side.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

Oh, my: Mayor Adrian M. Fenty muzzled one of his employees against her own advice.

Check Bill Turque’s D.C. Wire account for the full back story, but the short version is that Turque was working on a story about Michelle Rhee’s “Plan B” on how to get rid of bad teachers in the event that contract negotiations didn’t work out. Part of that, Turque reported at the time, involved tying teacher licensing to classroom performance—which falls under the bailiwick of State Superintendent of Education Deborah Gist.

Before commenting, Gist told Turque she’d have to check with Fenty chief of staff Carrie Brooks. No response ever came from Gist, though Brooks later denied putting the kibosh on any comment.

Rather, the kibosh came from Fenty himself, after Rhee weighed in by saying that any comment could be “very messy”: “Yes. Don’t speak with him (and please don’t tell him something like. ‘the mayor has told me not to speak with you’),” Hizzoner wrote. “Just don’t pick up the phone.”

Oof. This would be the best insight into mayoral communications strategy since LL laid bare the WaPo’s inside track on announcing Rhee’s appointment in June 2007.

Since then, the Post’s honeymoon has ended, at least on the news-reporting side. (The editorial board is still perfectly smitten.) Since Rhee’s appointment, the D.C. education beat has been fraught for Metro reporters. V. Dion Haynes and Theola Labbé-DeBose held the beat for the first portion of Rhee’s tenure, but Labbé-DeBose was taken off the beat in late March, then Haynes departed for a biz-desk job. Turque, a veteran former Newsweek reporter who had been covering the Virginia suburbs for the Post, was brought in amid rumors that Rhee was at odds with Turque’s predecessors.

Now today’s revelation, plus the string of Rhee no-comments in recent Turque stories, can only be taken as a sign that the Chancellor isn’t a whole lot happier with Turque’s reporting.

Buried in today’s Style section is a story about what the Post dug up when it filed a FOIA request on author Norman Mailer, who died last year. There’s not a whole lot of shocking news in the files, which may explain why it’s buried in the Style section—Feds impersonated friends to extract Mailer’s whereabouts, but otherwise the file seems largely stuffed with press clippings.

There’s a big missed opportunity here, though. There are plenty of Mailer scholars—or just garden-variety lit nerds like myself—who’d love a peek at the file. So why won’t washingtonpost.com, which prides itself on pioneering new ways to make stories sticky and engaging online—post a few jpegs or PDFs from it? If nothing else, I’d like to see the FBI agent’s attempt at a review of Mailer’s book about the ‘68 conventions, Miami and the Seige of Chicago. “It is written in his usual obscene and bitter style,” the agent explained.

No matter how frustrated I get with the forced theatrics and contrived confrontations of Bravo’s Top Chef, I always find myself curled up on the couch, watching the damn reality show. Some nights I hate myself for it. This season, though, we have a local contender gunning for Top Chef—Carla Hall, a Nashville native who now lives and works in D.C.

Starting on Wednesday, when Season 5 premieres, Hall will be competing against 16 other “cheftestants” (I did say that I sometimes hate myself for liking the show, right?) I’ll be watching closely to see how far Hall goes. Will she make it all the way to the top? Or just far enough to create the kind of buzz that propelled Spike Mendelsohn into quasi-celebrity status and burger joint fame? I guess I’ll be watching like everyone else to find out. ‘Cause Hall can’t say nothing about the show. Period. Can’t even drop broad hints, like she wanted to claw Padma’s eyes out after one episode.

Too good to be true. Fishbowldc gets suckered by a hoax artiste.

*Washington City Paper alum and very quickly rising media star Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Washington Post’s Outlook, in effect: MLK, alas, was right to have some faith in white people! But did Coates see that Pottsville video?

*Headline from the Washington Times: “Obama term expected to be post-racial” Again, see Pottsville.

*Must-read on former New York Giant LaVar Arrington.

*A more nuts-and-bolts approach to saving a newspaper.

*Get the skinny on shooting incidents from this past weekend.

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a fascinating piece about a California couple who tried to live for a month on a $1-a-day food budget. Their mission was certifiably insane, but their motivation was noble. After all, as reporter Tara Parker-Pope noted, “The World Bank says nearly a billion people around the world live on a dollar a day, or even less…”

Here are the money quotes from the story:

The budget forced them to give up many store-bought foods and dinners out. Even bread and canned refried beans were too expensive.

Instead, the couple — Christopher Greenslate, 28, and Kerri Leonard, 29, both high school social studies teachers — bought raw beans, rice, cornmeal and oatmeal in bulk, and made their own bread and tortillas. Fresh fruits and vegetables weren’t an option. Ms. Leonard’s mother was so worried about scurvy, a result of vitamin C deficiency, that they made room in their budget for Tang orange drink mix. (They don’t eat meat — not that they could have afforded it.)

In other words, they had to live on crap, which helps you understand why poverty inevitably leads to a shorter life span. You can read all about Greenslate and Leonard’s experiment on their—what else?—blog, http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com

*DCist has got a primer on inauguration ticket availability. Bottom line: Good luck.

*WTOP has the skinny on new traffic patterns in Penn Quarter, thanks to Obama offices moving in. Wonder if the Obamanians have read about their neighborhood getting overrun by youths. Oh, right, that’s their constituency!

*Politico runs down the losers of the week (not a tough one, granted).

*Further evidence of the deep rot within the Board of Elections and Ethics.

*Postie Anne Kornblut pulls in a big six-figure sum for a book on the tough road for a female presidential candidate. Probably best just to read the executive summary in the Outlook section this past weekend.