As LL mentioned in this morning's Daily, the Washington Times' Timothy Warren reported this morning that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had said at a voucher press conference, "If you send a kid to [public] school in D.C., chances are that they will end up in a gang rather than graduating."

Moments ago, LL received an e-mail from a DeMint aide, who says, "The Washington Times completely misreported Senator DeMint's comments, leaving out the opening of his statement that he was told this by a DC parent. As the New York Post points out here, Senator DeMint was simply quoting from a mother who said those words to him this week, that she was concerned her child was likely to end up in a gang instead of graduating if forced out of the scholarship program."

Read More "Conservative Catfight Over DeMint Quote" »

WTOP's Mark Plotkin bought Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs a radio (he'd said he didn't have one). Then he proceeded to press Gibbs on why Obama has yet to put "Taxation Without Representation" license plates on the presidential limo. Gibbs is very nice about it:

Kudos to commenter "al gonzales" for pointing this out.

Yesterday, WAMU-FM reporter Kavitha Cardoza did a piece [Windows Media/RealPlayer] on the DCPS budget hearing held Tuesday, which was announced only six days ahead of time and which only "about a dozen" persons reportedly attended.

Kind of a boring piece, with requisite outrage from veteran activists Mary Levy and Margot Berkey---until Cardoza put Mayor Adrian M. Fenty on the spot about the short notice.

His verbatim reply, if you can call it that: "Yeah, I think the person who said it right is that we're providing an information in real time probably summed it up best."

A typical content-free response from Fenty, sure, but that isn't even a sentence, far as LL can parse. Replied Cardoza, "What does that---I don't understand what that means."

Said Fenty, "I can't translate. All I can give you is a response to your question."

In that case, we're all still waiting.

Good morning, City Desk readers, and welcome to another addition of Freedom Friday. In case y'all missed it, please check out Average Day D.C., and, if you have time, my review of Arthur Delaney's Nanonman: The Post-Human Prometheus. And now, some news:

Read More "Our Morning Roundup: Time For a Tea Party?" »

No huge surprise here, but it's finally official: Tom Sherwood is now the resident analyst on the weekly Politics Hour with Kojo Nnamdi.

Since Jonetta Rose Barras left the Friday noon talk show on WAMU-FM last May over a pay dispute, the show has been rotating in guest analysts (including, now and again, yours truly). But in recent months, Sherwood, best known as a reporter for WRC-TV, has pretty much become a fixture. Nnamdi, indeed, has been referring to him as "permanent guest analyst" on recent shows.

Says Sherwood, "I've been a guest on Kojo's show occasionally over the years. I've got the highest respect for him." Late last year, he says, he was approached about doing something more permanent, and "my TV station decided to give me the time on Friday afternoons. I appreciate that they asked me."

When Barras was on the show, it was billed at the "Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta"; with Sherwood on board, however, the name will remain as plain-ol' "Politics Hour," says producer Diane Vogel.

Tune in to Sherwood's "resident" debut tomorrow noon at 88.5 FM---LL will be guest analysting!

As noted in today's LL Daily, David Brooks, in his New York Times column this morning, painted Ward 3 with the typically broad brush you might know and love from such armchair sociological works Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive.

A sample: "On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids’ play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies)."

So LL called Ward 3's councilmember, Mary Cheh, to get her reaction. She minced no words:

"I do have something of a reaction. He's made his living lobbing uninformed insults at various communities. He lives by these broad generalizations, which is somewhat ironic, since the man himself lives at Bethesda, Maryland...a community which suffers even worse stereotypes...He should be ashamed of himself!"

Cheh went on to postulate a cynical motive: "It might be a market strategy, since many of the New York Times readers are in Ward 3."

The stereotypes, Cheh continued, are "extraordinarily offensive. That's his stock in trade, to be offensive to communities....They're not based on fact. They're not based on first-hand knowledge." She seemed most concerned about how Brooks' comments reinforce the old tropes about white vs. black Washington: "It plays into these divisive stereotypes that people throw out about the District. It doesn't help any community in this city."

Cheh's husband, Neil A. Lewis, is a longtime reporter in the Times' Washington bureau. LL asked Cheh if she might ask him to crack some heads down at the office.

"No," she said, "I'm leaving him out of it."

UPDATE, 5:45 P.M.: For the record, Cheh says, she does not have a NordicTrack in her Forest Hills home. "And I haven't had my kitchen remodeled!"

In fact, Brooks' no-upper-body-toning rule sure doesn't apply to Cheh. The councilmember tells LL she does 200 pushups daily.

If Jeff Jarvis had his way, this post would not exist. In his new book "What Would Google Do?," Jarvis lays out a number of rules to help dead tree newspaper types and corporations in general face the new online reality--including "do what you do best and link to the rest."

Just like the newspaper industry he criticizes so frequently, What Would Google Do? seems like an attempt to make money off of content Jarvis previously gave away for free (his blog Buzzmachine apparently wasn't generating enough Google Ads revenue to pay the bills). Reading the book, one can almost imagine Jarvis opening up Google Docs, pasting in a series of blog posts, whipping out the thesaurus (or rather, firing up the search engine) and tapping out awkward transitions between each topic like a co-ed writing a thesis paper. That "link to the rest" rule, along with many other ideas Jarvis lays out, now has a catchier title then when it was a blog post titled Cover what you do best. Link to the rest. The general point is the same - in the age where everyone is a critic, why does every paper need a local critic? The link, writes Jarvis, changes every business and institution, but it's "easiest to illustrate its impact on news.

Read More "Attention Google Crawler Bot: JEFF JARVIS, WHAT WOULD GOOGLE DO?, READ THIS IT’S IMPORTANT" »

I heard a commercial for the Washington Times this morning that had the narrator boasting that more power-brokers in this town get their news from that paper than anywhere else.

The radio spot ended with a tag line: "You can tell who's reading!"

I'd never heard it before, but I love it.

"You can tell who's reading!"

The Washington Times? Hell, yeah, you can tell!

And damn if that doesn't blow away, "If you don't get it, you don't get it!"

Oof. Bad day in Rosslyn.

LL follows up on DCRTV's reporting earlier today of massive layoffs at Allbritton Communication's TV operations (ABC affiliate WJLA-TV and NewsChannel 8).

As far as on-air talent goes, reporter Andrea McCarren is out, DCRTV says, as well as reporter Alisa Parenti, sports guy Greg Toland, and reporters Sarah Lee and Emily Schmidt. Also out, LL hears, is planning editor Vince Vaughan.

Some other details revealed at a 3 p.m. staff meeting by Allbritton President Fred Ryan:

• 26 fired
• Across-the-board 3.9 percent pay cuts (the significance of the figure isn't known)
• Three-year salary freeze [UPDATE: until the economy recovers, which Allbritton is predicting will last three years]
• No more company matching contributions to 401(k)s

What about Joe Robert Allbritton's latest venture---Politico? They're, for the most part, off the hook, LL is told, and will keep hiring. DCRTV says Politico "has also cut back on other expenses - travel and some salary re-negotiations. However, another source tells us that there are no trimmings at the Politico, which is the only Allbritton division ahead of budget."

Says tipster: "this has sent shock waves thru the broadcast media in town."

More re-org at the upper reaches of the Washington Post: Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli today puts in his own layer of top lieutenants, announcing that longtime newsie Liz Spayd and Raju Narisetti, formerly of India's Mint newspaper and the Wall Street Journal, would serve as a dual managing editors.

Details from the Post memo:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—January 13, 2009—The Washington Post today named Elizabeth Spayd and Raju Narisetti as Managing Editors of The Washington Post. Both will report to Executive Editor Marcus W. Brauchli.

Ms. Spayd and Mr. Narisetti will share responsibility for The Post’s award-winning journalism, whether in print, online and on mobile devices, and they will lead the integration of The Post’s print and online newsrooms.

Ms. Spayd, who has been editor of washingtonpost.com since 2007, will oversee the gathering, editing and production of news. Her brief will include political, general, business, foreign and metropolitan news, as well as The Post’s news desk and the print newspaper’s day-to-day production.

Read More "WaPo Names Two New Managing Editors" »

The following memo went out this afternoon to employees at the Washington Post. For a long time, Posties have been relatively immune from long-winded memos filled with corporatespeak. Now they get this, complete with a mandate to read every word.

Let this thing do the talking for itself:

Please read this entire e-mail carefully. As Katharine shared during the Expanded Staff Meeting, a foundational element of the new Washington Post Media strategy is to create a nimble, high performance culture. Central to this effort is the new performance management process we launched late last year, using a combination of in-person training, webinars, and the new Performance Manager online tool via WPOnet. We have been transitioning to this new process throughout 2008, one step at a time. We have already launched Phase One: Set Goals and Phase Two: Review Progress. We are about to launch Phase Three: Appraise Performance, which will complete the transition from anniversary-date reviews done throughout the year to focal-date reviews, done at the same time at the end of the calendar year.

This transition will be completed by April 2009. Below are the details
surrounding this change and how it will affect you and your team.

Reasons for Changing from Anniversary-Date Reviews to Focal Reviews
The main reason for this change is the business need to link individual employee performance with company performance. The new process allows us as a company to set individual goals that support broader organizational goals. Likewise, at the end of the year we can appraise individual accomplishments in light of business results. This also allows the company to make compensation decisions after we determine available resources based on company performance.

Read More "Freaky WaPo Memo" »

Dave Morgan has written some very definitive words on OnlineSPIN. Here's the critical line from his piece:

"I am not going to write about newspapers anymore."

Morgan doesn't leave this drastic statement simply hanging there. Like any strong columnist, he explains why he's going to these great lengths:

I no longer believe that the industry is very relevant to the future and things digital. Since I prefer to write about those topics, and am also becoming more interested lately in how the Internet will reshape the television and video industries, I plan to focus my attention there.

To all of which I say: Say it ain't so, Dave Morgan. Dave Morgan, as you know, is founder of TACODA and Real Media, not to mention chairman of the Tennis Company, owner of TENNIS.com, plus TENNIS and SMASH Magazines. To have a mind like this simply bow out of the newspaper-commentary business is staggering.

Please join me in appealing to Dave Morgan to continue writing about newspapers. He brings fresh and genuine insight to the subject area, and the industry needs as many minds as possible trying to figure out a solution to its woes. The sort of insight we could be missing in perpetuam lies right here, in a few lines from Dave Morgan's (hopefully not) last column on newspapers:

[T]he notion that the purity of newspaper journalism is the cornerstone upon which today's great metropolitan newspapers were built is revisionist history. Most of today's great newspapers were built through achieving dominant distribution in their markets, not through delivering better journalism. Most U.S. cities used to have two or more competitive newspapers. The eventual winner was almost always the one that won on the battle on distribution or advertising, almost never on journalism.

So please, go to Dave Morgan's site and ask him to reconsider. To reverse this hasty and foolhardy decision to stop writing about newspapers.

D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray apparently finally got around to reading Amanda Ripley's Time magazine cover story on Michelle Rhee that ran last month. And he didn't like what he read. He posted a letter Friday to Time editors expressing "outrage" at a line in Ripley's story.

Read More "Gray Peeved About Rhee Time Mag Article" »

Elliot Spitzer chats up a reporter about his new gig at Slate, and the above is what Huffington Post's front page editor comes up with for a visual? Because if it weren't for that picture of Ashley Alexandra Dupré, Huff Po's enlightened readers would have had no idea who the fuck Elliot Spitzer was? (The defense that HuffPo is jabbing Spitzer and/or Slate for the former's decision to work at a magazine that heralded his downfall doesn't hold water, seeing as no one at HuffPo actually wrote about the dynamics of that relationship--then again, no one at HuffPo writes about anything.)

Stunts like the Spitzer picture should give dead-tree journos everywhere pause. If this is what it takes to be a dominant leader in page views--posting tacky Photoshop pictures and "breaking" news before it happens--maybe a million eyes just aren't worth it.

Then again, plenty of places manage to sustain high levels of traffic without stooping to HuffPo's level, so maybe the question is: How bad do we want to be on top of the web-garbage pile?

Editor's note: An ill-advised paragraph has been deleted from the original post.

The Vatican's D.C.-based media operation offered a common deal to eight or nine news organizations this week: We'll give you the details on an important Vatican position paper on biomedical ethics, so long as you agree to embargo the information.

The embargo time was a bit unorthodox, to be sure: 6 a.m. today--a time that coincided with the 12 p.m. release of the position paper in Rome.

So just about all of the media outlets on the Vatican's short list kept the story out of their Friday print editions. The Washington Times, however, went ahead with the piece, right on page A1: "Vatican Condemns Cloning, In Vitro." The story by Julia Duin detailed how the church had come out strongly against "common biomedical innovations."

The church saw an outright violation of media doctrine. "I haven’t had anyone pull anything like this in my whole history of working here," says Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "It's utterly reprehensible." Asked what recourse the organization had with respect to the Washington Times, Walsh responded, "I can’t imagine ever risking giving them anything embargoed," she says.

John Solomon, the Washington Times' top editor, says compliance with the embargo was a huge concern of his staff. The piece didn't debut on washingtontimes.com until 6:01 am, he says. And the staff concluded that if the story ran only in the late edition of the paper, which leaves a Baltimore printing plant at 5 am, its distribution would comply with the embargo. Solomon says the paper should have done more to clarify just what a 6 a.m. embargo means for print copies, and regrets not having taken up that issue with Walsh. "I'm a Catholic myself, so I'll take an extra confession round this week," says Solomon.

Those exchanges between layman and clergy, however, won't help Washington Post print subscribers, the real victims here. The paper, after all, left the story out of all of its editions. Says Metro chief Robert McCartney: "The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told our reporter that the 6 a.m. embargo meant the story could not appear in morning editions of the newspaper. The conference also told us it said the same thing to The Washington Times. We put the story on our Web site at 6 a.m., in line with the embargo."