[First published in AM New York]

SOME OF OUR CITY‘s ever­-suspicious press corps are spotting conspiracies again.

Last week’s entirely creditable Pulitzer national reporting prize for The New York Times and its expose of killer railroad-crossings is being linked – much less creditably – with a sloppy Times debacle.  

The paper looked bad over its “Exclusive!” deal with Columbia University, agreeing to report the findings of the school’s investigation into alleged anti­Semitism among the faculty, without reporting any aggrieved reaction to those findings.

Now there are mutterings that it might be worse – that the paper’s reward for treating the anti-Semitism investigation somewhat blandly wasn’t just being given the university’s report ahead of any other news outlet. It was getting Columbia President Lee Bollinger‘s vote in the Pulitzer Prize Board for the railroad story.

But the fact is, events on the day the Times put its Columbia story together argue against any such conspiracy.

The Times has a policy clearly enshrined: “We do not promise sources that we will refrain from seek­ing comment from others on the subject of the story.” However, in its disingenuous public “mea culpa” published days after the outcry, Times management said: “In this case, editors and the writer did not recall the policy.”

Thankfully though, higher-ranking staff who attend­ed that afternoon’s “Page One” meeting were not so disingenuous, and DID recall the policy. They ordered their education reporter to seek out further reactions, despite her agreement with Columbia’s press office. It was what the paper lamely called “the lateness of the hour” that had prevented a full range of criticisms being gathered.

But the senior executives’ earlier alarmed response certainly doesn’t fit with any top-level deal to secure a Pulitzer vote, does it?

THE EFFECTS OF TiVo, and other forms of domestic digital video recording (DVR), are causing mount­ing horror among TV moguls. That’s despite what they say in public about taking it all in stride – and having an armory of measures to deal with viewers’ growing habit of skipping commercials.

In ruminating among themselves, though, executives do sound rattled. Bob Wright, CEO of NBC-Universal, admitted at last week’s National Cable & Telecommunications Association conference, that he felt the industry has “gone too far with the dis­tribution of DVRs.” He complained that the tech­nology “doesn’t help any one of us, quite frankly.”

FIRST, EXECUTIVE EDITOR Leonard Downie acknowledged the amount of verbiage in the Washington Post is “daunting,” and that “we want to make it easier to get through the newspaper.”

Now this week, Bill Keller, Executive Editor of The New York Times, sent an internal memo urging his staff to “fight bloat“. Keller insisted “a skillful writer … can do full justice to most news stories in under 900 words … Writing tight is a discipline. It takes work.”

Couldn’t help but notice … Keller’s cry for brevity amounted to 1,009 words.

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