FTFA:

It wasn’t one of the owners, Schilling said, the manager, general manager, assistant general manager, anyone in uniform, the head trainer, the massage therapist, the medical operations coordinator. Schilling apparently didn’t stop talking long enough to realize that if he eliminated everyone but one person, people would know who the person was.

As it turned out, this was a completely incestuous story. Schilling is an ESPN commentator. He told of the alleged PED idea in an interview on ESPN radio in Boston. Then later in the week, last week, ESPNBoston.com reported that two investigations, one by Major League Baseball, the other by the Red Sox, found Schilling’s claim to be baseless.

One more thing. The member of the Red Sox organization who made the suggestion to Schilling was said to be Mike Reinold, the team’s head physical therapist. Who said it? ESPNBoston.com, of course.

Keep grinding that ax, Murray. Maybe the "Old" Times will take you back!

Classy. We should stop linking to bloggers.

Generally, however, the Daily News has done a far more impressive and aggressive job than The New York Times

If only the Times could have emulated the News by publishing a book about what a total asshole Roger Clemens is, breaking the "he was banging a young chippy on the side" story, being an open forum for any confident prediction the prosecution felt like issuing while simultaneously mocking Clemens' defense attorney as a overmatched hick blowhard, and finally, throwing a loud, many-months tantrum after Clemens was almost immediately acquitted by the jury. You know, "an impressive job."

Generally, however, the Daily News has done a far more impressive and aggressive job than The New York Times, whose sports section these days seems more interested in snowboarding and dog-sledding than legitimate news.

As much of a total idiot that Chass has been from the day he was given the boot from the Times, he's right about their current sports section. There are days when seeing all those articles about dog shows, skiers, and other minor sports, I think I'm looking at a stack of Sports Illustrateds from 1954 or 1955, when it had more cover stories about animals than it did about baseball or football.

In fact, the Miami New Times has appeared so frequently – 9 days in a 12-day span before Sunday – that the papers’ names seem to be blending and emerging as the Miami/New York New/Old Times or simply the New/Old Times.

Gold Jerry! Gold!

If only the Times could have emulated the News by publishing a book about what a total ####### Roger Clemens is, breaking the "he was banging a young chippy on the side" story, being an open forum for any confident prediction the prosecution felt like issuing while simultaneously mocking Clemens' defense attorney as a overmatched hick blowhard, and finally, throwing a loud, many-months tantrum after Clemens was almost immediately acquitted by the jury. You know, "an impressive job."

You mean like the NY Times did with the various Hilary Clinton scandals? At least 4 times William Safire claimed his sources told him a Hilary indictment was on the way.

Fortunately the Times had learned its lesson by the time the Bush administration was beating the Iraq War drums ... oh.

Generally, however, the Daily News has done a far more impressive and aggressive job than The New York Times, whose sports section these days seems more interested in snowboarding and dog-sledding than legitimate news.

I assume that the Times would come in fourth in most fair comparisons of metro sports sections. I don't read Newsday often enough to say. I guess it's possible the Times is third.

The Daily News has plenty of annoying sports columnists...in part because they have lots of sports columnists. The Times just isn't relevant. (I don't think they were relevant in Chass' day either for that matter.)

Unless one associates the Times solely with quality and tabloids solely with dreck, there's no mystery here. Tabloids get readers by covering sports and local news (especially crime) really well. There's no question that the Daily News kills the Times day after day on city news, just murders them. The Post varies more. But that's because the Daily News cares a lot about it, and the Times doesn't care much at all.

Same with sports (though this has maybe closed recently.) If you can't break news stories in the DN sports, you're done. The Times isn't really trying on that level.

In national political news, the Times cares a lot and the DN mails it in, and the disparity is vast, and of course even more vast in international news or arts or books or things like that.

But it is easy to both believe the Times is by far the greatest newspaper in the country, maybe the world, and that the DN beats it silly in sports and local news.

The fact that the title of the blogpost can be sung as a line of Joy Division's "They Walked in Line" is unsettling, I find.

But it is easy to both believe the Times is by far the greatest newspaper in the country, maybe the world, and that the DN beats it silly in sports and local news.

Of course, although if you look at the Times' Sunday and Monday sports sections during the baseball and football seasons, you can see that it's not a matter of talent or resources, it's a matter of some stupid ####### sports editor whose apparent mission in life is to cram every sob story and political angle down their readers' throats, and the more it involves women or minor sports the better. On Sundays and Mondays it's the best sports section in the country, and for the other five days it's pretty close to being the worst.

Lead sports story on the Times website right now, with a joint byline of two Times staff writers:

At Dog Show, Judge Defends His Fairness

i have to admire chass' determination in holding his grudge. as i comment regularly, one of the big advantages in life is the trait of persistence. the ability to 'sustain'

and boy, chass is sustaining his drilling of his ex-employer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/joe-sexton-tinkerer-in-chief-bolts-times.html

New York Magazine
2/1/13
"Tinkerer-in-Chief Bolts Times: Joe Sexton’s Innovative, Profane Reign"
By Joe Hagan

"Do sh!t you’re not supposed to do.” That’s how Joe Sexton, who as New York Times sports editor has been behind some of the paper’s most groundbreaking recent work, describes his guiding philosophy. On the front page of his section, he exploded Times conventions, running a panorama of Walden Pond at dusk, sideways across the fold, for a story on long-distance swimming, and teased an article on J.?R. Smith with an arresting picture of the Knicks guard’s densely tattooed body. (“Photos and interview, pages D4–5.”) When no players made the Baseball Hall of Fame last month, a legacy of the game’s steroid era, Sexton left the top three quarters of the page jarringly blank: “And the Inductees Are …” After NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard died at 28, he ran a three-part epic on the brain-damaged player. His cri de coeur, “Snow Fall,” which integrated computer-animated displays into a multimedia megastory on a deadly avalanche, was heralded as the Way Forward for Serious Journalism.

For the Times, the future is about to leave the building.

On January 24, deadline day for the buyouts the paper offered as part of a companywide cost-cutting purge last month, Sexton announced he was leaving to take a new job at the nonprofit muckraking outfit ProPublica. Today is his last day at the paper. Executive editor Jill Abramson, for whom Sexton was a front-line lieutenant in her quest to reinvent the Times, says his departure makes her “very, very, very sad.” [...]

“Snow Fall” was from the outset a Ruthian swing for the fences. But the idea of reinventing multimedia journalism around a tale of some backcountry skiers, and not, say, Syrian rebels, required some hard selling. “I had to think that through and come to peace with that,” Abramson says.

The story, a 17,000-word, 360-degree exploration of a single avalanche in Washington, took six months for reporter John Branch (who also wrote the Boogaard series) and a dozen other staffers to complete. Presenting the finished product to the top editors, Sexton added a flourish. “I bought them all ski mittens and ski mufflers and hot chocolate,” he recounts. “Without getting too f****** self-important or cocky, it’s a pretty dramatic realization of an integrated online bit of storytelling.”

“Snow Fall” produced 3.5 million page views in the first ten days. “The world went f****** insane,” Sexton says. For all the enthusiasm toward the project within the Times, though, the story will probably remain an outlier. During a postmortem held by Abramson, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and new Times CEO Mark Thompson, the executives discussed how often they could invest in a story of that scale. “My big fear,” Abramson says, “is that every proposal I get now is going to be a pitch to do a 30,000-word piece with every kind of resource the newsroom can muster.”

Joe Sexton: Good riddance. What a waste of newsprint.

As much of a total idiot that Chass has been from the day he was given the boot from the Times. . .

Didn't Chass volunteer for a lucrative buy-out, to go with his lucrative pension for 39 years with the NYT? Not exactly booted, although he does seem to miss the status he enjoyed before he became a mere blogger.

"Without getting too f****** self-important or cocky...

"I'm only as self-important and cocky as I deserve to be, because I am a genius."

As much of a total idiot that Chass has been from the day he was given the boot from the Times. . .

Didn't Chass volunteer for a lucrative buy-out, to go with his lucrative pension for 39 years with the NYT? Not exactly booted, although he does seem to miss the status he enjoyed before he became a mere blogger.

It was voluntary in the sense that he could've refused the offer and hung around like a lame duck. But it was the Times that took the initiative and made the offer in the first place. It wasn't as if Chass woke up one morning and out of nowhere decided he'd rather be a blogger.

I've known plenty of journalists who've taken buyouts, and not a single one of them has subsequently acted towards his or her former employer in the petulant way that Chass has in the past five years. He denies that he was effectively fired, but if that were really the case the body language of his blogging sure suggests otherwise. The irony is that it's almost certain that he was offered the buyout for purely financial reasons, not because the Times took a look at his column and realized that they were paying Abe Simpson to yell at a cloud.

I've known plenty of journalists who've taken buyouts, and not a single one of them has subsequently acted towards his or her former employer in the petulant way...

Jay Mariotti was worse after he left the Sun-Times (See Jay the Rat BY ROGER EBERT for more info), but his five-year probation sentence seems to have shut him up.

http://www.murraychass.com/?p=3335

PRECEDING POSADA’S POSITION
By Murray Chass
May 18, 2011 [...]

Insubordinate. That word appeared in an article about Posada in Sunday’s New York Times and triggered a flashback, a very personal flashback. Three years ago this past March 31, the sports editor of the Times, Tom Jolly, accused me of being insubordinate.

He ignorantly leaped to that charge because the baseball editor, Jay Schreiber, told him I had “declined a request for reporting help.”

Some background will put my experience in perspective and explain why I understand Posada’s position last weekend.

At the time, the financially stricken Times was desperately trying to shed some of its most veteran, highest-paid reporters and columnists. The situation struck me as being similar to the Florida Marlins shedding their best, highest-paid players after they won the World Series in 1997.

In an effort to induce me to leave, Jolly told me I would have to give up the baseball column I was writing and return to reporting, which had been my assignment from July 1969 until January 2004. He knew from previous conversations that I would not do that but figured I would instead leave the newspaper with the attractive buyout that was being offered.

Along the way, Jolly told me a series of blatant lies, but his most egregious act was his accusation that I was insubordinate.

On that day, March 31, Schreiber called me, as he had hundreds of times, presumably to ask me for help on a story but never said why he was calling. I told him I was not prepared to work because I had not decided what I was doing.

Instead of telling me what he needed, he ran to the sports editor and told him I refused to work. The accusation of insubordination followed in an e-mail later that day, as in “declining assignments represents insubordination.”

I was familiar with plenty of stories of reporters refusing assignments, most of them related by Schreiber, but none of them had ever been accused of insubordination. [...]

I don’t know how Tom Jolly got his job with the Times, but he is no longer sports editor. His superiors removed him, belatedly, I was told, because they were unhappy with the Times’ embarrassingly erroneous coverage several years ago of the Duke lacrosse incident.

I do not regret my decision to reject Jolly’s ploy to have me return to reporting. I have enjoyed continuing to write columns on this Web site (this is No. 333), but in thinking about that charge of insubordination, I retrieved from my files an e-mail I wrote in response to one threatening “to address this in a formal setting with representatives of labor relations and the guild…”

“I would have enjoyed the meeting or grievance hearing,” I responded, “that would have resulted: my record of 33 consecutive years (1970-2003) of working without missing a day because of illness or injury against your day of insubordination.”