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NYT Slams Politico And Time For Scooping Rolling Stone On Its McChrystal Story

by Glynnis MacNicol | 12:05 pm, June 28th, 2010

» 9 comments

President Obama may have solved his McChrystal problem but the long tail of the now-infamous Rolling Stone profile is still kicking around the media world. In his column today at the New York Times, David Carr takes Politico and Time to the woodshed for posting a full PDF of the McChrystal story before Rolling Stone made it available on their site.

Some background: The Rolling Stone article began making the rounds on Monday afternoon after RS sent out an advance copy to the AP “with restrictions” (it was about this time the administration first learned of the piece, also). By the time the nation awoke Tuesday morning the story, and the news Obama had called McChrystal back from Washington, were leading most news reports. A short time thereafter both Politico and Time posted a full PDF of the story because it was not available elsewhere to the public (before it went up I pulled excerpts from Marc Ambinder‘s blog). RollingStone.com didn’t post the story until 11am. Says Carr: “It was a clear violation of copyright and professional practice, and it amounted to taking money out of a competitor’s pocket.”

Really? What if the competitor is not savvy enough to understand how to make money? Carr goes on:

Several commentators suggested that Rolling Stone brought this on itself by not immediately publishing the McChrystal article on its own site (the magazine had planned to publish online but on its own schedule).

“That’s like saying, ‘She had it coming,’ ” Eric Bates, executive editor of Rolling Stone, said in an interview on Thursday. “The decision about when to publish our material is ours and ours alone. It was completely inappropriate.”

First, it is not like saying she had it coming. At all. Secondly, it’s great that Rolling Stone had intended to “publish on its own schedule”, however, to the best of my knowledge the breaking news cycle rarely allows anyone to do to anything on their own schedule. And this was big, breaking news. That Rolling Stone was caught off guard by the impact of their own article is one thing — many people were. That by the middle of the night on Tuesday someone at Rolling Stone didn’t realize their story would be leading the national news cycle and make decisions — decisions based on how the news works in 2010 — accordingly, strikes as astoundingly short-sighted.

This was not an interesting profile with catchy anecdotes that some other news organizations stole for a quick traffic grab (nor can I imagine anyone doing that). This was a story whose impact was of immediate, international importance; in essence the story was the story. Under any other circumstance I think Carr would be right on the money in scourging either Politico or Time for their actions, however, if anything this instance (this very rare instance…when was the last time a magazine story had this kind of immediate impact?) is, if anything, the exception that proves the rule.

It may not be nice that the story got posted in full elsewhere, it may not be fair, but I also think that to presume you own the “right to publish on a schedule you chose” when what you are publishing is determining the course of action is a highly controversial war, is downright naive.

David Carr, Michael Hastings, Politico, Rolling Stone, Stanley McChrystal, Time

Puter Boi

I suspect that if this had happened to Glynnis, she might be singing a different tune.

“The Rolling Stone article began making the rounds on Monday afternoon after RS sent out an advance copy to the AP “with restrictions”

What restrictions? Perhaps you should clue us in. Do you know what the restrictions were? Do you even care?
valkyrie101

All and all, whether a couple of on-line news sources jumped the gun or not, Rolling Stone got massive media coverage of this story. In fact that jumping the gun might have helped out.
weatherman

I don’t agree with the conclusion of this article at all. It’s one thing to report on an article, it’s another to republish it. It’s the Rolling Stone’s piece, and it’s up to them to decide when and how to republish it. There was no “news value” in publishing the whole piece when it easily could have been quoted with substantially the same effect.
Puter Boi

I will NOT stop my footsteps and you can’t make me!!!!!!!
http://SailRabbits.com Magister

I agree with @weatherman and disagree with @Glynnis.

It was Rolling Stone’s story and no matter the impact or how ill-advised others may think, it’s their place to determine the publication schedule for their work.
http://SailRabbits.com Magister

BTW: I just noticed that this blogpost doesn’t include a link to Mr. Carr’s column, which includes the quote from a Time spokesperson admitting it was a mistake and promising that it won’t happn again.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Schreiber/833980397 Michael Schreiber

Glynnis — couldn’t disagree more. Carr’s analogy is right on. Here’s mine:

Let’s say you are a book reviewer and you are provided with an advanced copy of a book that identifies the ‘real’ JFK assasin… and the killer happens to be… I don’t know… Don Rickles (I think he was in Dallas that day).

Anyway, you were provided the book so that you could write about it, and hopefully talk it up, so that when it hits the shelves in a week or two, people go out and buy it. You could even print a spoiler and identify Rickles as the killer. But that’s not enough for you, is it?

According to your logic, because this is a big, earth shattering story, with far reaching consequences for both the worlds of politics and comedy, rather than be limited to writing about the book and quoting from it liberally, you decide to send the manuscript to a vanity press publish the entire volume yourself. You do include the original author’s name, though you also include a new forward, written by you, of course. You sell ‘your’ book on street corners, small book stores, and comedy clubs. You make a modest but nice profit.

Meanwhile, once the real book is released, the author, New Gingrich, takes a 20% hit in sales because thanks to you, his book is already all over the place. You think to yourself, 20% isn’t that much… except that for Newt, who took a big advance, it’s huge. He ends up owing the publisher money, which he can’t pay, because he already bought a boat (which he named “The Don Rickles”) Newt ends up losing the boat, his credit is destroyed, and his movie deal with HBO falls through (Paul Giamatti had been tapped to play Rickles).

And all this happened because you thought you could publish whatever you want, even if it didn’t belong to you, as long as it was important.

And also, I don’t think this comes anywhere close to falling under fair use.
http://SailRabbits.com Magister

Great analogy, Michael.

I had considered using a “wonder drug” myself, but now that I’ve read the RS piece, it really wasn’t that important and much more in-line with Rickles killing Kennedy.
http://SailRabbits.com Magister

Clarification: The RS story became important because its results, but I personally did not think the revelations were particularly earth-shattering and it read like pretty much every other big RS piece. Therefore, like the mag, I don’t know that I would’ve done anything different toward its marketing, myself.