The column itself is inoffensive enough. He begins by lamenting the smug positions taken on global warming/climate change by some Congressmen in the wake of the recent blizzard in Washington…

When you see lawmakers like Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina tweeting that “it is going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries ‘uncle,’ ” or news that the grandchildren of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma are building an igloo next to the Capitol with a big sign that says “Al Gore’s New Home,” you really wonder if we can have a serious discussion about the climate-energy issue anymore.

…and it’s hard to argue that such displays will accomplish anything constructive. Friedman’s problems begin when he advocates widespread adoption of the term “global weirding” in place of “global warming” or “climate change.” The first problem is that this term barely outpaces “lamestream media” on the Juvenile-O-Meter. The second is that he already advocated for this term – and was criticized for it then – two years ago. NYT Picker singled him out last year for repeating himself almost verbatim, and it appears here he did something similar. Here’s what he said in 2007:

And sweet-sounding “global warming” doesn’t really capture what’s likely to happen. I prefer the term “global weirding,” coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest fires and species loss in other places.

Today, he said:

Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.

Additionally, he said the following in November of last year:

According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion … passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”

Now, add one more thing. The world keeps getting flatter — more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” — with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.

Today:

Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar.

Not as egregious as what NYT Picker pointed out, but awfully similar. Friedman’s point about projected population growth and renewable energy is valid, but if he simply repeats himself, he’ll get tuned out. A better solution for a column like today’s might be to put in blog format rather than print – that way, he can link to previous columns where he’s already said essentially what he intends to say, rather than regurgitating talking points. He does have an nytimes.com blog, but hasn’t used it in over two years. Such a forum would be a better fit for what he said today, and might help soften the criticism levied at him.

That, of course, and dropping “global weirding.”

While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?

Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson’s death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous. Sigh.

But frankly, I’ve got nothing better. So try this out: Matt Haughey selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12k was the most emblematic online event of 2009. Why? Because the amount seems both ridiculously high and preposterously low at the same time. It proved that if there was ever a time when you couldn’t tell what the fuck something was worth, this was it.

With Kim Kardashian making $10k per tweet, even internet fame seemed synchronously bankrupt and filthy rich. Or as someone else asked, how didn’t we notice that Perez Hilton had accidentally become more famous than his namesake Paris? And how is it possible that more people are reading Reblogging Julia than Julia herself?

So it’s time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title “Best Blogs” from this annual list and change it to “Most Notable” blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year’s list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.

So here they are, the 30 Best Blogs of 2009:

[Previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008.]

30) Dustin Curtis
Woe, the personal blog. It’s a small tragedy that the decade began with the medium being used primarily by single individuals to gather and share small insights, but ends with the impersonal likes of Mashable and HuffPo. In the age of more more more, it’s remarkable to see someone dedicate so much time to a single post, making sure the pixels are aligned and the words are all just right. Dustin Curtis’ personal site is one of the dying breed of personal bloggers who care about such things (similar to how Jason Santa Maria puts art direction into every one of his posts). Start with: The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X.
(See also: Topherchris, We Love You So, A Continuous Lean, and Clients From Hell.)

29) NYT Pick
The bloggers behind NYTPicker had quite a year: they got Maureen Dowd to admit to plagiarism, they pointed out several errors in the Times obituary of Walter Cronkite, and Times contributor David Blum was revealed and then un-revealed as one of them. In the process, they showed that blogs can comment on the New York Times in a more substantial way than making fun of silly Sunday Styles trend pieces. If anyone really still thought blogs couldn’t be the home of original reporting and research, NYTPicker proved them wrong. They watch the watchdogs! Just wait for an enterprising blogger to start NYTPickerPicker in 2010.

28) Gotcha Media
Every year it seems like a site should emerge to take the video aggregator trophy, but the space is still a hodgepodge of sporadically embedded YouTube clips. Gotcha Media was the closest to the quintessential destination for finding video events we remembered through the year, whether that be Kanye crying on Leno or Michele Bachmann leading a anti-health care prayercast.
(See also: Gawker TV and Mag.ma.)

27) Animal
As Virginia Heffernan recently asked in a recent NYT essay, what exactly should a magazine look like in the digital age? Once a sporadic print title, Animal is now one of the last remaining examples of what an underground magazine could look like online.
(See also: Black Book Tumblr and Scallywag & Vagabond.)

26) Shit My Dad Says
Several people tried to convince me to change this entire list to “Best Twitterers of the Year,” a listicle that someone probably should compile but which exceeds my pain threshold. In the meantime: “Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.”

25) The Rumpus
As literary magazines go, The Rumpus is something of a mess. Created by Stephen Elliott, who spent most of the year jostling around the country in support of his novel, The Rumpus defined itself mostly in opposition to what it is not. But columns by Rick Moody and Jerry Stahl, along with a rambling assemblage of interviews, links, anecdotes, reviews, and whatever fits onto the screen, make it the best case going for a reinvented online literary scene.
(See also: HTML Giant, The Millions, Electric Literature, and London Review of Books Blog.)

24) Best of Wikipedia
…Coprolalia, Foreign Accent Syndrome, Stendhal Syndrome, Dude, Mopery, Sokushinbutsu, Tyvek, Shm-reduplication, Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, Pica, Kayfabe…
(See also: Double Tongued.)

23) WSJ Speakeasy
It didn’t start off very well. In the backdrop of the Wall Street Journal announcing Speakeasy in June was the chatter about Rupert turning the internet into a clunky vending machine (put a quarter in, junk food drops out). And the coverage at this culture blog was spotty at first, but the gentility eventually morphed into a more conversational aesthetic.
(See also: NYT Opinionator.)

22) Script Shadow
“I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process,” said Tim Robbins’ cocky producer character in The Player in 1992, and Hollywood seems to have listened. By reviewing movie scripts before they get made into movies, this site turns the focus back onto the written word.
(See also: First Showing, Movie of the Day, and Go Into The Story.)

21) Newsweek Tumblr
It isn’t enough that Newsweek is the only mainstream media organization dangling their toes in the rocky stream of Tumblrland; it also happens to be doing it better than most of the kids. (NYTimes.com has been threatening to do “something interesting” with the medium for a couple months, but there’s still nothing to show for it.) It’s tricky for an established old media company to find the right voice on a new platform, but the Newsweek Tumblr has figured out how to mix their own relevant stories with the reblog culture.
(See also: Today Show Tumblr.)

20) Asian Poses
The Nyan Nyan. The Bang! The V-Sign. The Shush. These are just some of the poses Asian Poses introduced us to this year, illustrated by photos of cute Asian ladies. Is it offensive? Maybe, but many of the most interesting blogs straddle that offensive/not-offensive line. Also, based on the well-known “members of a group can make fun of that group and you can’t” rule of comedy, this is not offensive since it is run by a Chinese guy. But maybe it objectifies women! Color me confused-pose.
(See also: Stop Making That Duckface, This Is Why You’re Fat, Really Cute Asians, and Awkward Family Photos.)

19) Look At This Fucking Hipster
If you thought the Internet had run out of ways to mock hipsters, Look At This Fucking Hipster and Hipster Runoff proved you wrong this year. Look At This Fucking Hipster took the more direct approach, simply asking you to look at photos of these fucking hipsters, complete with caustic one-line captions. It may come as no surprise that the author, Joe Mande, appears to be a self-loathing hipster, posing in black-rimmed glasses and a flannel shirt on his website. Literary-minded hipsters are surely jealous of LATFH’s book deal.

18) Hipster Runoff
Hipster Runoff’s Carles took a more satirical approach, blogging about pressing hipster issues such as the music meme economy and whether you should do blow off your iPhone in fractured, “ironic quote-heavy” txt-speak. Many people suspected that “Carles” was actually Tao Lin, since Carles’ writing was so similar to Lin’s affectless prose, but Lin denies this. Whoever Carles is, he is most certainly another self-loathing hipster. He knows far too much about Animal Collective to be a civilian.

17) Reddit
There’s a long-standing joke on this annual list to mention Metafilter every single time. But this was the first year it seemed that more people were paying attention to what was going on in the conversation threads on Reddit. For the uninitiated: Reddit takes some of the features of Digg, mixes it with the aesthetic of Twitter, adds the editorial of Fark, and accentuates it with the comments of Metafilter. But better than that sounds.

16) Smart Football
If you had told me at the beginning of 2009 that Steve Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell would get into a heated debate about football esoterica, and that this debate would happen, in all places, within an internet comment thread, I would have said, “Yeah, and Brett Favre will have the best season of his life at 40.” But every once in a while intellectuals wander into sports, and recently the NFL seemed the place where the Chronicle of Higher Ed crowd is hanging. So if you want to get smart about football, this is the place to do it.
(See also: Deadspin and The Sports Section.)

15) Information Is Beautiful
Is it? Yes, but only in the hands of those who know its power.
(See also: Infosthetics, Data Blog, and NYT Bits Blog.)

14) Snarkmarket
It looks like a conspiracy that Snarkmarket has made this list a few times now, but unlike most blogs that become sedentary in their success, it just keeps innovating. This year, Robin Sloan quit his job at Current TV to become (among other things) a fiction writer — and one of the most fascinating ones on the scene in some time. Matt Thompson had been gigging at the Knight Foundation, but recently hopped to a new gig at NPR. With them being so busy, Tim Carmody settled in as the new scribe of ideas. If they let me give it a tagline, it would be “The BoingBoing it’s okay to like.”
(See also: Hey, It’s Noah and Waxy.)

13) Nieman Journalism Lab
Where were these guys when we needed them? Sure, it’s another think tank, but Nieman Journalism Lab has been putting its not-for-profit money where its mouth is by also breaking news, such as the item about Google developing a micropayments sytem, the crack-ass idea from the Associated Press to game search, and little factoids like NYT’s most frequently looked-up words. It also happens to be the only place still hiring journalists.
(See also: Reflections of a Newsosaur and Newspaper Death Watch.)

12) Anil Dash
At some point during the year, I asked Anil for an explanation in the upsurge of blog posts on his site. He said it was merely recognizing an opening: there are so few people writing intelligently about technology today. True! Daring Fireball may have the links, and TechCrunch may have the coverage, but there are scant intellectuals left in the space. When it was announced last month that he was leaving Six Apart to work for a new government tech startup within the Obama administration, the techno-pragmatism all made sense.
(See also: Obama Foodorama.)

11) Slaughterhouse 90210
Slaughterhouse 90210 combined lowbrow TV screencaps with highbrow literary quotes, making it kind of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of Tumblr blogs. Another comparison: an intellectual I Can Has Cheezburger. Seeing a quote from, say, The Bell Jar underneath a Friends screencap is pleasantly shocking — especially after you realize the quote fits the show perfectly — and a reassurance that it’s okay for smart people to like stupid things. Could be a good candidate for a book deal, if it weren’t for those pesky copyright issues.
(See also: The G Maniesto and Fuck Yeah Subtitles.)

10) Letters of Note
We’ve known for a while that the best blogs are dedicated to a precise nano-topic, but there is also a new thread emerging: the blog dedicated to disappearing technologies. The tagline of Letters of Note, “Correspondence deserving a wider audience,” says it all. There’s Hunter S. Thompson starting a screed “Okay you lazy bitch,” there’s Kurt Vonnegut writing his family from Slaughterhouse Five, there’s the letter from Mick Jagger asking Andy Warhol to design album cover art, and there’s J. D. Salinger’s hand-written note aggressively yet delightfully shooting down a producer who wants to turn Catcher in the Rye into a movie.
(See also: Significant Objects, Iconic Photos, and Unconsumption.)

9) Mediaite
Launching another media blog didn’t sound like rearranging Titanic deck chairs; it sounded like booking a flight on Al Quada Airlines to Jerusalem. But not even six months after launching, Mediaite was already on the Technorati 100, eventually landing somewhere around #30 on a list of players who have been there for years. Sure, it can go a little bananas with the seo/pageview bait, but it’s also one of the few entities in the whole bastardly New York Media Scene to actually have the will to take on Gawker (or its pseudo-sibling, The Awl).
(See also: Web Newser and Politics Daily.)

8) Clay Shirky
There were only, what, a dozen or so essays on his blog this year? But one of them, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, caused such a little earthquake in the industry that tremors were still echoing months later. Shirky is the only guy in the whole space who doesn’t sound like he has an agenda, who doesn’t have a consulting agency on the side that he’s pumping his half-baked theories into.
(See also: Umair Haque and The Technium.)

7) OK Cupid: OK Trends
Even the breeders in the crowd will be fascinated by the data porn on display here.
(See also: Music Machinery.)

6) Harper’s Studio
The book industry is about to go through the same disruptive changes that the music industry set upon a decade ago — this, it seems, almost everyone agrees upon. But just as with the previous natural cultural disaster, no one is sure how to prepare for the earthquake. The editors at the new Harper Studio are the most likely candidates for turning all the theory behind “the future of books” into actual functional products. An impressive list of inventive works on the horizon hints at their agenda, but the blog, which is something of a clearing house for discussing everything that has to do with the future of publishing, is like an R&D lab for print.
(See also: Omnivoracious, The Second Pass, The Penguin Blog, and Tomorrow Museum.)

5) Eat Me Daily
As one competing food blogger put it to me, Eat Me Daily is the Kottke of food blogs. Which, if you want to follow that obtuse metaphor, makes Eater the genre’s Gawker and Serious Eats its Engadget. And which, if you understand any of that at all, means that this blurb can end now.
(See also: Eater and Serious Eats.)

4) Mad Men Footnotes
As I wrote earlier, Mad Men Footnotes revived the moribund genre known as tv recaps.

3) TV Tropes
If you don’t know TV Tropes, it’s too bad, because I probably just ruined your life. If you’ve ever recognized a hackneyed plot device on a tv show and thought “I wonder if anyone else has thought of this,” the answer is: yes, a lot. I don’t even know where to suggest starting in this labyrinth, but try entries like Butterfly of Doom or Chekhov’s Gunman or Bitch In Sheep’s Clothing — or just hit the random item generator. My dream is to have Tarantino spend a month here and come out with his Twin Peaks.
(See also: Television Without Pity and Urban Dictionary.)

2) The Awl
The Awl is too good to exist, or so goes much of the catty banter in the media business scene. There is seldom a conversation of The Awl lately that doesn’t ask, “How the hell will they make money?” But let’s set aside that gaudy little question for a second and instead ask, “Why has The Awl become an internet love object?” I’ve done the math, and I have a theory, involving at least two factors: 1) It winks at all the sad internet conventions while both debunking and adopting them at the same time (Listicles Without Commentary and those Tom Scocca chats are the best example). And 2) it is willing to go to bat for the unexpected without sounding like one of those intentionally counter-intuitive Slate essays (Avatar and Garrison Keillor are two good recent examples). In short, it’s just less dumb than everything else. Even Nick Denton joked about it at launch, and I don’t know how they’ll survive either, but The Awl already exists in an admirable pantheon that includes Spy and Suck.
(See also: Kottke and Katie Bakes.)

1) 4chan
Go ahead, scoff. But I will tell you this: no site in the past year has better personified the internet in all its complex contradictions than 4chan. Blisteringly violent yet irrepressibly creative, vociferously political yet erratic in agenda, 4chan was the multi-headed monster that got you off, got you pissed off, and maybe got you knocked out. When I interviewed moot in February, I discovered a smart kid who had seen more by the age of 16 than someone who actually lived inside all six Saw movies. People tend to think of 4chan as pure id, but there are highly formalized rules (written and unwritten) within the community. Inside all the blustery fury of the /b/tards, there is more going on psychologically than we are equipped to understand yet.
(See also: Uncyclopedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Know Your Meme.)

Special thanks to these exceptionally nice people for contributing ideas to this list: Caroline McCarthy, Joanne McNeil, Melissa Maerz, Chuck Klosterman, Soraya Darabi, Mat Honan, Katie Baker, Erin Carlson, Noah Brier, Jason Kottke, Taylor Carik, Nick Douglas, Lockhart Steele, Matt Thompson, Anastasia Friscia, and Kelly Reeves.

The column’s title says it all really: “Times Standards, Staffers or Not.” In short, the paper will enforce the same rules on freelancers as it does on better paid staff members, despite the fact that the ethical guidelines are often antithetical to the unstable life of a freelance writer and may complicate one’s ability to do work elsewhere.

Whether it’s free travel or all-expense-paid press junkets, writers just scraping by are prone to accept any favors that will make their job or financial life easier, but that just will not work according to Hoyt:

These cases illustrate how hard it is for The Times to ensure that freelancers, who contribute a substantial portion of the paper’s content, abide by ethics guidelines that editors believe are self-evident and essential to the paper’s credibility but that writers sometimes don’t think about, or don’t think apply to their circumstances, or believe are unfair or unrealistic. Some writers do not read the guidelines carefully, and although they are encouraged to raise possible conflicts of interest with an editor, some don’t tell and are not asked.

The story of recently fired Times freelancer Joshua Robinson, just two years out of college, illustrates the conundrum perfectly. Robinson was fired for using his affiliation at the paper to score free airline tickets that he needed for an independent project. According to Hoyt, “He said he called himself ‘a reporter for The New York Times’ — which he is not — only to establish his ‘street cred’ with those he was soliciting, and not to imply he was on the newspaper staff.”

In other words: because the struggling paper relies so heavily on freelancers (meaning no salary or benefits for many Times contributors), they are required to do additional work elsewhere, even though it may affect their employment with the Times. But if you count the number of contributors who have run into similar ethical issues lately (Mike Albo comes to mind), then maybe the writers have weighed their options and trying to get away with something is worth it in an “every man for himself” world. Maybe it’s the paper being unrealistic and unfair.

“The paper wants to treat freelancers like staffers without the same pay or benefits, and without paying for their research,” one former columnist said. Times editors contend that “the most important consideration is that everything in the newspaper, no matter who produces it, must be free of even the smallest hint of undue influence,” while Hoyt suggests that writers keep slipping up because of the complicated guidelines.

But it seems pretty simple: pay them or let them fly.

Times Standards, Staffers or Not [New York Times]

But this weekend, Times watchdog blog NYTPicker caught another writer in an ethical pickle, as Harvard Business School professor and freelancer Prof. Mary Tripsas wrote a Sunday column about business management in which she praised the company 3M. Only 3M had recently arranged for researchers to come to headquarters “for a day-long briefing on the center, their travel and accommodations provided by the company.”

Via NYTPicker:

Most of her column focuses on 3M, which she describes as at the “forefront of a movement” that involves customers in the innovation process. After several paragraphs of worshipful description of the place and interviews with the executive in charge, Prof. Tripsas concludes: “[The center] has helped 3M to establish productive, long-term customer relationships.”

The blog has more on the specifics of Trispsas’ situation (Mediaite has contacted her for comment, as well), but this new instance of ethics violations calls into question a few larger issues:

By now, the Times must realize they have a real thorn in their sides due to NYTPicker’s existence. Even though it’s a small-time, insidery blog, they have proven that they will notice when the paper slips up, and at least a few people who care are paying attention. And yet direct violation of the rules is still occurring, which brings us to the writers and editors.

Are they being made aware of these rules? Are they choosing to ignore them? Do they know that NYTPicker has an eye on them? Whatever the case, they’re probably going to be “caught,” and likely fired (unless you’re David Pogue), so they need to adjust accordingly.

But more generally, maybe it’s time for the Times to rethink their stringent, intensely black-and-white policies. Freelancers are struggling and need to take their breaks where they can. Plus, the paper has cut many jobs, including many editors, making these things hard to catch. That’s not to say there should be a free-for-all of favors and freebies, but maybe these things can be judged on a case by case basis. Throw in a little bit of disclosure and you’ve got far less of a headache.

Of course, we have no guarantees of what the future holds. But, anxiety-fed gossip nothwithstanding, there is no further newsroom staff cut planned or foreseen, no “next round” on the agenda. It is my fervent hope that we will never endure another month like this one. Indeed, while the business climate remains cloudy, there are some hopeful signs — in the heft of the paper, in the display ads on the website — that we are over the worst of the economic upheaval. The company is hard at work on some promising ways to boost revenues and get back on a path to growth. More to come.

The problem is, last year had a similar eulogy, as noted by NYT Picker:

No, I do not see another round of newsroom staff reductions on the horizon. In fact, we are entering into the budget discussions for 2009 with a determination — shared by Arthur and Scott — to protect the journalistic team that is the engine of our long-term success….What [the recession] will NOT mean, I most fervently hope, is a surrender to the short-sighted, serial staff cuts that have hollowed out some of the nation’s great news organizations.

Clearly, the economic downturn and subsequent business maneuvers are ultimately out of Keller’s control, but that doesn’t make being a Times employee any less stressful in these turbulent times. You can read the rest of Keller’s memo from this year here.

Keller: There Is ‘No Next Round’ of Layoffs [The Observer]

Sound Familiar? Executive Editor Bill Keller Says No More Newsroom Cuts “Planned Or Foreseen.” Just Like He Said Last Year. [NYT Picker]

“These two items on successive Sundays late last month showed what can go wrong when journalists get too personal,” Hoyt wrote.

DeLaFuente used the Complain Box column — a space to write about “broader irritations of life, like loud music on the subway” — to kvetch specifically about a customer service incident, abusing his power along the way. One editor said the column “was like writing on New York Times stationery and then sending it out to a million and a quarter people.” Hoyt said, “The Times does not need the appearance that its journalists are using Complaint Box to air self-serving gripes.”

Buckley’s case, meanwhile, was a bit more controversial, and her ethical blunder a bit more egregious:

A Miami reader called attention to Buckley’s relationship with Joshua Woodward, the co-owner of the 8 oz. Burger Bar. It had been publicized earlier after Woodward was arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of causing the miscarriage of a child believed to be his by another woman.

Mediaite first noticed the Buckley fiasco via NYTPicker, though Hoyt notes that Buckley was ineligable to write for the Times at all, because she has gone on free press junkets as a travel reporter.

Plus, the Times ethics manual is pretty clear on the matter of shilling for loved ones:

No journalist may report for us about any travel service or product offered by a family member or close friend.

No gray area there, Gray Lady. Hoyt closed his column thusly:

In the end, there is a bright line here. Journalists cannot use the power of The Times, or any newspaper, for what can be construed as personal purposes. It is simply wrong to look as if you are getting even with a company, or writing a plug for family or friends.

Public editor, out.

Buckley’s five-page feature on Miami nightlife includes the seemingly innocuous plug, “Have a grass-fed beef burger topped with Bel Paese cheese and a Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale at 8 oz. Burger Bar,” but some blogger digging reveals that Burger Bar co-owner Josh Woodward had a “long, incredible and beautiful relationship” with the writer.

How would the Times ethics manual respond?

No journalist may report for us about any travel service or product offered by a family member or close friend.

Ouch. But then it turns into a brutal crime thriller, via NYT Picker:

Woodward and Buckley broke up just recently — apparently right before October 29, when the Miami Herald reported that the restaurateur had been taken into Miami police custody on charges in connection with the death of a 13-week-old fetus, reportedly his child. The Herald later reported that Woodward had been charged with murder.

The Herald’s story said that Woodward “was suspected of placing an unspecified powder in the pregnant woman’s vaginal area,” causing a miscarriage.

(In California, a crime is considered fetal homicide at eight to 10 weeks gestation as defined by the California Supreme Court. You can read more about the decision here.)

If this seems like the stuff of tabloids, it is — but only if your tabloids are filled with strictly media gossip. NYT Picker has a request for comment in with the paper’s public-relations department and will continue to update the story here. NYT Picker, ladies and gentlemen — just trying to keep your Paper of Record clean.

That question and others have come to light after a letter from Brauchli to now-resigned Post marketing director Charles Pelton, saying that he did know after all that the proposed dinners (ultimately aimed at making money) would be off the record, was sent to the Times by Pelton’s lawyer.

Today the New York Times ran a correction pertaining to two of its articles from the summer about the Post‘s Salon-gate:

An article on July 3 reported on aborted plans for the publisher of The Washington Post to hold corporate-sponsored dinner parties including Post journalists.

One issue in the controversy was that the dinners were being promoted as “off the record.” The article quoted The Post’s executive editor, Marcus W. Brauchli, as saying that the newsroom would “reserve the right to allow any ideas that emerge in an event to shape or inform our coverage.” By The Post’s definition of the term, that means the events would not be “off the record.”

On Sept. 12, an article in The Times reported that Charles Pelton, the marketing executive at the center of the plans, had resigned from The Post. That article, referring again to Mr. Brauchli’s comments at the time, reported that he said he had not understood that the dinners would be off the record.

However, in a subsequent letter to Mr. Pelton — which was sent to The Times by Mr. Pelton’s lawyer — Mr. Brauchli now says that he did indeed know that the dinners were being promoted as “off the record,” and that he and Mr. Pelton had discussed that issue.

Times spokesperson Diane McNulty told NYT Picker, a blog dedicated to tracking the New York Times which claims to be run anonymously by journalists, that “The note speaks for itself.” That said, the Times also buried the note as a correction.

After disabling current iterations of the program, the paper will launch another version, charging a monthly fee of $1.99 for the app, with more detailed subscription plans to follow. At this time, there are no plans to issue a refund. As a result, many customers — who thought they were buying an unlimited version of the service — are lashing out at the Times. Via NYT Picker:

“I Paid for a Year!” reads the headline of one scathing review on the iPhone app, from a user named Timburwolf. “Ok, hold on. I bought this months ago and I remember it saying it was a subscription App. But I paid for a year and now it says my subscription is up November 1. Is that even legal?”

Other review headlines call the move “despicable!” “appalling” and a “rip off,” and attack the NYT for its greed. Many of them demand a boycott of the NYT.

“The NY Times should be ashamed for their devious switcheroo,” reads another review. “I will delete [the App] and never purchase a NY Times app — I might never buy a newsstand copy of the paper either.” That’s not the kind of PR a paper needs these days.

A commenter points out that it may actually be Apple that’s stingy with the refunds when it comes to re-pricing applications, and that many companies are taking the losses themselves to reimburse angry customers. We’ll have to wait and see what’s worth more for the struggling Times: hoarding a bunch of unfair $9.99 payments or keeping the people pleased.

“I love Sarah Palin. I mean, I love her more than anyone because as a journalist she is the best story ever… It’s like Hollywood casting — when you have Meg Ryan playing a nuclear physicist or, you know, Calista Flockhart playing a Harvard lawyer — I mean, you’ve got this former beauty queen and sportscaster who is in the role of Dick Cheney, and it’s mesmerizing.”

— Maureen Dowd on Way Too Early With Willie Geist, showing her typical confidence in the abilities of women

Geist had Dowd call in to the show as his “Wake Up Call” to discuss her column in today’s New York Times comparing Sarah Palin to — who else? — Hillary Clinton. Here’s the crux:

In their vivid twin performances Sunday — Hillary on “Meet the Press” in Washington and Sarah at her farewell picnic in Fairbanks — two of the most celebrated and polarizing women in American political history offered a fascinating contrast.

Hillary, who so often in the past came across as aggrieved, paranoid and press-loathing, was confident and comfortable in her role as top diplomat, discussing the world with mastery and shrugging off suggestions that she has been disappeared by her former rival, the president.

Sarah, who was once a blazingly confident media darling, came across as aggrieved, paranoid and press-loathing in her new role as bizarre babe-at-large, a Nixon with hair extensions ranting about “American apologetics,” which sounds like a cross between apologists and Dianetics.

Once you get past the five separate opening paragraphs (MoDo is always so reluctant to part with her bon mots, to the detriment of her overall work), it actually makes some astute observations. She notes that Hillary Clinton has “lost that irritating question mark she used to carry around above her head like a thunder cloud: What is Hillary owed because of what she gave up, and went through, for Bill?” and “In this White House, Barack Obama is the pretty thing who is taken with Hillary’s serious, smartest-girl-at-Wellesley aura.”

She’s also quite right that Palin’s looks factored into her appeal, and her controversy. But noting that a dash of sex appeal adds to the intrigue is different than how she constantly sets up women as either attractive or smart, but never both. (This, by the way, dovetails with what she said on the Colbert Report back in December 2006 – I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like “the beautiful women want to be told they’re smart and the smart women want to be told they’re beautiful.”) Alas, this formulation of women seems to be Dowd’s only option, no matter what. It limits her enormously as a political observer.

But! That doesn’t mean her evaluation of Palin as an eventual GOP candidate isn’t relevant to this piece. Dowd thinks that Palin could “absolutely” be the nominee: “She is the first person to fuse politics with reality TV – I think she could absolutely be the nominee, because she’s sort of playing to people’s darker impulses and that core of the Republican party that is left – that is very bitter – is loving her.”

Related:
Sarah Grabs the Grievance Grab Bag From Hillary [NYT]
Dowd Plagiarizes Self! Re-uses “All Cage, No Bird” [NYT Picker]