The Pentagon Papers Of Our Time. This is the title being given to the new Wikileaks release of more than 90,000 military documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan. It’s hardly surprising given the parallels often drawn between Afghanistan and Vietnam — but what are the real similarities and differences? James Fallows makes some comparisons in The Atlantic.

If readers feel like online publications (or the online counterparts to print publications) are often poorly edited or have an unusually large number of typos, they aren’t imagining things. In entering the digital age, copy-editing standards seem to have become more lenient. The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal makes the case for why copy-editing might make a comeback. For journalism’s sake, let’s hope he’s right.

Mark Coatney, better known to many as the funny guy behind the Newsweek Tumblr account, just announced via his own personal Tumblr that he will be leaving his post at Newsweek — to take a job at Tumblr itself: My new job, basically, will be to take the lessons I’ve learned at Newsweek and bring [...]

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front. No one doesn’t have an opinion on things they know something about. I may have no opinion on who the best NASCAR driver is (and I don’t) but that would certainly change if I started paying attention to the sport. Coming in to last month, [...]

The world of traditional media has overturned in the past decade – and few have ridden the crest of this wave more savvily than Michael Kinsley. As a pundit on CNN’s “Crossfire,” editing Slate, experimenting with the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times, and now at The Atlantic, Kinsley’s philosophy has been an open desire to speak truth to power, and to bend the boundaries of where and how the media engages with its audience. Philip Bump examines the arc of Kinsley’s career, and just how ahead of the curve that arc has been.

Now that the controversy over the failure of the White House corps to criticize Helen Thomas has temporarily blown over, there is a new journalism controversy facing the DC press: should journalists go to the Biden’s house for a picnic and be Super Soaked by Rahm Emanuel.

The MLB should boycott the 2011 All-Star Game in Phoenix over Arizona’s harsh new immigration law.

That is the idea being set forth by activists at Change.org and Daily Kos, who view the influx of tourism and publicity Arizona will reap from an All-Star Game, prominently featuring Hispanic players, as unwarranted.

A generation removed from the Ronald Reagan era, it is often difficult to remember that the roots of America’s most beloved conservative were in Hollywood. The Atlantic has uncovered a poignant reminder of that: an episode of the 1950s program General Electric Theater starring Reagan and a pre-megastardom James Dean.

You know a television show is IMPORTANT television when both The Atlantic and The American Prospect are having online seminars dissecting every nuance, musical note, and unspoken glance. So it is with HBO’s Treme, the newest must-see television show for the media crowd, which premiered this Sunday and is already greenlighted for a second season.

Everyone has that one incorrigible media junkie in their circle of friends. You know, the one who greets you every morning with “did you see the latest Griff Jenkins ambush video?” or “Michael Calderone is leaving Politico!” Turns out there’s an entire industry of those people (if not an entire nation), and The Atlantic Wire has taken on the formidable task of chronicling their information consumption habits. Here’s your semi-weekly Media Diet.

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced nominations for their annual National Magazine Awards last week, and for the first time included a brand new category: Magazine of the year. The official press release from the Magazine Publishers of America, defines the new award as, “honor(ing) publications that successfully use both print and digital media in fulfilling the editorial mission of the magazine.” Let’s take a look at the first time honorees: The Atlantic; Fast Company; Glamour; Men’s Health; and New York.

Headline blogger Andrew Sullivan (who left Time for The Atantic just over three years ago) is really not at all happy with last week’s redesign of the Atlantic.com’s powerhouse website and is making his dislike known. Really known. Behold.

After releasing a pretty inclusive list of the Top 25 Right-Wing Journalists in America, Daily Beast columnist Tunku Varadarajan took on the other half of the aisle, putting together a list of the most powerful and influential American liberals.

Last Monday, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote a piece on Andrew Sullivan, staff writer at The Atlantic, maître d’ of The Daily Dish, and all-around nabob of web journalism. It was not a very nice piece. Most of it is assigned to an insidious strain of anti-Semitism to which Sullivan, wittingly or not, is supposed to have fallen prey . . .

Perhaps in the future, in an over-perfected, suspense-less, Gattaca universe, men will come with LED displays on their foreheads that read: “I mean business” or “I’m deliberately wasting your time,” or, “Actually, I’m gay,” or “I’ll marry you, but we’ll loathe each other and I’ll leave you for a 20-year old when you’re 37.”

This time around the joke appears to be on Iran. According to a recap at The Atlantic, Charles Davis, a freelance journalist and blogger at the website Dissident Voice, penned a satirical, fake news piece yesterday titled “EXCLUSIVE: Obama Orders Air Strikes on Guantanamo Bay” which was subsequently picked up by Iran TV.

“One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news.”

On Friday, David Brooks used his New York Times column to announce the first round of his Sidney Awards for the year’s best magazine essays. It was a varied and inspired list — except out of the six essays chosen, none were written by women. Today, in his second set of winners, that wrong was righted. But, two out of 14?

What can we learn about New York Times columnist David Brooks through his favorite essays of the year, published annually as The Sidney Awards? Well, he loves The New Yorker, paid special attention to the health care debate and, uh… doesn’t read the work of too many women. Fortunately, another batch is coming Tuesday.

The Atlantic’s Jim Warren, former managing editor and Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, attended the Second City 50th anniversary event in Chicago, which featured alumni of the comedy institution — including a very forthcoming Stephen Colbert. Colbert, who sat for a panel discussion with writers of “The Colbert Report,” moderated by NPR’s Peter Sagal, talked about the jokes he held back at the 2006 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, what he thinks of Glenn Beck and why he couldn’t help himself from liking Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Comparing his blog to The Economist and the old Talk of the Town at the New Yorker, Andrew Sullivan ended his December vacation to respond to criticism that erupted over blog posts by Patrick Appel suggesting that other people wrote posts that ended up on Sullivan’s Daily Dish at The Atlantic‘s website.

The initial, general consensus seems to be that President Obama exceeded expectations and that his “sober” Nobel acceptance speech — – which required him to walk a very tricky tightrope — will please the conservatives as well as the liberals as much as any speech by the president can. That said, for a Peace Prize speech the president spoke an awful lot about war. In fact, he mentioned ‘war’ 44 times during the speech. He mentioned ‘peace’ 29 times.

Now that the White House’s war on Fox appears to have simmered down it looks like they may have found a new target for their frustration with media coverage: Politico. Sort of. Now, if only every battle with the press represented a skit on The Daily Show.

Depending on what side of the political spectrum you fall, you might think a Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck 2012 ticket, were it come to pass, was either actual proof that the Mayans were right and 2012 is the year of the apocalypse, or that you are witnessing the political version of Super Friends.

Either way, it is an utterly unlikely scenario (but still really fun to think about.)

The internet was abuzz this weekend when Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fervent opponent of Israel and frequent Holocaust denier, was actually of Jewish ancestry. Many major media outlets proliferated the story, which has since been been refuted. Why did the web get fooled?