Craig Whitney, the man who kept all the thug motherfuckers in check as the Standards Editor of the New York Times, is retiring after more than four decades at the paper. You can read a very gracious speech about him by Bill Keller by clicking here, or just read this excerpt, which is Whitney's career highlight:

And along with Phil Corbett, his successor, he has worried about all the words that appear not only in the paper but, now, on the web (a recent exchange with a department head involved the appearance of the word "pooping" in one of our sites).

Poop well in whatever you move on to, Mr. Whitney.


Just like in America, Russia has cranky old ex-military wingnuts. But over there they seem to have slightly more influence! Example: Someone wrote a story ("media" peg alert!) about a kabob house called the "Anti-Soviet Kabob House." Uproar ensued amongst Soviet wingnuts! Somebody else wrote about how ridiculous this was and now he's subjected to even more intense wingnuttery, to the point where his life may be in danger. The moral of the story is, God Bless America, where our wingnuts kill journalists less often than their wingnut counterparts elsewhere do.


Is Time Inc. for sale? No, says Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. He said at a conference that they'd still have it five years from now. Although if he could go back in time two years and sell it he totally would, in a flash.


Boy, the magazine industry sure isn't going to let Apple come between it and its readers, like Apple did to the music industry with iTunes. No way. The magazine industry wants to make its own iTunes-type thing, to cut out the middleman, and grab the dough. Well, you know how it is. Five years from now you walk back into the same bar and there's the magazine industry, sitting on the same stool, sipping the same beer, still talking about how it's gonna make that awesome new iTunes thing for magazines. Good luck, guys.

Page Six picked up on the story on Sunday, getting Burr to sort of recant. "The Post gets credit for raising the bar and bringing it to our attention. We're not going to give out perfumes any more," he told the paper. But what did the higher-ups at the Times think? Toohey sent the same letter to publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who wrote back himself and then passed it on down.

Here's how Standards Editor Craig Whitney handled the issue:

From: Craig Whitney
Date: Aug 20, 2007 12:38 PM
Subject: Chandler Burr's perfume dinners

Dear "Ellsworth Toohey" (I put the Ayn Rand name between quotation marks because you do in your e-mail address; please forgive me if it is not a pseudonym):

In answer to your letter to Arthur Sulzberger (and Page Six) about the perfume dinners that our "T" perfume critic, Chandler Burr, participates in, I can tell you that Mr. Burr, although not an employee of The Times but a freelance contract contributor, has been made aware that it would be a violation of our ethics policy for him to review any more of the perfumes used at the dinners you wrote about, since the parfumiers had made free samples available for that purpose. He understands that it was a mistake to have used sel de vetiver, since he had given that perfume a favorable review.

The dinners, however, are not hosted by him or by The New York Times; he does not charge attendees, the dinners' host does.

Thank you for writing.

Sincerely
Craig R. Whitney
Standards Editor

Give It a Rest

Craig Whitney notes our infatuation with the word "snarky," which seems to be growing; he finds six examples just in the last month or so.

Avenue Q, a snarky comic ode to the satisfactions of quasi-loserdom in your 20s. (Arts & Leisure, April 8)

Still, snarky sentences like those notwithstanding, it is hard to get a pulse going for this. (House & Home, March 29)

"We're not a snarky, mean, nasty brand." (all right, a quote, from Key, March 18)

The snarky, gossipy, anxious employees of the agency compose the collective narrator. (Book Review, also March 18)

Would today's critics have savaged Suetonius for writing snarky "pathography"? (again Book Review, again March 18)

Its famously snarky voice can appeal to enough readers to be profitable. (Sunday Styles, March 13)

The word is colloquial, and its primary meaning is "irritable, irascible." The currently faddish meaning of "irreverent, snide" can easily be conveyed by one of those words or something similar, without resorting to colloquialism or sounding as though we're trying too hard to be hip.

"Sorry to sound snarky," Craig says, "but enough already."