The Observer reported tonight that the Times is going to be taking a sharp-edged tool to its stable of blogs, in keeping with more general cost-cutting measures. Whether this tool is a scalpel or an axe remains to be seen, but based on what executive editor Bill Keller told his staff earlier this month, some cuts are pretty much guaranteed:

One thing we are doing is taking a close look at our long roster of 70 or so blogs and our online verticals, as we call our focused packages of online content. We think we can save some slots there. Many of our blogs serve a valuable journalistic purpose... But if we find instances where a blog or a vertical is consuming considerable effort and expense with little reward, we're prepared to do some pruning.

So he's using a pruning knife!

The Observer made a pretty good list of blogs sure to make the cut: Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook, the Well Blog, Bits, The Caucus, City Room etc. But what about those poor blogs churning away in the more obscure regions of the Times' bloated blogosphere? Here are eight that could more-or-less conceivably not make the cut, along with a helpful point system to aid you in your office Fantasy New York Times Blog pool:

And the Pursuit of Happiness
DESCRIPTION: "Maira Kalman's illustrated column about American democracy."
FREQUENCY: +1
There's only one a month! Good for a calendar: bad for a blog.
COMMENTS: +6
Sure, her posts don't garner that many comments. But almost every single one is something like: "Wow, beautiful." or "Beautiful." or "Wow." or "Beautiful, wow."
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: +4
Kalman has illustrated more than 18 books and a bunch of New Yorker covers. She's as big time as an illustrator can get.
TILT: +5
One of those was an illustrated version of Strunk and White's "Elements of Styles," which every newspaper editor has basically internalized.
TOTAL: +16

Stanley Fish
DESCRIPTION:"On education, law and society. "
FREQUENCY:+2
~3 posts per month. Not bad for the World's Oldest New York Times Columnist.
COMMENTS:+9
It's not unusual for a Fish post to break 1k comments. He writes about stuff that really gets Times' readers riled up: What their kids might be learning at their fancy liberal arts schools.
AUTHOR NOTORIETY:+9
So he's no celebrity chef, but he's got another kind of cred: Academic. Dude has written 10 books and is the "Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities" at Florida International University. But you can just call him "Stan."
TILT:-5
The ancient Fish must be used to scrawling on papyrus scrolls or something, because his posts are WAY TOO LONG.
TOTAL: +15

Judith Warner
DESCRIPTION:"On the politics of everyday life"
FREQUENCY: -2
Anywhere from 2-5 posts a month. Sort of sparse for a blog about "everyday life".
COMMENTS: +5
Warner's posts frequently break triple digits
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: +2
Like Fish, Warner has written a bunch of books. But two of them were about people who lost presidential elections. (Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton). Way to pick 'em, Warner.
TILT: +3
She wrote a post about "Mad Men" linking it to the Way We Live Now. (Plus, she's a woman. Women love that about her!)
TOTAL: +8

Formula One
DESCRIPTION: "The competition, gossip, politics and technology of Formula One racing."
FREQUENCY: +3
Formula One? Posts are more at a go-kart pace: 3 per week.
COMMENTS: -5
Nobody likes to talk about F1 on the Internet, apparently.
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: -7
This guy, Brad Spurgeon, is a Formula One journalist. 'nuff said.
TILT: +10
We just can't bear the thought of what will happen to the readers for whom Formula One is their favorite blog on nytimes.com if it's cut. They'll be so sad!
TOTAL:+6

Pogue's Posts
DESCRIPTION: "Quick hits from the technology columnist David Pogue."
FREQUENCY: +3
Pogue's Posts come at a rate of about 3 a week
COMMENTS: 0
Pogue's Posts rarely break double-digits. Maybe everyone's tweeting at him.
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: +1,000,000
David Pogue is not just a journalist; he's a visionary.
TILT: -1,000,005
Does Pogue really need a larger presence on Nytimes.com? Seems like he and members of his extended family are covering some new portable fingerprint reader or whatever every day in a video on the front page.
TOTAL: -2

In Transit
DESCRIPTION: "The Times's travel staff answers questions about the ever-changing world of traveling, from the modern hassles of flying to perfect vacation spots."
FREQUENCY: +10
Multiple posts a day (12 today alone!)
COMMENTS: -10
Not a single one of today's posts had a comment
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: -10
Can you name one person on the travel staff?
TILT: -4
"In Transit" is probably the most boring name for a blog ever.
TOTAL: -14

The New Old Age
DESCRIPTION: "A focus on the elderly and the adult children who struggle to care for them."
FREQUENCY: +2
This old person's blog posts at an old person's pace of about 2 per week.
COMMENTS: +1
Solid double digits.
AUTHOR NOTORIETY: +5
The Blog's founder, Jane Gross, was the first person to use the phrase "anal sex" in the pages of the Times!
TILT: -1 billion
Old people don't read blogs!
TOTAL:-1 billion, give or take a few.

Slap Shot
DESCRIPTION: "News from the world of hockey"
IS IT ABOUT HOCKEY?: -3,000,000,000
Yes, it is about hockey
TOTAL:-3,000,000,000

There you have it. Place your bets!

NYTPicker found this bio for Pogue on the website for an upcoming tech conference:

So what is a New York Times Visionary, other than something you get demoted to when everyone realizes you're not actually a journalist? That's unclear. Maybe it involves being able to see past the flaws in an operating system, like endless crashes of key software, to call it a "sleek upgrade." Or to call a notebook computer a "slice of heaven... not underpowered by any means" and then later tweet that the same machine is "too slow for Photoshop, video even Word sometimes." Or not! (We've put in an inquiry with the Times and Pogue.)

UPDATE: Pogue wrote us back:

That's definitely not a title I would ever use for myself. (I usually go by
"Consumer Tech Columnist"). And it is, obviously, not a title The Times
selected.

It sounds to me like something that panel's organizer, Warren Buckleitner,
made up, for the sake of more interesting brochure copy. Maybe you should
ask him?

We've corrected our headline accordingly.

The forum was Leo Laporte's influential podcast, This Week in Tech, which has devoted large chunks of not one but two episodes to skewering Pogue over his oddly positive review of Apple's latest operating system, which just might have been influenced by the fact that Pogue has a book coming out on the OS.

The gist: Pogue copped to a conflict of interest, but said he isn't and has never claimed to be a journalist, and besides all his competitors have huge conflicts of their own, including archrival Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal who runs a conference where people pay $4,500 each to hear live interviews with the people whose products Mossberg reviews. How refreshing to hear Pogue finally talk about this very real conflict of Mossberg's, which is normally left unspoken within the genteel club of tech writers.

Beyond that, Pogue said Times editors repeatedly rejected his past entreaties to disclose his conflict of interest in his column. And he cited instances where he's been critical of Apple products.

Also: "I like my interview subjects to like me."

An edited clip of Pogue's comments about being a journalist are above; about his competitors, below. The full interview is here, and a transcript is here. NYTPicker has a longer summary.

We thought Pogue's comments about never calling himself a journalist were odd. First off, the Times' public editor clearly considers him one, as NYTPicker points out. Also, judging from past Pogue writings our own John Cook dug up on Nexis, the columnist sure likes to hang out at places where "journalists" are invited:

"Apple revealed its answer Tuesday to an invited audience of journalists at a half demonstration, half U2 rock concert here..."

"The result of his brainstorm was Demo, an annual two-day conference attended by 800 analysts, executives, reporters and investors, their belts clanking with pagers, cell phones and Palms."

"When I shared my plans with representatives of the Big Three — Duracell, Eveready and Rayovac — they told me, with the weary sighs of people who explain this point to journalists every day, that battery run-down tests are terribly misleading."

"APPLE doesn't send out greeting cards very often, especially by FedEx. So when the company mailed cards to reporters last week, too soon for Christmas and too rushed for Halloween, some curiosity was understandable."

And Pogue isn't above adopting the disdainful tone of a top-shelf reporter when he's feeling superior:

Still, I think very little of the bloggers who are keeping Microsoft's bribe laptops.

Clearly, they're exploiting the lawless, Brave New World of the blogsophere, where, since they're Not Quite Journalists, they don't feel constrained by any of those pesky journalistic ethics guidelines. Like the one that says, "You don't keep $2,200 gifts from the subject of your review. You might think you can still write an impartial review, but it's highly unlikely-and either way, nobody will believe it."

Nevermind that Pogue accepted a $2,000 gift of his own; he's now freely admitted that he's Not Quite a Journalist himself.

UPDATE: Non-journalist Pogue recently gave the keynote address at a conference put on by the Columbia Journalism Review, at Columbia University's School of Journalism, entitled "Opportunities and Dangers for Journalism." Now does that sound like something a journalist would do? (Hat tip to Fake Steve Jobs.)

(Pogue pic: Randal Schwartz)

Hoodwinking the press is an old tradition for Jobs, and reporters were immediately suspicious when Jobs told Times columnist David Pogue he decided to omit a much-anticipated camera from the iPod Touch in order to keep the cost down. Jobs said "we were focused on... reducing the price to $199. We don't need to add new stuff." But an Apple rumor site then heard that the camera was delayed because it was too buggy, leading Fortune to ask if Jobs had been lying.

Now comes tangible evidence he probably was: Hardware website iFixIt took apart the new iPod Touch Jobs was talking about, only to discover a conspicuous gap at the top of the device just large enough for the camera Apple is using on its other new iPod, the Nano:

It took months for the facts to catch up with Jobs' misleading spin about his health; in this case, the turnaround has been reduced to just five days. If Jobs has no moral qualms about dissembling in the press, this acceleration should at least instill some practical concern.

See, NYT tech columnist David Pogue reviewed Apple's new operating system, Snow Leopard, for the Times. He gave it a very positive, wonderful, glowing review, calling it "sleek" in the headline. Which might be troublesome when viewed in light of his book about how to use Snow Leopard! Sleek!

Now, watch Clark bring down the Hammer of Hoyt upon his face:

I presented the facts to three ethicists: Kelly McBride at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center in Florida; Bob Steele, a professor at DePauw University and a scholar at Poynter; and Stephen Ward, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. All agreed that Pogue and The Times were facing a clear conflict of interest.

Aw, shit, son! You got yourself a C.O.A.. Hoyt then proceeds to go all Denzel in Training Day on him, and the rest of the Times:

Pogue is by no means the only Times writer with other interests. Thomas Friedman commands $75,000 for a speech, and his books are blockbusters. Another Op-Ed columnist, Frank Rich, is a consultant helping HBO develop new programming. A. O. Scott, the film critic, is about to become co-host of "At the Movies," produced by ABC Media Productions. Mark Bittman, The Minimalist, an independent contractor like Pogue, writes cookbooks and appears on PBS. John Harwood, who writes from Washington, is CNBC's chief Washington correspondent.

Okay, great. So Hoyt goes on to name the various levels on which this is a sticky conflict of interest, and the different ways in which the Times tries to circumnavigate this kind of situation. And the end result of all of Hoyt's bustin' heads?

Larry Ingrassia, the business editor, said that, prompted by my questions, editors decided to make disclosures to readers regarding Pogue's outside activities. On his Times Topics page online, Pogue posted a statement of ethics, saying manufacturers have no involvement in his manuals and that from now on, if he is writing a book about a product he is reviewing, he will disclose it to readers. It says his personal investments are in a blind trust to avoid any question of reviewing products in which he has a direct financial interest. A disclosure was appended to the Snow Leopard column online.

Times' readers get a disclosure. That's it. Not a vigilant, angry, pissed off tech nerd who's willing to actively take the piss out of Apple no matter what the consequence, but some guy who's basically a symbiotic leech of their company's product, and a statement for their readers that they know he's one.

Hoyt may have a badge, a gun, and a big nightstick, but he ain't allowed to kill with it. Which is too bad. Because with kickers like this...

It was good that The Times addressed the issue now. Windows 7 is being released within a month. Pogue is planning to review it. The "Missing Manual" is already for sale.

...you know Hoyt would be pistol-whipping sucka bitch Times conflict-of-interest-perpetrating writers like it was nobody's business.

Bill Keller, are you listening? This man is your deadliest enforcer.

According to a press release from his publisher, reprinted below, Pogue's book now has a publication date of August 12, nearly a full month ahead of Douglas' book (Sept. 8), despite the writer's late start.

Douglas was mostly polite about the competition in an email conversation — "I'm sure both his book and mine will do well," yadda yadda — but we did manage to elicit one underminey quote:

I'm impressed with how quickly Pogue and his publisher turned out their book, since I started working on mine last fall and only just this week approved the absolute final draft. I'm pretty thankful for the long process.



With less time, I couldn't have gotten contributions from Jimmy Fallon, Ashton Kutcher, Susan Orlean, Eugene Mirman, Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, or Sarah Silverman.

Zing! (In fairness, we'll be happy to print a reply from Pogue. Feel free to go way over 140 characters, David!)

Though Douglas may have the big names, Pogue has a decided PR advantage. The high-profile columnist and TV commentator has a head start, and thus a pretty good shot at sucking up all the available press for a book of witty tweets. He's also got claim to calling his book the first of its kind, as he does in the press release below.

Now Douglas' publisher HarperCollins has to scramble to catch up. An old-line publishing house moving at Twitter speeds? Stranger things have happened.

David Pogue, who makes those surprisingly entertaining gadget-review videos for nytimes.com, also has a joint book venture with technical publisher O'Reilly. Through this imprint, he plans a book of funny tweets from his Twitter followers. Sounds familiar.

Also familiar-sounding: A blogger is flabbergasted — utterly baffled! — that Pogue thinks he can make money off other people's online ephemera. Cue Russ Marshalek, a book-industry publicist with a blog on Creative Loafing:

This sort of attempt at an of-the-minute cash-grab really irks me. While publishers, authors and other various incidental folk in the book business are actually working, diligently and full of heart, to discover what it's going to take to turn the sinking ship of books around, Pogue's trying to ramp up excitement for 200 pages of @SomeGuy tweeting "hey I really like dogs."

Marshalek won't be buying the book then, presumably. Especially after Pogue blasted back at Marshalek's "nasython" in the comments:

So, let's see: my book project is an "of-the-minute cash-grab," meaning that I'm going to get rich off the book...

And yet… you're predicting that the book will tank!

Kind of a good point. Also: If a book of Twitter posts is vapid and unredeeming, what is a blog post trying to gin up outrage about such a book? You're just going to end up looking like a hypocrite, Russ. (Don't take it personally, it took us a couple of posts to figure that out ourselves.)

Talking Points Memo blogger Matt Cooper admitted to being in the dark.
Unduly sexy ABC newsman Jake Tapper taunted his bosses.
Huffington Post survivor Rachel Sklar admitted to shopping at Diane Von Furstenberg knockoff vendor Forever 21.
CBS geek explainer Natali Del Conte dealt with a Starbucks stalker.
New York Times gadget dude David Pogue confronted a bully on Facebook, several decades too late.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Self-described "new media whore" Paul Carr wanted everyone to know he was not dead.

David Pogue upheld the standards of the New York Times.

Politico's Patrick Gavin learned how to say "bruschetta."

Brian Chen at Wired crowdsourced his latest assignment.

Tina Fey thought about the sweetness of fame.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

Time writer Karen Tumulty fumed at the stultifying media elite.

Guardian writer Bobbie Johnson thought about adding to his film collection.

New York editor Jessica Coen promoted a new diet.


New York Times gadget columnist David Pogue tweeted to his tweeps — "Twitter peeps," get it? — about how he planned to talk about Twitter on Twitter, which is the best reason to use Twitter.

BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante saw someone famous.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us their username.

John, since you don’t permit comments (why?), I’ll have to answer your blog by email.

The problem is, you completely missed the point of my tip (or you’re deliberately ignoring it to make me look stupid).

The tip is this: Use Google INSTEAD of the sites’ internal Search boxes.

This is not something that’s obvious, as you can see by the 80 comments for that post. ” You are SO right… Not only is this tip both so obvious and so overlooked, but it works like a charm,” says one.

I imagine that most people, when they want to search Amazon, NYTimes, Facebook, eBay, or whatever, go to that site FIRST and use ITS search box.

My point is that you can save time and get better results by NOT doing that.

In your post, you totally mischaracterized the point of my tip.

Dp

(Photo by macinate)

Delivered-To: jlgolson@valleywag.com Received: by 10.78.198.2 with SMTP id v2cs346280huf; Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:22 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.142.88.20 with SMTP id l20mr5814001wfb.72.1204147941025; Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:21 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: <> Received: by 10.142.88.20 with SMTP id l20mr9735271wfb.72; Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:21 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <00504502c79604472a8a48285026d3b@googlemail.com> From: Mail Delivery Subsystem To: jlgolson@valleywag.com Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:21 -0800 (PST)

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——- Original message ——-

Received: by 10.142.88.20 with SMTP id l20mr5813971wfb.72.1204147939537;
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(version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=OTHER);
Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:17 -0800 (PST)
Message-Id:
From: Jordan Golson
To: David Pogue
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed; delsp=yes
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v919.2)
Subject: nyc meetup?
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:32:15 -0500
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.919.2)

David, thinking of coming down to New York next week. Meet for a cup =20
of coffee?

—

Jordan Golson
Valleywag — Gawker Media
jlgolson@valleywag.com

——- End of message ——-

I'm David Pogue. I hope you're having a happy holidays. I sure as heck am! Hear that? That's the sound of opportunity. I have just signed a contract with CNBC. Isn't that brilliant!?

Pogue, holed up in Connecticut, proves as out of touch as those wraparound-sunglassed hipsters who never seem to leave SoMa. The cheeky news site — based in Lexington, Kentucky, not San Francisco — has had its own Jeopardy category and is featured annually in Reader's Digest. The popular site's name was originally meaningless nonsense, sure, but it has come to mean the "crap," as Curtis puts it in his new book, that fills so much of the mass media.

By including Fark in a list that could otherwise go on without end, Pogue reveals how little he knows about Internet culture. Or maybe he's just hoping to attract some traffic from enraged Farkers. Too bad Fark users' informal rules forbid links to the New York Times.

Update: After multiple readers commented on the inclusion of Fark in the list, Pogue has conceded his error.

Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal: Faster, easier than Vista. For me, the marquee features are Time Machine that automatically backs up your entire computer in the background; Cover Flow and Quick Look, for rapidly viewing the contents of files; and new techniques that allow you to access other computers on your network or over the Internet with no technical expertise. The menu bar is now translucent, which can make it hard to see the items it contains. The new folder icons are less attractive than their predecessors.

David Pogue, The New York Times: Sleek, modern-looking desktop. Time Machine, Quick Look. Having virtual-screen software built in with so much polish makes a huge difference. A more polished Boot Camp lets you restart in Windows. Screen sharing lets gurus assist newbies from afar. iChat blue-screen effect. It also lets you display documents, presentations or movies to your videoconferencing buddies. The most serious misstep: See-through menus.

Edward C. Baig, USA Today: Time Machine. Cool video chat. Pretty e-mail: more than 30 stationery templates — baby announcements, party invitations — with integrated photo browser. You can create Notes and To-Dos inside Mail. It can detect addresses, phone numbers and dates inside a message. If you join the $100-a-year .Mac online service, you can access your machine remotely. I ran into snags trying to remotely connect from a hotel.

The problem with tests based on advance access to carefully doled out "review units" is obvious: It's in the gadget maker or service provider's interest to provide a few well-placed reviewers like Pogue with hand-picked, flawless gear and overly helpful support. The real customer's storebought or online experience is sure to be different.

For example, my own Macs have a lot more hardware failures than Walt Mossberg's do at the Wall Street Journal lab. And I've frequently been given misinformation from the Genius at the Apple Store counter. He can't grab a senior product manager to answer my questions, as the company's publicists do when I'm working on a Wired review.

In Pogue's case, he reviewed an overseas phone calling service whose super-low rates — the feature that sold him — turned out to be three, four or more times higher when the service went live.

Pogue observed to us that the Times' restaurant and theater critics do their reviews incognito, buying their own tickets and meals on the company expense account to avoid special treatment or pricing. Yet gadget reviews are traditionally done — by the Times and everyone else — on equipment loaned by the maker. Reviewers are under pressure to seek early access so they can meet deadlines and beat other publications, rather than wait for the product to hit stores or the site to go live.

The shining exception is nonprofit Consumer Reports. All tested products are purchased at retail by its staff, and no free samples are accepted from manufacturers. But who's going to wait around for CR to pronounce that "Our tests of Apple's new iPod Touch confirm that it is indeed essentially an iPhone without the phone?" By the time early buyers learn, as CR did, that the iPod Touch's screen can be dimmer than an iPhone's under the same lighting conditions, it's too late.

I don't expect David Pogue to stop accepting advance products and services, nor the special treatment that comes with them. It would be career suicide unless all other journalists stopped at the same time. But when readers' experiences turn out different than that provided to reviewers, hopefully more writers will do what Pogue did: Stand tall and warn everyone, rather than letting the issue die quietly on a Corrections page.

(Photo by realmerlyn)

Ordinarily, I conduct my own tests of products and write my own conclusions. But on a product whose primary feature is its price, I have to rely on the company that makes it — especially when I'm writing the review before the product is available to the public, as often happens in my business.

In his correction, Pogue says that the prices are still much lower than using, say, your AT&T cell-phone service overseas, so Cubic is still a good deal. Um, no thanks — I'll stay far away from a company that flat-out lies to a reviewer, especially one as well known as David Pogue. Still, I give Pogue credit for coming clean and apologizing rather than just sticking a correction on some back page somewhere.

I'm not exactly sure how the problem could have been avoided — in 20 years of reviewing tech products, nobody has ever deliberately misled me on hard facts like prices — but I thought you should hear about it from me.

... the same info we got out of the "Maximum" main-product man earlier this week on the Chevy Volt / Opel Flextreme / E-Flex platform. The result was different than we expected — we mean, who knew the NYT could write so glowingly about a US automaker? It would seem the GM PR machine's officially working "on all cylinders" now. Ha! We love hackneyed automotive analogies. (Hat tip to Thaddeus!) [NYT Pogue Blog]