So anyway, the first gift presented – and the best – was scavenged from the 43rd Street building by Janet Higbie, an editor on the Foreign desk: a hardbound copy of The New York Times style manual, in PRISTINE condition, Janet emphasized. As in, NEVER used. So shiny. So pretty. And the name inscribed on the inside? (Drumroll…)

Jayson Blair.

Hah. That would explain so, so much. He never even read the part about how you're not supposed to lie and plagiarize! To be fair, it's way after the bit about the Oxford Comma, which is where most readers give up.

New Yorker media critic Ken Auletta sees mixed results: "I suspect that serious felons like Blair have been deterred. But cheating and cutting corners has not been. Declining circulation, falling advertising revenues, and the swooning stock value of traditional news organizations, coupled with expanding consumer choices, prompts slashed newsroom budgets.

"This leaves fewer editors and fact checkers to police newsrooms. Worse, with business declining, the folks who sign our checks push for more sensational stories, more conflict, more sharp opinion — anything — to lift their news stories from the clutter. The business culture imposes itself on the journalistic culture. In the contest between the two cultures, business usually triumphs," Auletta wrote.

Whoa, way to bring us down, Ken! Slate's Jacob Weisberg is more succinct: ""I think the print media's credibility issues have been largely overwhelmed by its economic issues."

And, you know, with the Times culling a hundred reporters today, yeah, we'd have to agree that no one's paying attention to their "credibility" anymore.

Media ethics since the Jayson Blair bombshell [MarketWatch]

Frauds always look worse from the outside. The Jayson Blair incidents at the NYT were staggering, but nobody stopped them for a long, long time. The LAT's most recent burn, when it ran a story implicating Puff Daddy in the shooting of Tupac that turned out to be based on forged documents, looks terrible, as well. How could they be so careless?

The truth is that it's not really that hard to defraud a journalist. In certain cases, reporters are on their guard against misleading or false answers: when speaking to flacks, cops, or anybody else with a vested interest in twisting a story to their own ends. But in many other cases—when there's no immediate, common sense reason to believe that someone would lie to you—reporters tend to take things at face value, relying on their own (overestimated) bullshit detector. And the public's conception of the level of fact-checking that goes on at everyday news outlets is laughable. Top-tier titles like the New Yorker aside, most newspapers and smaller magazines have no such thing as a separate fact-checking department. Reporters are the fact checkers. Editors can ask reporters questions, but again, in order for the question to occur to them, it usually has to be related to something that would plausibly be lied about. So anyone who fools a reporter well can get a fake story published, with a bit of diligent effort.

Print up some fake business cards. Set up a fake website. Get some fake stationery. Give yourself an official title, have a friend play your secretary or business associate, and you can imagine how many fake stories you could plant. The thing is, the vast majority of time, it's not something that people would do without a solid motive. And that motive would usually be enough to raise a good reporter's suspicion.

We all rely to some extent on the good will of others not to do us harm. When somebody purposely pulls a sophisticated scam—whether at a news outlet or an investment bank—lots of other people end up looking stupid. But just about anyone could be the victim. So have a heart! People are busy. Reporters are overworked, with tight deadlines. Shit happens. Only karma really protects us.

We will still participate in the inevitable outcries over future journalistic hoaxes. But we'll try to figure out who's just a poor, unlucky bastard, rather than a jerk.

Also, some honest guy told me that Obama's running mate will be Dick Gephardt, so FRONT PAGE BABY!! (not really)

[H]e thinks the club will remain in the same dank, subterranean space on 40th Street and Ninth Ave., but whatever happens, it will definitely be in Hell's Kitchen. "We're not straying from our roots. Siberia's always been in Hell's Kitchen and it works. There have been some shit holes in Hell's Kitchen, and that's basically what we're looking for.

What Kit tells us:

The building's transparent exterior is meant to convey the idea of a free press and an open society. A mammoth rectangle frames the facade, suggesting a television or computer screen that provides what the museum calls a "window on the world." Visitors enter through a Great Hall of News, where they can see breaking stories on a giant digital "zipper" before setting out on a 1.5-mile path of displays and interactive kiosks. The building, which has seven floors, also contains 135 upscale apartments, Newseum shops and Wolfgang Puck's three-story restaurant, the Source.

• Time magazine's armored truck from the Balkans
  
• The laptop used by Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in Pakistan in 2002
  
• The vest that Bob Woodruff of ABC was wearing last year when he was wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq
  
• The cellphone that a Virginia Tech student used last month to capture a video of the campus massacre
  
• A pencil used by Mark H. Kellogg, a reporter killed at Little Bighorn with Custer in 1876
  
• The turquoise slippers worn by Ana Marie Cox when she wrote as Wonkette, the sassy Washington blogger

  There's also a display containing disgraced former Times reporter Jayson Blair's articles and a gallery:

  [D]evoted to journalistic ethics. It allows visitors to race one another to answer some basic yes-or-no questions on deadline. You are reporting on shoplifting and learn that your neighbor has been arrested, a potential conflict; should you tell your editor? (Yes, according to a Newseum panel of journalism experts.)

  We can hardly contain ourselves. You know, we don't get enough of the press celebrating itself with Pulitzers and ASMEs and other fake awards. We need the grandeur of a seven-story complex that lauds the dedication of our ink-stained (or pajama-bottomed) information gatherers. When this sucker opens, we're going to be first in line to see the exhibition containing R.W. Apple Jr.'s legendary expense reports. —balk

  A Museum for Artifacts of the News Media's Hunters and Gatherers [NYT]

First, a pair of runners-up:

Jayson Blair, who discovered the cure for cancer while training for the defense of his Tour de France championship at the Shaolin Monastery in Ulan Bator, where he was the Supreme Ninja Warrior, died today, according to his publicist J. Blare.

Jayson Thomas Blair, 35, known to the online blogging community as "Crazy Us Weekly Guy," was pronounced dead at 1:46am this morning after being transported unconscious from the SoHo Apple store.

Jayson Blair was a typical 21st century memoirist.

This looks like a job for the Internets!

Your challenge: Write the first sentence of Jayson Blair's obituary. Assume everything that has actually happened to Blair in the real world — his firing from the NYT and reasons for same — will be shifted to secondary importance by whatever fictional/futuristic element you create, and will thus be printed later in the proposed obituary (we only want that first sentence, not the whole obit). Remember, your proposed first line must describe something so amazing and yet conceivably plausible that it would actually eclipse Blair's achievements to date, for good or ill. Think of it as a way to outline a potentially fruitful life-path for the troubled journo. Submit your entries in the comments below or tips@gawker.com. The chosen winner will reappear here and earn a congratulatory one-year subscription to Times Select.

Jayson Blair: 'I Cannot Imagine Anything I Could Do, No Matter How Long I Live, That Will Change That First Line Of My Obituary' [FishbowlNY]
Everything I Needed to Know About Journalism, I Learned from Jayson Blair [PopMatters]

[Photo: Getty Images]

the next night i had drinks with the GM of another "hot" restaurant here in the city and it turns out he also had dinner at aVoce not one full week before me. and he hated it too. and i mean REALLY hated it he launched into a violent twenty minute dissertation on every crappy aspect of his dining experience i am not even kidding. the end result being we both agreed frank-bruni is a big stupid clueless fuckwad. oh ! and that reminds me— a "hot" restaurant proprietor i know who also recently dined at aVoce had this to say and i quote: "... the review was so unbelievably glowing, i was thinking as i was reading it that Frank Bruni must be totally in love with this boy." don't get me wrong now. i'm actually very sorry poor little aVoce has to suffer the brunt of my disdain for frank-bruni. even though i did truly dislike aVoce intensely, it's really frank-bruni i despise about a hundred times more. because FRANK BRUNI = AMANDA HESSER + A PENIS

Well, there you have it. We've yet to dine at aVoce, so we'll refrain from judging the restaurant, but if that assertion is, in fact, the case, it explains a whole lot. Is Frank Bruni Amanda Hesser with a penis? Very possible. If you load up a primate on caffeine, gave it a microphone, and stick it in Times Sqaure, does it become David Carr? We're betting yes. To that end we've put together a brief chart of Times equations which we'd like to share with you. Please print and save for easy reference.

The Blahg [PX This.]

Ms. Carroll's future book project was going to be big, according to Mr. Vigliano. "She's very sympathetic, so I think there'll be a very positive reaction to her book," he said. "You gotta differentiate between somebody who's seen like a hero, like she is or [Charles] Moose is, and someone who's notorious, like Jayson Blair or Jared Paul Stern. If a lot of people are offended by the person's behavior, ultimately they're not going to buy a book."

David Vigliano on Jayson Blair, in "The Blair Pitch Project," by Joe Hagan, NYO, May 26, 2003:

Mr. Vigliano, meanwhile, is working hard — and fast — to turn the 27-year-old into Jayson Blair Inc. It's a story that he believes could be worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in film and book royalties....
Already, speculation in the New York Post has suggested the possibility of a six- or seven-figure advance for a book by Mr. Blair. Those figures, Mr. Vigliano said, "don't seem unreasonable to me. It's a huge, huge story. I've talked to Jayson and I've seen the richness of this story. It's a very deep and very textured and layered story, and he's a gifted writer — and no, those figures don't seem unreasonable at all, by any means."

Hey, Victim, Want a Book Deal? Jill Carroll's Post-Trauma Choice [NYO]

i was in the newsroom, at the metro desk, the afternoon jayson was being interviewed in front of the building, which was a sunday. what happened was that a couple of reporters saw him downstairs while they were on their way into the building. word got out that he was downstairs doing an interview, and then one reporter opened a window facing 43rd street and shouted something at him. i forget exactly what she said, but it wasn't a friendly hello, it was more along the lines of sarcasm or a taunt. (i believe it was, "hey jayson, look at you, you're really blowing up," or something like that.) i only know because i was there a few minutes later when she was laughing about it with a few colleagues by the metro desk.

So it would seem Blair's tale in Rush and Molloy was in fact not a wholesale fabrication but merely a unduly favorable interpretation of actual events. Which, for him, is a huge step.

Earlier: Jayson Blair Is, Shockingly, an Unreliable Source

"I was nervous about coming back to the block," he tells us. "Some editors opened the window and said hello. That was a nice gesture."

It was a nice gesture. But here's the thing, as several Timespeople have pointed out: It doesn't make any sense.

The newsroom is on the third and fourth floors of the building, not at street level. No one's ever seen the windows of the building being opened. And editors work along the interior of the building; reporters cubicles line the 43rd Street windows. So Blair would have us believe that an editor — actually, more than one editor — was walking past a reporter's cubicle along 43rd, glanced out the window and down 30 or 40 feet to the sidewalk, happened to notice Blair on the street, and then bounded over to a never-opened window to pull it open and stuck his or her heads out just to say a friendly hello to the man who instigated one of the biggest crises in the paper's history.

"I consider myself a person susceptible to lying," Blair also told Rush & Molloy. Well, yes.

Rush & Molloy [NYDN (second item)]

Perhaps our favorite question:

6. Carl wants to notify all 250 people in his fan club that his band is playing at a bar on Saturday night.

How should he do that?

A. Create a flyer on his work computer, print it, use the department copier to make copies, and then use the Company postage machine to stamp the flyers.
B. Ask a few of his colleagues to use their downtime at work to call the 250 people in his fan club.
C. Create a flyer on his work computer, and then use his expense account to order a box of glossy paper that costs $2.50 a sheet on which to print the flyers.
D. None of the above.

There's no way Jayson Blair would have gotten past that.

Off the Record [NYO, second item]

Blair, while emceeing a minority student awards event last weekend, said that he's looking to go into human resources, saying he wants to help others who "find themselves in situations like I was in." (You know: Coked up and full of endless loads of horsepoo.) Blair, who just got an online degree from Jones International University, says he had a touching message for young minority students.

"People tell you all your life to work hard, get good grades and go to a good school because that's how you really get ahead," Blair said. "That's a lie."

Speaking of lies, this is Jayson Blair we're talking about here, so it's important to remember that everything in this story is probably, you know, complete bullshit. He's probably living in the Ozarks somewhere, jacking up on crystal meth and telling the woodland animals that he is the ancient god Zozor.—WL

Jayson Blair Searches For New Legacy [Fairfax News]
Rock And A Hard Place: Jayson Blair [The Black Table]

What will all the people who talk to themselves read all day if libraries across America no longer stock this book?

The good news is that you can now pick up this classic at a cut-rate price. If you're a snob about buying used books, just check out the description given by one motivated seller:

NO SCRATCHES, NO MARKS, NEVER BEEN READ.