I got a surprise today. North Korea’s Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) cited my documents on the 1980 Kwangju Uprising in South Korea in a story looking back at the event and exploring its significance in recent U.S.-Korean history. This is the first time in my memory that any media outlet in the DPRK has written about the thousands of declassified cables I obtained in the 1990s about U.S. role in the Kwangju rebellion and the May 1980 coup that brought to power the hated South Korean dictator, Chun Doo Hwan. Some of what KCNA reported was fact. But KCNA’s propagandists – its writers cannot be called journalists by any stretch of the imagination – went way beyond what was in my documents to charge ... Continue reading →

>>> bad news arrived today from a great american city where this broadcast has spentd a taught of time and put down roots since hurricane katrina . new orleans, louisiana, is a city easy to love, and that has always included for them their local paper with the unusual name, the times s picayune. today's news was about the local paper. >>> it's a force even the times picayune couldn't withstand. the paper that survived the civil war , countless mergers, and most famously, hurricane katrina , today bowed to the changing economics of the newspaper industry. >> this is the end of the line for something that is very important in a community. >> this fall, it will go from printing papers seven days ... Continue reading →

>>> bad news arrived today from a great american city where this broadcast has spentd a taught of time and put down roots since hurricane katrina . new orleans, louisiana, is a city easy to love, and that has always included for them their local paper with the unusual name, the times s picayune. today's news was about the local paper. >>> it's a force even the times picayune couldn't withstand. the paper that survived the civil war , countless mergers, and most famously, hurricane katrina , today bowed to the changing economics of the newspaper industry. >> this is the end of the line for something that is very important in a community. >> this fall, it will go from printing papers seven days ... Continue reading →

The decision by The Times-Picayune to cut publication to three days a week and go all-in on the web is a response – probably belated – to some pretty grave realities. Whether it’s a solution is another question. What the bean counters have to hope is that they’ve struck the right balance between the web, which has large audiences but low advertising income, and the traditional paper product that has a dwindling readership much more highly esteemed, eyeball for eyeball, by Dillard’s and JC Penney and the car dealers and realtors who have long carried newspapers on their backs. If the T-P’s New York-based owners have got the balance wrong, then the changes announced today are just an interim step before there’s another plunge down ... Continue reading →

WASHINGTON – The co-owner of a major Pentagon propaganda contractor publicly admitted Thursday that he was behind a series of websites used to discredit two USA TODAY journalists who had reported on the contractor.The online "misinformation campaign," first reported last month, has raised questions about whether the Pentagon or its contractors had turned its propaganda operations against U.S. citizens. But Camille Chidiac, the minority owner of Leonie Industries and its former president, said he was responsible for the online activity and was operating independent of the company or the Pentagon."I take full responsibility for having some of the discussion forums opened and reproducing their previously published USA TODAY articles on them," he said a statement released by his attorney, Lin Wood, of Atlanta."I recognize and ... Continue reading →

Enlarge Ellis Lucia/Courtesy The Times-Picayune Times-Picayune reporter Mark Schleifstein visited New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward in 2005. The huge, building-like structure in the background is a barge washed aground by post-Hurricane Katrina flooding. Ellis Lucia/Courtesy The Times-Picayune Times-Picayune reporter Mark Schleifstein visited New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward in 2005. The huge, building-like structure that crushed a school bus in the background is a barge washed aground by post-Hurricane Katrina flooding. In Their Own Words 'Times-Picayune' editor-in-chief Jim Amoss and reporter Mark Schleifstein discuss covering the disaster, and how it changed them. The Big Picture Mark Schleifstein and colleagues at the Times-Picayune have grappled repeatedly with the implications of land loss along Louisiana's coast. Enlarge Gretchen Wheaton Times-Picayune features writer Renee Peck writes a column called ... Continue reading →

I spent most of my journalism career at The Times-Picayune and have many friends there, so the news that its owners are slashing the staff, dismissing top editors, and cutting back publication days is very difficult to process. My heart goes out to my valiant former colleagues, and to the city itself, which will suffer from having reduced news coverage and seeing one of its signature institutions diminished. During my time at the paper I was involved in many of its ambitious and award-winning journalism efforts. Clearly I was lucky to be there during that era, and that era is now definitively over. (Ironically or not, the TP just published a great series on the Louisiana prison system. But where will the next one come ... Continue reading →