More on Credit for Berkeley Pit

I posted mere hours ago on the stories in the New York Times and Wired on Berkeley Pit Lake, a toxic dump in Montana that harbors microorganisms with possible drug-making uses. In that post I mentioned a story by Slate's Jack Shafer on the Times' reputation for cherry-picking stories from smaller publications—and admitted that I couldn't find that story online.

Jack sent me a note to set me straight.

I don't think I wrote the piece that you attribute to me in your Berkeley Pit Lake post. But now that I've got your attention, I think the process works both ways. Other media organizations take their editorial cues from the Times (especially TV and the Post and Globe and LA Times) and the Times—especially in the old days—has treated the work of other news organizations as insufficiently sophisticated to credit. I think Bill Keller [the Times' editor] is a force for good here, and that his regime is more willing to acknowledge the work of others. But for the most part, journalists are reluctant to distribute credit. I've always been eager to share, thinking the karma would come back to me. And it did today, at least, in your column, where I got credit for something I never wrote!

As usual, Jack makes good points. If the Times is an apex predator—a lion—other media outlets are hyenas, happy to save energy by living off of the Times' kills when they can. When I was at Newsweek, the front page of the Times certainly provided, shall we say, editorial guidance. And I didn't know that Keller's Times had a reputation for fixing the missteps of the past. That's good to hear.