The shots were taken for the 2008 New Jersey State Bodybuilding, Figure & Fitness Championships, and match up with the picture of Seibert featured on the New York Times Co. website. Seibert's figure was presumably something of an asset at his last job in the fashion world, where he worked as COO for design Mark Ecko's company.

The muscle shots certainly show Seibert to be an executive of unique focus and determination. That said, he might want to read his newspaper's recent story on steroids and weightlifting and weightlifting. Not that we're saying this gentleman is juicing. But he should at least be aware of what sorts of practices to avoid!

(Pics via MuscularDevelopment.com)

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.

NYT editor Bill Keller told Clark Hoyt that the paper is "within weeks of a decision" on the long-discussed question of whether, and how, to charge for its online news.

So here is what their decision will be: You will have to pay for their online news. One way or another! Maybe you will pay a $5 per month subscription fee, or maybe you will pay micropayments for every story, or maybe they will roll out tiered membership packages with fancy extras designed to get hardcore fans to pay more in exchange for more access. Probably a certain level of news will be free, and a better level of news will not be free. Or maybe someone there has actually come up with an elegant solution to this mess! Though we doubt it.

But somehow we will all have to pay something, because if we don't, the New York Times is totally going to go broke, bit by bit, by giving its product away for free. Which is something that it and every other newspaper have now come to realize. A more interesting question: Will any of the NYT's star columnists flee the paper if they're shoved behind a pay wall, like Newsday's Saul Friedman just did?

They might! These same NYT columnists sat through the Times Select fiasco and watched their readership drop precipitously. Things are different now though! Because somebody like, say, Thomas Friedman, or David Pogue, or Maureen Dowd, could legitimately decide that their own BRAND would gain more by going off on their own than by sitting behind a paywall at the NYT. Thanks for the help with everything, Times, but we're off to be A Brand Called Me-s! Fewer readers could hurt their speaking fees. Can't have that.

This result would bring in some much-needed fresh blood and get rid of Thomas Fucking Friedman, so let's all pray it goes down exactly like that. We have our (employer's) credit card ready, Bill Keller.

Just witness the position Apple is in with the New York Times. After we pointed out that Times editor had casually mentioned "the impending Apple slate" at an off-the-record confab, the newspaper's editor clammed up. When Peter Kafka of All Things D Keller asked him to elaborate, he got a stern quote via PR: "I ain't sayin'" anything about Apple's rumored device. But the horse was already out of the barn. One can only imagine what sort of conversation Keller might have had with Apple's famously caustic CEO Steve Jobs after that slip.

It's a clash of cultures: Keller specializes in publishing information as quickly as possible; Jobs in keeping in secret, for long stretches of time. It's also an unavoidable situation for Apple. To get beautiful content to show off the capabilities of the tablet and its (presumed) sharp color display, Apple has been meeting with magazines, newspapers and book publishers, who have lots of glossy, high-resolution content. There's no way Apple executives would talking to these guys about a forthcoming device if it didn't feel they absolutely had to.

It must be a painful situation for Apple. At least the company has lots of practice in manipulating the media. Just not usually from such an uncomfortably close distance.

By Mediaite's tally, 32% of the more than 500 commenters on the story said they'd pay to read the NYT online. Let's call that one-third!

Now let's make some generous assumptions. Quantcast estimates that NYtimes.com gets about 15 million monthly US readers. (We asked the company how many comments they get; they haven't gotten back to us yet). Their weekday circulation is around 650k. So the question becomes: How many of those online users who currently pay nothing would pay, say, $5 per month (a number the NYT was floating in a survey earlier this year) to read the website?

Since one-third of the commenters on a story about the paper's staffing issues said they would, does that mean one-third of the total would? We are currently laughing derisively at that assertion! These commenters are people who not only are interested enough in the inner workings of the paper to read a story about its staffing issues—already a small minority—but also interested enough to comment on the story, which takes a certain level of commitment at the NYT's website. So we have a small subset of a small subset of the paper's online readers; namely, those readers most interested in the financial fate of the NYT. Of those, one-third say they're willing to pay.

Let's very generously say a quarter of online readers fall into the first subset, and a quarter of those fall into the second subset. Therefore, the number of online readers willing to pay would be 1/4 times 1/4 times 1/3 times 15 million, or 312,500 readers. If they all paid $5 per month, the NYT would make an extra $18.75 million per year. Which is nice and all, but would not even cover the interest payments on their subprime Mexican loan.

The NYT may in fact get more online readers worldwide, but then again, our assumptions here were already overly generous. In other words, the company's salvation will not be found in the comments section.

Two years ago, the Times was quoting the same sort of fabulous young people saying that a different teeny-tiny social network, Harvey Weinstein's A Small World, was going to be the cool new thing. But traffic quickly flatlined, and Weinstein earlier this month finally relinquished his stake in the disappointing property.

Foursquare, admittedly, seems slightly more interesting: It has an innovative, GPS-based "check-in" technology that allows you to register your location; and like Twitter in its early days it has caught on among the hipster dot-com digerati. But its 60,000 users are nothing to brag about, and there are some interesting parallels between how it and A Small World were packaged in the Times:

Picture of worldly young women? Check.

• Foursqaure: "Emily Woolf, far right, uses, Foursquare.... to find her friends when she wants to meet."
  
• A Small World: "Laura Rubin, a brand consultant and fashion publicist.... combed [the site] for guests to attend a fashion party in the glass-enclosed penthouse of Hotel on Rivington on the Lower East Side."

• Foursquare: "Supersize services like Facebook and Twitter... have millions of members... [Foursquare] is not yet cluttered with celebrities, nosy mothers-in-law or annoying co-workers."
  
• A Small World: "Sleeker than MySpace or Facebook, aSmallWorld.net is not the type of site where one is likely to come across videos of amateur motorcycle stunts or girls in bikinis."

• Foursquare: "At this point, I don't even bother texting or calling my friends. I just check Foursquare to see if they're nearby and go meet them." —Emily Woolf, 24. "On Twitter, there are more than 3,000 people that follow me... Foursquare is more the people that I actually want to hang out with." —Annie Heckenberger, 36.
  
• A Small World: "In reply to a query from a comely young woman searching for a hairdresser in Singapore, a Procter & Gamble executive there responded with a thinly veiled proposition: 'I have two bottles of Nice n' Easy in the cupboard. I'll do it for free.'"

• Foursquare: "One factor that might help Foursquare retain its intimate feel is that most of its members... many urbanites in their 20s and 30s.... are picky about who can see the real-time footprints that they are leaving across the cities in which they live."
  
• A Small World: "The site functions much like an inscrutable co-op board: its members, who pay no fee, induct newcomers on the basis of education, profession and most important, their network of personal contacts."

Foursquare: Everyone goes there, because it's not crowded.

However, the Times still hates your kids and your mom.

One of the internet's most important legacies is its absolute destruction of credentialism. So who better to explain it to the world than New York Times TV-watcher-and-internet-looker-and-writer-about Virginia Heffernan, the one person that every American too old to figure out how to get onto the internet turns to to tell them about said internet, in a magazine column? And tell us, Leon Neyfakh, could the book have a name and theme commensurate to the preposterousness of its ambition?

In the proposal [for the book, tentatively titled The Pleasures of the Internet: How to Live in the New Online Civilization], a copy of which was obtained by the Transom, Ms. Heffernan's book is described as "a complete aesthetics of the Internet" that will treat the Web as a complex work of representational art, complete with "a poetics, a scale, a palette, a rhythm, a sensibility, a set of rituals and spectacles, a system of metaphors and an emotional range."

Haha yes. Very good. A good book to give to, say, your grandmother who retired as a college literature professor a long, long time ago. Explaining the entire internet in a book: Actually a very internetty type of thing to do!
[NYO]

"I think it will come down to a gut call," editor Bill Keller tells the Observer. But the Times' gut has been notoriously wrong about the Web in the past. Remember that time the paper passed on the chance to invest in a little startup called "Google?" Or "Amazon.com?" Or "Yahoo?" Good times.

Is there any way for the Times to maybe ask the guts of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or Evan Williams (Twitter, Blogger) and just go with that, somehow? Their guts just seem smarter, about the internet.

(Pic: Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger at the unveiling of Amazon's Kindle DX in May. Getty.)

When asked how he keeps up "with the latest tech news when there are so many blogs," Times editor David Gallagher immediately cited TechMeme, a direct competitor of Blogrunner, as "one of my favorite sites." Although the Times serves Blogrunner results from the front of Gallagher's own section, the editor didn't plug the site in his three-paragraph answer. It wasn't the first time the Times forgot about its 2005 acquisition; reporter Saul Hansell says he considered pushing the newspaper to develop something similar before discovering "we actually owned a company that did that" (see video).

It's great that Gallagher knows about TechMeme, a very useful aggregator. But, if he's going to help turn around the Times, he needs to help make Blogrunner more competitive. That means borrowing a key idea from the world of software startups: Eating your own dogfood; i.e. using your own product. And talking about it, when you have the chance.

(We sent Gallagher a couple of emails seeking comment but have yet to hear back; we'll update this post if we do.)

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.

You'll no longer find Rebecca Ruiz's post "NYTPicker Revealed" on the Times' Media Decoder blog, although for the moment it remains in Google's cache. Citing "a person with close ties to the site," the Times fingered as NYTPicker's author David Blum, the Times vet turned fumbling newspaper turnaround artist. Blum had declined to comment to the Times, but about half an hour later, NYTPicker denied the report on its Twitter feed, and the Times pulled it from the Web.

The wording of NYTPicker's tweet did imply a team of two or more writers is behind the site, and that would certainly help explain its impressive track record: The site caught the Times romanticizing the plight of a child rapist, taking a hypocritical position on publishing the identities of foreign kidnap victims, and writing several erroneous things in Walter Cronkite's obituary. It also coaxed the first admission of plagiarism from Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

The site's authors are no doubt having still more fun at the paper's expense in the wake of its bad guess. And to think that, just two years ago, this sort of embarrassing public guessing game was played only by unscrupulous bloggers. Silicon Valley was in a frenzy about the identity of the author of the anonymous blog Fake Steve Jobs. After several erroneous, confidently-worded guesses by Gawker Media CEO ringleader (and then-Valleywag blogger) Nick Denton, the identity of the real author, Forbes editor Dan Lyons, emerged, thanks to some old-fashioned digging by none other than... the New York Times. Maybe the writer behind that successful exposé, Brad Stone, can be brought in to help this time around.

UPDATE: The Times has issued a new post, carrying a full denial by Blum. The paper adds that Blum "hadn't intended to decline comment." WTF?

Original post:

What happened to poor Julie Klam? Six months ago, the writer was "the best updater on Facebook," according to the Times' Viriginia Heffernan (pictured), excelling in a burgeoning genre of "perfect... spontaneous bursts of being." Klam was grateful for the value placed on her prolific Facebooking, but it seems her experience quickly went downhill; in a column published Wednesday, the same Klam was quoted by the same Heffernan as saying Facebook "felt dead" as of a few months ago — in other words, right after she "friended" Heffernan on the social network. "I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like it's kids getting tired of a new toy."

The moral of the story: Journalists cannot be bothered to find fresh sources in the dog days of August for their specious (the New York Observer debunked it by the numbers earlier today) trend stories. Also: Under no circumstances should you "friend" Virginia Heffernan.

(Pic via)

Perhaps you've heard the President talk about "net neutrality." That's the idea that the Internet should continue in on its merry way: people can go to the sites they like, do what they want and their web providers will allow them to do so. It's really quite utopian. Well, that practice could come to an end if evil telecommunications giants have their way.

The National Cable and Telecommunications Assn. and its ilk think that providers should reserve the right to pick-and-choose which sites get preferential treatment on their bandwidth. More than that, they're toying with the idea of increasing rates for video sites, meaning those of you who watch movies or television on your computer could pay more than people who use it simply for news and the such. According to the association, this is simply how the market works. And does it ever!

The current marketplace is working well to bring consumers the services and features they want at prices they can afford. Lawmakers should be very reluctant to replace that flexible, market-driven success story with a system of intrusive regulation.

Though the Obama administration insists it will fight for net neutrality, it may be in for quite the fight. Telecommunications companies give millions to lawmakers — Comcast employees and its PAC, which is fighting against net neutrality, spent $2.9 million in the political realm during the 2008 election and has already given about $700,000 since then — and, as we all know, lawmakers aren't immune to hefty checks. (It's worth noting that the FCC slapped Comcast's wrist last year, when the company put up barriers to block or slow down file-sharing services.)

Luckily for all of us, new FCC head Julius Genachowski vowed to back Obama and company, saying:

One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles.

This would please the New York Times, whose editorial team demanded this weekend that the President keep the Internet open and free.

The issue isn't simply about money — making it and spending it — but about which sites load faster or are more accessible. If, for example, one Internet provider prefers NBC News, that means CBS readers will be shit out of luck. And, if that's the case, we'll be one step closer to this "destroyed democracy" thing Glenn Beck and others keep barking about.

As much as some would like to believe it, the free market's not our democracy's defining characteristic. Nor should it be. And if there's one place to prove that, it's here, on the wild, wild Internet. Regardless of what happens, it's clear that the Internet won't be what it once was — and that makes us sad.

Image via aLii's flickr.

This horrific news is brought to us today by those tireless chroniclers of the plight of the rich, the New York Times, in a story about how the "super-rich" are just losing their asses all over the place.

For every investment banker whose pay has recovered to its prerecession levels, there are several who have lost their jobs - as well as many wealthy investors who have lost millions. As a result, economists and other analysts say, a 30-year period in which the super-rich became both wealthier and more numerous may now be ending.

As an example of how dramatic the fall has been for some of the aforementioned super-rich, profiled in the story is John McAfee of the McAfee anti-virus software McAfees. He founded the company in the late 80's and cashed out a couple of years after it went public in 1992, walking away with $100-million in the process. Over the years McAfee maintained his fortune by investing in real estate and Lehman Brothers bonds. This did not end well.

In 2007, Mr. McAfee sold a 10,000-square-foot home in Colorado with a view of Pike's Peak. He had spent $25 million to buy the property and build the house. He received $5.7 million for it. When Lehman collapsed last fall, its bonds became virtually worthless. Mr. McAfee's stock investments cost him millions more.

One day, he realized, as he said, "Whoa, my cash is gone."

He has sold a 10-passenger Cessna jet and now flies coach. This week his oceanfront estate in Hawaii sold for $1.5 million, with only a handful of bidders at the auction. He plans to spend much of his time in Belize, in part because of more favorable taxes there.

Next week, his New Mexico property will be the subject of a no-floor auction, meaning that Mr. McAfee has promised to accept the top bid, no matter how low it is.

So now McAfee is left with roughly $4-million dollars to survive on. That's crazy when you consider that just two years ago our Gawker Media overlord Nick Denton did a Valleywag post noting the contrast between McAfee and Critical Path founder David Hayden in competing profiles of the two men in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. McAfee's profile focused on his carefree "sky gypsy" lifestyle with his much younger girlfriend, while Hayden's focused on how he was having to sell his art and furniture to survive. Two years ago! Oh how times have changed!

Now, whether McAfee is worthy of pity or not is up for debate, but it's hard to argue that it's better to have been rich and lost it all than never to have been rich at all.

Pic via

Brad Stone of the New York Times has a piece in today's paper on the effects of modern technology on the family, specifically in the morning. Stone note how the addiction to gadgets and social networking are altering the great American family morning rituals. Instead of getting up immediately for breakfast or coffee or to read the morning paper, people are going straight to their gadgets to check email and to play around on Facebook and Twitter. In the course of his reporting, Stone profiles a few families, one of which are the Gudes of East Lansing, Michigan.

Today, Mr. Gude wakes at around 6 a.m. to check his work e-mail and his Facebook and Twitter accounts. The two boys, Cole and Erik, start each morning with text messages, video games and Facebook.

The Gudes' sons sleep with their phones next to their beds, so they start the day with text messages in place of alarm clocks. Mr. Gude, an instructor at Michigan State University, sends texts to his two sons to wake up.

"We use texting as an in-house intercom," he said. "I could just walk upstairs, but they always answer their texts."

Now, the Gude family may be the epitome of the modern, wired American family, but isn't the excerpt above kind of, well, sad. Personally, one of the my fondest memories of childhood was of my Mom coming into my room to wake me up each morning for breakfast and to get ready for school. The thought of being woken by freaking text message because Mom's too busy playing around on Twitter is utterly horrifying! How long before they start IMing each other at the damn dinner table? Ugh.

A tipster was selected for a survey on nytimes.com and graciously copy/pasted from it for our benefit. The Times was gauging interest in two premium packages that it calls NYT Gold and NYT Silver. Market research is apparently ongoing and it's entirely possible, even likely, that the pricing and features outlined below aren't a final plan. But they are the most detail we've seen of just what the Times is hoping people will pay for on their web site as print revenue vanishes.

The packages carry an annual cost of $150 and $50, respectively, and emphasize behind-the-scenes benefits like newsroom tours, exclusive videos of reporters telling "the story behind the story" and ancient back issues. In this, the new packages repeat the core mistake of the Times' last, abortive effort at premium online content, the TimesSelect opinion section: Assuming people are fascinated with the Times as a brand, and with the deep thinking of its insiders. Really, most Web readers just like the news. But the NYT's most valuable, expensive to produce product would seem to remain free under the new plan.

Aside from the tote bag, which could have a certain retro chic if the paper doesn't soon conquer its deep financial problems, the most compelling benefit is called FirstLook and gives paying customers an early peek at the news: "You'll... get access to some stories before they appear in print or online." However, whether this is an early look at a political scoop or the Dining section isn't clear.

UPDATE: Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty writes, "It's very early in the process. We are still in the data collection phase."

The Times' plans, as outlined in an nytimes.com user survey:

(Top pic: Times chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr, by JD Lasica)

The blog's explanation for pulling the post:

Basically, we believe that parties who are the subjects of an extensive and sensitive post like yesterday's should know they are being written about. This is both the neighborhood-y, Local thing to do and simple journalistic ethics.

In this case, the author of the piece identified himself to several climbers but not to the people who run the space. We were unaware of this lapse. We had concluded, based on the author's initial pitch, that he planned to be upfront with everyone, and we neglected - our bad - to confirm this after the piece was filed.

Well that's all well and good and friendly, but it's really the type of thing to decide before you publish the extremely extensive post about "this bizarre hybrid of subterranean climbing gym and hippie speakeasy" in Fort Greene. Because the entire thing is, of course, cached by Google. All anyone has to do is click here to read the whole thing, or visit AnimalNY, where they put up a screen shot of it. Now, Jed Lipinski's post on "one of the best kept secrets in Brooklyn" is going to get far more readers than it would have had you simply left it up.

See: The Streisand Effect.
[The Local's 'Why We Unpublished" statement and the original post, via Animal NY