September 13, 2011 · 8:53 pm

Bulletin: senior editor wanted


The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has an opening for a senior editor to lead a rather interesting international project. The description is below. It’s a full-time, telecommuting gig that will be a joy for the person with the right background. This won’t be advertised til next week, so if you’re a journalist, you know–right this instant–the value of reading my blog: Maybe a few days’ head start.

If you’re a friend, feel free to ask questions via email or Facebook. All others must use comments.

The gig:

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is searching for an organized, creative, and committed senior editor to develop, organize, and implement a monthly Roundtable, an essay forum on nuclear disarmament, energy, and development. This Roundtable will draw on experts in developing countries and inform policy leaders and civil society organizations worldwide.

For each monthly Roundtable the senior editor will identify and commission three international writers to tackle a Roundtable question. The goal of this feature is to encourage the participation of developing country governmental and nongovernmental experts in international discussion and action on disarmament and nonproliferation in the context of economic and political development.

The successful candidate is an efficient, detailed, and talented editor capable of identifying international experts, commissioning them to write for the Roundtable, and working with them to create copy that is strong in language and provocative and insightful in thought. The editor must have experience working with international authors and be comfortable pushing authors to hit deadlines. The senior editor will also oversee three translators, so the successful candidate must be highly organized, as he/she will be juggling six schedules in potentially six different time zones. This position is a three-year commitment, so we are looking for someone who can take ownership of this project and make it into something truly spectacular. In addition to the Roundtable, the senior editor will also assist in commissioning and editing articles on nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, biosecurity, and climate change for the Bulletin’s website and, on occasion, for the digital journal.

Our authors are leading scientists and experts in their fields.  The senior editor works closely and collaboratively with the editor and with these experts to create compelling articles that are accessible to lay audiences. All candidates must have an interest in disarmament issues. Successful candidates will come prepared with solid ideas for Roundtable questions, as well as a list of writers who could tackle the proposed questions. All candidates must have excellent editing skills, experience editing writers who speak English as a second language, as well as the ability to work with high-profile writers and experts.

Requirements: Candidate must hold a degree in journalism or other relevant discipline or profession, have at least five solid years editing experience, understand basic HTML, and have experience with Drupal or a similar CMS. This position requires not only coordinating a Roundtable each month, but also overseeing three translators and ensuring these translators hit their deadlines. Salary is commensurate with experience, in the range of $47-$57k. This is a full-time, telecommuting position with benefits.

What to send: If this sounds like a good fit for you, please send your résumé, cover letter, three (3) published samples of your editing work (before and after), and Roundtable ideas to mbricker@thebulletin.org; please type “Roundtable Editor” in the subject line. What do we mean by “Roundtable ideas”? Send us three proposed Roundtable questions, along with the authors who you think could tackle each Roundtable—that’s three questions and 9 author suggestions (three authors per Roundtable). Keep in mind that a successful Roundtable is as much about the stellar essays as it is showing off your journalistic instincts of what personalities and perspectives would work in each Roundtable. We will not consider candidates without editing clips and Roundtable ideas.

Your cover letter should tell us about your experience, your editing abilities, and your understanding and interest in the issues that we cover.

What to know: Due to the volume of resumes, we will not respond unless we are interested in interviewing you. Please refrain from sending multiple emails, and please do not call.

Who we are: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was established in 1945 by scientists, engineers, and other experts who had created the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, informs the public about threats to the survival and development of humanity from nuclear weapons, climate change, and emerging technologies in the life sciences. Through an award-winning digital journal, our website, and the Doomsday Clock, we reach policy leaders and audiences around the world with information and analysis about efforts to address the dangers and prevent catastrophe.

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September 11, 2011 · 3:23 am

Sorry. Not just yet.


When you come across exactly what all your enemies have been looking for for decades now and haven’t gotten, you just have to go with it.

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September 10, 2011 · 9:11 pm

The Tea Party’s Nikki Haley parties like it’s midnight in Paris


If, as the talking heads of Fox News like to insist, the nation’s national media are overwhelmingly liberal, why is it that they trumpet “rising stars” of the Tea Party, often based on little but good looks or a decent way with left-baiting speech-making, but ignore horrid, seemingly corrupt behavior that goes against everything the Tea Party supposedly believes in? After all, the Tea Party doesn’t profess to believe in giveaway crony capitalism, but an apparent master of pay-to-play, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, has Tea Party support in his run for the presidency. Yes, the NY Times and LA Times have pointed out Perry’s astonishing habit of tossing large governmental benefits to his major campaign supporters, but it’s not something that’s gotten much notice elsewhere in a politico-mediasphere that’s absolutely desperate for Perry to last as a leading candidate and add some suspense to a set of GOP primaries that otherwise would amount to a Mitt Romney coronation ceremony.

On a similar note, the national press just fell all over itself gushing about Nikki Haley when she survived a barrage of mudslinging and won the South Carolina governorship last year. Which is fine. But isn’t it about time that Governor Haley got a little national press for the $127,000 (at least), week-long, state-funded junket she took to Paris in June? She billed the trip as an attempt to attract job-creating business to South Carolina, but the details, as recounted by The (Charleston) Post and Courier reporter Renee Dudley, are pretty damning:

Haley, who captured the governor’s office preaching fiscal restraint, spent the cash so she, her husband and the rest of the state’s contingent could stay in five-star hotels; sip cocktails at the Paris Ritz; dine on what an invitation touted as “delicious French cuisine” at a swanky rooftop restaurant; and rub elbows with the U.S. Ambassador to France at his official residence near the French presidential palace. The South Carolina group also threw a soiree at the Hotel de Talleyrand, a historic Parisian townhouse where they feted foreign employers in hopes they’d set up shop in South Carolina. The Department of Commerce billed the $25,000 event as a “networking opportunity for members of the South Carolina delegation.” “It was a great party,” Commerce Secretary Bobby Hitt said in an interview last week.

After Dudley”s story, Haley classily referred to the young reporter as “that little girl” and then made a disingenuous half-apology, saying, according to The Post and Courier,  “The story painted a grossly inaccurate picture and was unprofessionally done, but my ‘little girl’ comment was inappropriate and I regret that. Everyone can have a bad day. I’ll forgive her bad story, if she’ll forgive my poor choice of words.”

This is good stuff, oh national newsmen and newswomen: sexism, ageism, and hypocrisy in one tidy package that a “little girl” has tied up for you with a nice pink ribbon. Why don’t you open it up?

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September 10, 2011 · 7:55 pm

Sky’s the limit


National Geographic‘s photo of the day site is always worth a glance. But in addition to spies and spy planes, I’m a sucker for cosmology and all things to do with the start of time and that elusive theory of everything. And NG has a Best Astronomy Photos of 2011 slide show. And so I’m just going to have to go with it.

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September 10, 2011 · 7:37 pm

Germany follows a non-nuclear path to prosperity


I’m running between other assignments and can’t go into detailed commentary right now, but this piece by leading German environmental economist Claudia Kemfert lays out a detail-filled analysis leading to an interesting conclusion: Germany’s move to get out of the nuclear power business not only won’t be a financial disaster — it may well create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the sustainability sector. It should be read by every member of Congress. And Rick Perry.

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August 21, 2011 · 7:52 pm

Texas crony capitalism, Perry style


For more evidence that Texas governance is a banana republic in minimal disguise, take a look at this piece from Sunday’s NY Times about Rick Perry’s nonchalant/extravagant habit of doling out government money to major campaign contributors. Add it to the excellent piece I’ve already mentioned in the LA Times. Shake, stir, imbibe — and vomit.

It’s heartening that the national media are picking up this early on the absolute whorehouse that is Texas politics and on the Chief Pimp role Rick Perry has played over the last decade. I would say, “Now, it’s up to the people to decide.” But it’s not, really. It’s up to the press to continue to look at the Texas pay for play two-step.

Extending  Lone Star crony capitalism into national governance via the George W. Bush administration has literally brought the country to its financial knees.  It’d be nice if the national press eschewed its habitual avoidance of nasty facts about Republican candidates (driven by fear of being called the “liberal news media”) and reported the truth about corruption in Texas government repeatedly. It could help the country avert outright economic decapitation.

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August 21, 2011 · 12:40 am

Yes, Jeff Jarvis was full of it


Way back in 2008, I told City University of New York journalism prof and strident new media guru Jeff Jarvis that he was full of it for contending that a bunch of LA Times reporters were wrong to sue Sam Zell and others for their reckless takeover and management of  the Tribune Company. Back then, Jarvis wrote:

The Times veterans should not be suing Zell. They should be suing themselves. Oh, I, too, am angry at the state of newspapers in America but I’m angry at the right people. The LA Times’ problems — like those of other papers — were caused by by decades of egotistical and willfully ignorant neglect by the owners, managers — and staff — at the paper.

Back then, in the comments section for his BuzzMachine blog, I told Jarvis:

I don’t think I have ever read a less germane comment on a lawsuit by anyone alleging to be any kind of journalist. If what is alleged in the lawsuit is true — that employee funds were misused in a flim-flam game that will make Sam Zell and former Tribune managers huge money while costing the employees most or all of the stock-option earnings they amassed over decades — the defendants have violated their fiduciary duties and some may even have criminal liability.

To conflate that specific allegation of egregious wrongdoing with some overarching general critique of how the newspaper business has been run in recent decades is — how can I put this gently? — shockingly misguided and legally illiterate.

Ordinarily, when I write so intemperately I regret it. Ordinarily, this blog post would be some form of apology, if not for substance then for style.

But I don’t regret any of what I said back then, because Jarvis truly didn’t know what he was talking about. Evidence to that effect: The lawsuit was just settled, with 13,000  current and former Tribune employees sharing in a $32 million payout (after it’s reduced by about $8 million in lawyer fees).

I’m not going to do some victory dance in the end zone here. I’ll just spike the ball, and trot on off to the bench. Smiling.

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August 20, 2011 · 11:40 pm

Cowless in Ventura


If you had a mess of photos from the Ventura County Fair and your daughter had won a giant stuffed cow, you’d go with the pictures, too. You know you would. Even if you didn’t get a shot of the cow.

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August 20, 2011 · 8:43 pm

The weak and compromised Governor Perry


I will write at length some other time about what I regard as truly atrocious coverage of Texas Gov. Rick Perry by national reporters who seem more interested in a clean story line about the Republican presidential horse race than in the truth of what the man says, particularly when it comes to what he says he’s done in office, particularly when it comes to the economic position of the state. The idea that the Texas economy is remarkably affected by what a Texas governor — any Texas governor — does is just silly. It cannot be overemphasized what a weak office the governorship of Texas is. Here’s a good explanation of my assertion, courtesy of the University of Texas:

Compared to the U.S. President or the chief executives of other states, the Texas Governor occupies a “weak” office. The main source of the relative weakness of the Texas Governor can be found in the historical conditions surrounding the Texas Constitution of 1876. Mindful of the experience of Reconstruction – the period after the Civil War when Republican governors wielded extensive executive powers and were resisted by conservative elites in the state – the authors of the new constitution sought to rein in future governors. They did so by dispersing power that might otherwise be lodged in the chief executive’s hands among a vast array of independently elected officials. Broad powers over the legal system, state budget and finances, education, transportation, agriculture, public utilities, and land development are delegated to officials who need not share the policies nor even be of the same political party as the governor. The dispersal of power among different officials creates what is often called the plural executive. Unlike the federal system, where the cabinet secretaries and the other top executive officers serve at the pleasure of the President, the voters elect the corresponding officials in the Texas system, giving the Governor no direct authority over them.

But today, rather than spouting torrents of bile at journalistic colleagues, I will end by sighting, in the sea of bad Perry coverage, a tropical island  of solid reportage in the Los Angeles Times that deserves special commendation. If anyone thinks the power of big money and large business interests is a problem in federal governance, he or she ought to think many, many times about choosing someone coming from the Texas system to be president of the United States. As I’ve said many a time, and based on my 10 years of reporting there, Texas government is not what people in much of the rest of the country would recognize as American representative democracy. It’s a strange hybrid, in which the forms of American politics are applied as a thin, attractive veneer that masks an inner reality that is hard to distinguish from a banana republic oligarchy. The, ahem, payoff paragraphs from the Times:

Perry has received a total of $37 million over the last decade from just 150 individuals and couples, who are likely to form the backbone of his new effort to win the Republican presidential nomination. The tally represented more than a third of the $102 million he had raised as governor through December, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice.

Nearly half of those mega-donors received hefty business contracts, tax breaks or appointments under Perry, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis.

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August 20, 2011 · 8:29 pm

Texas on Perry


I wanted to let the dust settle a bit after Texas Gov. Rick Perry jumped into the presidential race before giving myself a victory lap for having said he would run way back when. And when. And when.

Now, rather than blurt out my estimation of Mr. Perry and his campaign, I thought I’d give a little space to some smart friends who live in Texas and actually know something about him, as opposed to the “reporters” writing about him in much of the national press. I’m going to delete names here, because I didn’t explicitly say I would identify these folks (though I did say I might use the answers on my blog).  But I’ll try to give you a bit of background, so you can put what these people say in some context.

The following viewpoint comes from a longtime, expert politics-watcher and journalist whose judgement I greatly respect and who I don’t think has an ideological bone to pick:

He’s the most disingenuous fuck in American politics outside of Palin. Like her, he’s an actor, a thespian spouting lines, unexamined. There are plenty of Texas Republicans that absolutely detest the guy but are afraid of him or warily tolerate him because … he’s boss. He has a bristley, arrogant side that is pronounced and probably will be off-putting when they start in peeling his rind away. Not like Bush, at all, in the projection-of-personality department. I suppose his last big victory was due to the insane anti-Obama fevers, the economic jitters and the ineptitude of the Texas Democrats and their candidate, but his previous 39 percent showing seems more indicative of how people actually view him. I guess. I keep hearing about how much $$ he can raise, what a crack debater he is b/c he wiped up Hutchison etc., but my uneducated guess is he’s peaking now because of general boredom with the field … and he’s about to be peeled like an overripe banana. The piety thing — he closes his eyes real tight when he prays – won’t play on the wide screen, and the $$-raising corruption is a string of endless 30-second TV IEDs. So I guess that means he’s our next president.

The yang to the preceding yin as regards Mr. Perry comes from someone who’s probably been less directly involved in journalistic politics watching over the years, but he’s a smart guy, he’s been around the state a long time and his thoughts deserve, well, thought:

Although I’ve been back in Texas for some 10 years, I really have not paid that much attention to Rick Perry and his leadership in the state. As you no doubt recall, the state is very conservative and pretty much has the attitude: If you want to advance in life, get off your ass and do something. Perry is God, Country and don’t mess with Texas (or its businesses or way of life). And that’s a pretty good reflection of how a majority of people feel in the state. We have a good business climate because that’s what the people want. We don’t mess with God, because that’s what the people want. Texas is tough on crime because that’s what people want. Most of us want government to take care of the basics and stay the hell out of our lives. Do I think he’s an empty suit? No, and I think I reflect people in the state. Do I think he’s all hat and no cattle. No. He’s just a poor ranch kid who served his country as a USAF pilot and then went on to try to live the American dream. And he’s done a pretty good job, I think. For some reason, progressives believe if you graduated from a Land Grant university, served in the military and worked your way up the political ladder, you are inferior and dangerous to the Republic — You are still a dumb hick. … Here’s what I think at this date and time: Perry doesn’t want to be president. He wants to be vice president …

And this last set of comments, from a true-blue, left Texas Democrat (yes, there is a liberal Texas, even if it’s a bit attenuated nowadays), might seem surprising in its estimation of Perry’s strength. But this comes from a real political pro:

My insight on Perry comes from experiencing his advance team and travel squad. This year Gov. Perry came [to Houston] for a joint press conference on an anti-human trafficking bill sponsored by two Democratic women legislators. Perry’s advance and travel team is Presidential class. They have traveled together in a very large state for more than a decade.

More, as they say in my profession, TK.

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