Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

The New York Times Explains Why It Prints Old News

You’ll be hearing about this most of the day, so best to take five minutes and watch it now: “The Daily Show” visits the New York Times (NYT).

Cheers to the paper for allowing itself to be savaged by “Daily Show” correspondent Jason Jones. I particularly enjoyed watching Executive Editor Bill Keller gamely explaining the news business while managing to get a dig into Google (GOOG), The Huffington Post and Drudge Report.

Crave more? Here’s an interview The Wall Street Journal’s new “Speakeasy” blog conducted with Jason Jones about the bit. Excerpt:

How’s the mood at the Times these days?

Edgy? No. It was really quite lovely. Let me tell you this, movies have severely misled me on what newspaper rooms should look like. There was no paper stacked six feet high on people’ desks. No one’s yelling stop the presses.

What are people up to over there?

I think people are using the Internet to look for new jobs. There are lots of great Web sites out there: Monster.com; Craigslist is great.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik