Sure there’s a future. Slate only laid off a few in what is a publication recession. If the car makers laid off an equal percentage, would we ask if the car industry had a future?

– Jack Shafer, who was laid off from his job as Slate’s media critic last week, during a Poynter.org career chat

“Let’s keep an eye on Señor Slim and get to know him better. A lot better.” That’s Slate columnist Jack Shafer on Friday afternoon, worrying that the New York Times will have a difficult time covering Carlos Slim, its billionaire investor/loan shark:

If Times reporters and editorialist criticize Slim, he can wave the clips to prove to his countrymen that he isn’t a vengeful brute. If the Times doesn’t cover Slim’s every move, it will be charged with cutting its investor slack.”

And here, on cue, is the Times’s first deep dive on Slim, via Mexico City bureau chief Marc Lacey. OK, not so much a deep dive as a series of interviews with other journalists who have covered Slim. But that’s sort of appropriate, since the article is trying to assess whether one of the richest men in the world tries to control what the press says about him.

That depends, the Times seem to say, on where the press is based. No one suggests that Slim plans to affect coverage at Britain’s Independent, where he owns one percent of the newspaper, or at the New York Times, where he may one day own 17 percent of the company.

But media in his own backyard? That’s a different story:

Raymundo Riva Palacio, a veteran journalist in Mexico City, said that after he wrote a column in El Universal newspaper in 2006 condemning Mr. Slim as a monopolist, a Slim adviser threatened to remove newspaper ads from his companies.

That was no small threat. Mr. Slim’s holdings are so vast that he controls a large chunk of all advertising countrywide. Eduardo García, a Mexican journalist who runs a Spanish-language financial news Web site and follows Mr. Slim, estimated his wealth at almost $44 billion as of the end of 2008.

‘I took it as part of the natural dynamic between the media and the powers that be in Mexico,’ Mr. Riva Palacio said, adding that the incident was quietly resolved. ‘That’s how things work here.’”

If you want to learn more about Slim’s business background, let me suggest this excellent (and long) August 2007 profile in the Wall Street Journal.

But here’s a nice summation of his influence in his native land:

Carlos Slim is Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly.

It’s hard to spend a day in Mexico and not put money in his pocket. The 67-year-old tycoon controls more than 200 companies–he says he’s ‘lost count’–in telecommunications, cigarettes, construction, mining, bicycles, soft-drinks, airlines, hotels, railways, banking and printing. In all, his companies account for more than a third of the total value of Mexico’s leading stock market index, while his fortune represents 7% of the country’s annual economic output. (At his height, John D. Rockefeller’s wealth was equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.)…

How did a Mexican son of Lebanese immigrants rise to such heights? By putting together monopolies, much like John D. Rockefeller did when he developed a stranglehold on refining oil in the industrial era….As Mr. Rockefeller did before him, Mr. Slim has accumulated so much power that he is considered untouchable in his native land, a force as great as the state itself.”

Here is that video from MarketWatch about the joint interview PBS’s Charlie Rose did with John Chambers of Cisco and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, where they trotted out that old saw about coopetition.

In other words, how the tech giants might compete, but also interoperate for customers’ sake. Let’s say we keep this one near the top of the pile, just in case it turns out differently.

“The Newspaper Is Dead. Long Live the Newspaper.”

That’s a nice kicker at the end of an excellent essay on the shift in newspaper reading from Slate’s Jack Shafer (full disclosure–I once worked for him when I was but a wee lass).

Shafer’s not saying much new here: Guess what? People are increasingly getting their news on the Web and they like it that way!

But, as usual, he says it well:

Horrible as it may sound, on many days the newsprint front page tastes of already chewed gum.

“I’m not the average reader, but anecdotes convince me that the average reader is becoming more like me every day—reading tomorrow’s news today.”

And he has some good suggestions for the troublesome trend, too: more succinct stories; better use of graphics on heftier inside pages; and, of course, acceptance of inevitable change.

I would add: Pray fervently that the trend is not moving quite as fast as it actually is.

Go Ahead and Use That SUV and Feel Better–Not

OK, I will admit I have been somewhat dubious about these carbon-offset credits you can buy to balance out your energy consumption.

Now, I am even more disturbed after seeing this video about the topic, given that Michel Gelobter of the think tank Redefining Progress and founder of Climatecooler.com says some companies that can cause increased global warming are being planned, so we can pay them not to be created.

In the meantime, also read Valleywag Owen Thomas’s entirely on-point screed about the global warmingness of the techie-heavy Burning Man event, now taking place in the Nevada desert.

Confused?

Here’s the video: