Rhonda R. Shearer, the widow of Stephen Jay Gould and proprietor of media watchdog site iMediaEthics, just published an extensive article on her site investigating a Newsweek article from 1967--and a follow up article that was published last month by The Columbia Journalism Review.

The long and winding tale starts way back in 1967, when Newsweek ran a cover story called “Trouble in Hippieland” by a then 28-year-old writer named Bruce Porter. The scare piece told the sad tale of a drugged out and washed up teen-runaway named Marcy.

Mr. Porter went on to write the book-turned-Johnny Depp movie Blow and teach at Columbia Journalism School, where he often used the story as a cautionary ethical tale. He had promised Marcy anonymity, but then revealed not only her name, but her hometown, drug use, back alley abortion and other identifying details.

In 2011, three years after retiring from Columbia,  Mr. Porter decided that he would find Marcy and apologize for betraying her, a documentary crew in tow. Along the way, Mr. Porter, managed to reveal many more details of her life. Mr. Porter writes about his quest in the November/December issue of the Columbia Journalism Review and ends the piece by acknowledging that he seems to have  betrayed Marcy’s trust once again. “It was as if I’d never learned a thing,” he writes. “Oh, Marcy, I thought, I’ve done it to you all over again!”

The CJR piece revealed Marcy’s last name, the names and identifying details of her family. Additionally, an accompanying photo showed her home address. Mr. Porter didn’t tell Marcy that the piece was running in CJR, although she did sign a release and was interviewed on camera for the documentary, which is still in the works.

Marcy did not hear about the CJR article until Ms. Shearer sent it to her.

“He should have let me know before he did that,” Marcy told Ms. Shearer. "I’m hearing something from you but I didn’t hear anything from them.”

Mr. Porter acknowledged that, in retrospect, he should have told Marcy about the CJR piece.

“The CJR piece was a way of getting attention for the documentary,” Mr. Porter told Off the Record. “In the best of all worlds I would have called Marcy to tell her about the piece.” Mr. Porter explained that he didn’t think of it because of her involvement with the documentary.

Ms. Shearer also contends, however, that she found factual errors in the original story, noting that a 1967 radio story contradicted many of the key details in the Newsweek piece. In a WNEW radio broadcast, also from 1967, Marcy, who said she was 19 (not 17) was given the phone to call her family. "They lied, mother, they really lied” and “it isn’t like they said," Marcy said, in a one-sided phone conversation that makes for difficult listening.

According to Ms. Shearer, Marcy wasn’t informed that she was being recorded at the time and had never heard the radio piece.

Over the years, whenever Mr. Porter played the tape for his journalism classes, he would get a lump in his throat. The tape has been sampled by  pop bands and is widely available on the Internet.

According to Ms. Shearer, CJR should have used this material to correct the original Newsweek story.

“Memory is a funny thing,” Brent Cunningham, CJR’s deputy editor, told OTR. “Our intention was not to re-report a 40-plus-year-old Newsweek story.”

Mr. Cunningham said that CJR relied on Mr. Porter’s notes from the original story, the Newsweek story itself and certain factual details about Mr. Porter’s trip to Flint, Michigan.

“It seemed like the bigger problem was what happened after the story,” Mr. Cunningham said.

Mr. Cunningham was referring to an article in The Flint Journal, Marcy’s hometown paper. After Mr. Porter enlisted the local paper to help publicize his search for the one-time flower child, a reporter from the paper called him the following week for an update.

Mr. Porter told the reporter that they had found her and she was living in Hawaii, although he knew that was not true. Marcy had lived in Hawaii for a time but was by then back in Flint. The Flint Journal published a story, based on the conversation with Mr. Porter, saying that Marcy was living in Hawaii, which upset Marcy.

“It was the wrong thing to do,” Mr. Porter told OTR. “What I should have done is confided in the reporter and said, ‘Yes, we found her but she doesn’t want more publicity.’”

Still, neither Mr. Porter nor Mr. Cunningham felt that that had a place in the CJR story since it happened after the narrative of the piece ended.

“It’s funny that Rhonda is trying to turn Bruce into a journalistic villain when he was really just trying to make amends for a youthful mistake,” Mr. Cunningham said. “Maybe it backfired, but not in this piece.”

De Niro.

Call it the Tri-Be-Can’t effect: As New Yorkers, we loathe letting go of our venerable institutions. It’s hard to even admit that they’ve changed enough to warrant a new name. The Lincoln Center is referred to as “the tents” during Fashion Week, as if anyone is still fooled into thinking the shows take place in Bryant Park. The most recent egregious case of celebratory misnomers has to be the Tribeca Film Festival, which was founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff. The purpose of hosting the event in Tribeca was to show the world that the neighborhood devastated by the attacks of Sept. 11 still had enough spirit to be snooty about its cinema. With its Cannes-do attitude, the festival premiered international indies in an attempt to show that New Yorkers were still as culturally polyamorous as their European brethren.

But for its 10th-year anniversary, something feels a little … different. Maybe it’s because half the screenings no longer take place anywhere near Tribeca. We actually found ourselves racing along Midtown for the festival’s kick-off at the Ziegfeld Theater. Or maybe it’s that the indie festival debuted with The Five-Year Engagement, with every poster proudly proclaiming that it comes “from the producer of Bridesmaids”—because nothing says “independent” like giving producers and their studios top-billing over the actors.

Oh, well, at least Five-Year is a (Judd) Apatow production: the poor guy probably needs some work thrown his way. He seems to have just dropped off the face of the earth. It’s been about 20 minutes since someone last mentioned Mr. Apatow. If we’re being pinpoint specific, we just read another critique of HBO’s überhyped Girls, which Mr. Apatow also executive produced, so really, make that 20 seconds. Wunderkind Lena Dunham’s first foray into mainstream success has hit both its stride and its official backlash simultaneously—something made even more amazing by the fact that the show is only on its second episode. It’s brilliant! But racist! And sexist! Or at least, Sex and the City-ist! The critically lauded comedy about a girl who believes she’s the voice of “a generation” (if not this one) can’t seem to catch a break, even while it surges to the top of pop culture talking points. (All we’ll say is that we’ll never look at Cabbage Patch lunch boxes the same way again.)

Maybe there was no way Girls could live up to its own hype, but we’ll still be watching. After all, at least we know where those girls stand: Ms. Dunham is Tribeca, born and bred … even if her premiere party was held in the meatpacking district and her character lives in Greenpoint.

Of course, in talking about sticky situations, we’d be remiss not to mention the giant muck-up at Columbia of late. Here we are, going on about some tiny film festival while the Columbia Journalism Review is moving its headquarters off-campus and into Midtown! We were always taught that what goes on in Columbia stays in Columbia (unless we’re talking about the country of the same name and you happen to be part of the Secret Service). They might as well call it the Times Square Journalism Review now. At least employees of The New York Times will know where to send their résumés. We have to admit, the way Times staffers are handling proposed cuts to their Guild Pension plan during their heated contract negotiations with the company’s management is pretty brilliant. YouTube videos are a quick, effective way to get the word out. Not to mention they’re as viral as cute bunnies.

So maybe when it’s all over, The Times can submit these videos as a sequel to Page One for next year’s Tribeca festival. We hear the screenings are going to be held on Long Island.

With Dean Baquet coming to New York to serve as Jill Abramson's Jill Abramson, Economix columnist David Leonhardt is taking over the New York Times' D.C. bureau September 6.

Yesterday an interview with Mr. Leonhardt was published in the Columbia Journalism Review, though it felt a little more like the Paris Review for its hundred-word questions, circuitous responses, all around edited-feeling.

And though it's good wonky read, it's no Christ/Borges, thus, the highlights:

Mr. Leonhardt shut down any speculation that his appointment signaled a change in the bureau's direction to match his economic expertise, an inkling reinforced by the debt debates in D.C.

"We all agree that there is nothing about my selection that is a signal that we're going to move toward a greater emphasis on economic policy than we've already had," Mr. Leonhardt said.

However, he would really appreciate it if everyone started paying closer attention to it.

"I think we have a society-wide problem of not focusing on what our real economic problems are," he said.

He doesn't understand why, for example, Americans think they don't want a deficit when they say they don't want taxes increased or Social Security cut. Neither do we, Dave.

This part was nice hear, coming from the Times:

"We also need to ask ourselves whether we are being overly affected by the conventional wisdom. I do think there are times when that happens, when it seems like everyone smart or everyone in power thinks o e thing, and we need to say to ourselves, is there a chance that it's wrong?"

But according to AOL/HuffPo editor Saul Hansell, Patch is simply ahead of it's time. It's like building the railroad 150 years ago, he said on a panel about the Future of Media (unrelated to the "Future of Media" report by the FCC which Mr. Peters and Mr. Stelter refer to.) We assume he meant that Patch's infrastructure and influence will redeem its high overhead costs, but let's not forget that the transcontinental railroad was mostly realized by underpaid imported laborers, too.

If you get off on making and listening to smug prognostications, we suggest throwing your name in the hat for Columbia Journalism Review editor in chief. "The editor in chief position was made possible by a funder, and I think part of the idea is somebody who enjoys meeting funders and being on future-of-journalism panels more than I do. I would rather go to the dentist than be on a panel," CJR executive editor Mike Hoyt told Romenesko.

The Columbia Journalism Review's Brent Cunningham does not approve. He finds these lists "silly":

For starters, there are very few actual journalists on either list. Rather, the lists are full of pundits and activists and opinion-pushers of various stripes, and the handful of true journalists who are included have mostly all transcended their humble reporter status to become, well, something more. Christiane Amanpour, for instance, is a journalist but also a media celebrity; Steve Coll writes important books and magazine articles, but he is also president of the New America Foundation. In other words, their "influence" is about something more than just their journalism.

That's fine, but one wonders if they would have made Tunku's list without those extra flourishes.

Silly, maybe. But recent posts on the CJR blog include "BREAKING: Stephen Colbert Reads Cat Fancy."

The report cited “people familiar with the matter” as identifying the unnamed bank as Corus Bankshares Inc., but Journal reporters Lingling Wei and Nick Timiraos also quoted from the call without any attribution, or information about where their notes on the call came from. Were they on the line?

It’s not unknown: When there’s a private conference call, the attendees get a phone number and a code to dial. Theoretically, anyone who gets the right phone number and code (and is smart enough to put his phone on mute) can be along for the ride without anyone knowing any better.

A call to Mr. Sternlicht’s office was not immediately returned, and a spokesman for The Wall Street Journal refused to comment on how the paper reports its stories, so it was impossible to confirm whether the reporters were, in fact, privy to the call, and whether Mr. Sternlicht had given them access to such a big scoop. (Ms. Wei had referred calls to the spokesman.)

The Journal spokesman also declined to say whether the paper has an editorial policy about listening in on such a call without the parties’ permission. That’s pretty standard: It’s part of what’s behind the curtain about how reporters get important scoops.

Of course, reporters get leaked private documents all the time. And have people present at meetings tell them what happened verbatim. Sometimes reporters even get surreptitious recordings. Is this any different?

“Well, that’s a good question,” said Mike Hoyt, the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, as he paused to ruminate.

“When I was a young reporter, listening at a door was not a bad thing. And it sounds something like that. On the other hand, I think of that guy from Cincinnati who listened to people’s taped messages, and that’s of course illegal and a crime,” Mr. Hoyt said.

Without knowing the details of the call and whether there was any kind of off-the-record admonition at the outset, Mr. Hoyt seemed to think it was equivalent to a meeting.

“I’d like to think about it some more, but my instinct is I don’t see the problem,” Mr. Hoyt said.

Mr. Kaiser just sent out a release touting his new column on CJR.com:

Mr. Kaiser has written for The Observer and The New York Times.

He's got some other candidates. Like!

Or!

Well, all we can say is, 2008 is barely half over!

An unusual kindergarten-through-12th-grade school called New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math opened last fall thanks to the determined efforts of a principal and parents. While it is too early to pronounce the schoolan unqualified success, it clearly is on the right track, and may offer the Board of Education a model for future innovations. Our public-school system is only going to work if we build from the bottom up, at the school and classroom level.

The school, known by the acronym NEST, has a selective-admissions policy, which has led the neighborhood's dreary socialists to raise the hoary charge of elitism. The policy is designed to reward students willing to work hard and conduct themselves like young scholars. They are expected to dress properly, read "Beowulf" in the sixth grade and learn the rules of grammar. No gauzy tracts about self-esteem here.

NEST is the latest innovation presided over by principal Celenia Chévere, who has started five other public schools with competitive-admissions policies, including an excellent all-girls academy in East Harlem. A child of poverty, Ms. Chévere knows that excellent public education can lift children to the middle class and beyond. She is exactly the kind of smart, creative administrator New York needs. The prime responsibility of the schools chancellor should be to recruit dozens more like her. We could retake our schools one by one.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Board of Education, and indeed all New Yorkers have a stake in NEST's success. Let's hope continued success inspires other principals, parents and children.

Dean Goldstein Of the Columbia J School Makes a Sleazy Turn

Society relies on great universities to stand up for intellectual integrity and scholarly ethics. But integrity and ethics have taken a holiday at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Widely touted as the country's most prestigious journalism training ground, publisher of the respected Columbia Journalism Review and bestower of the Pulitzer Prize, the Columbia J School has veered far from the straight and narrow path and scampered into the arms of a conflict of interest that would normally evoke outrage in, well, the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review .

The facts are simple and disturbing. As The Observer reported last week, Tom Goldstein, the dean of the Columbia J School, has been moonlighting on the payroll of Bloomberg News since December. There, Mr. Goldstein's job is to be a sort of ombudsman and keep an eye on possible conflicts of interest which might arise from having Bloomberg News report on Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who still owns the company. That's a curious setup in itself–to be of any use, an ombudsman needs to be an unpaid public figure, who can offer unvarnished advice. Does anyone really think Mr. Goldstein will offer any substantial criticism of the man who signs his paycheck?

The central issue is that Mr. Goldstein's greedy double-dipping makes a mockery of everything the Columbia J School ostensibly stands for. What does it say about a journalism school's impartiality, and ability to objectively assess news organizations in the classroom and in the pages of the CJR , when the dean of that school is collecting a paycheck from a news organization? Will the CJR, which describes itself as "America's premiere media monitor–a watchdog of the press in all its forms," take Mr. Goldstein to task for his unscrupulous and unethical arrangement?

Does Tom Goldstein understand he is a walking conflict of interest? That he is setting an atrocious, cynical example for Columbia students? If he wants to keep his job at Bloomberg News, he should resign his Columbia post immediately. Let him decide whose paycheck he prefers, but it cannot be both.

Bob Tisch Takes the Field

Athletics are one of the joys of being young, a way of establishing a lifelong habit of physical activity, as well as building character and introducing one to the importance of concentration, cooperation and teamwork. But New York City public-school kids are growing up in a sports vacuum, where their only meaningful athletic activity is watching the Yankees and Knicks on TV.

Ever since the fiscal crisis of the 1970's, the city has shortchanged its public-school athletic programs; ball fields and basketball courts have been allowed to deteriorate through neglect and lack of investment. The city spends less than a tenth of what surrounding suburbs spend on their sports teams. Of the 60 public high schools that even have athletic facilities, 50 have fields in such bad shape they need to be completely rebuilt. Just 12 percent of New York public-school students participate in a sports team, putting us at the bottom compared to other large cities. A shocking study by Queens College found that over 50 percent of New York public-high-school kids have a major risk factor for heart disease, mostly from being overweight and under-exercised.

Fortunately some of those in the private sector have stepped up to the plate. Take the Field is a remarkable, nonprofit public-private partnership which designs and rebuilds athletic facilities–baseball diamonds, football fields, basketball courts, tennis courts, running tracks–for the city's public high schools. Under the direction of its co-founder and chairman Bob Tisch, Take the Field has, in just two years, provided 15 schools with state-of-the-art facilities. The organization is on a campaign to raise $25 million–the city has pledged to match each dollar raised with three dollars. The resulting $100 million would be enough to renovate the fields of almost every public high school.

Schools work best if they engage kids in and out of the classroom. Take the example of George Washington High School in Washington Heights. The baseball team won championships and a national reputation despite dismal facilities, threadbare secondhand uniforms and not enough balls for batting practice. The kids who play on the team have graduation rates twice as high as other students at the school, and far higher than the city average. Thanks to Take the Field, the school now has a $2.5 million athletic complex, featuring a beautifully groomed ball field.

Take the Field's ongoing ability to raise funds will make sure that the city's public-school kids won't always have to dodge potholes on the baseball diamond. Those who wish to help may call 521-2232.