Nobody is going to fire him anymore.

Ta-Nehisi Coates.

At 37, Mr. Coates is the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States. His Atlantic essays, guest columns for The New York Times and blog posts are defined by a distinct blend of eloquence, authenticity and nuance. And he has been picking up fans in very high places.

Fans like Rachel Maddow, who tweeted: “Don’t know, if in US commentary, there is a more beautiful writer than Ta-Nehisi Coates.” The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg described him as “one of the most elegant and sharp observers of race in America,” when announcing that Mr. Coates had won the 2012 prize for commentary from The Sidney Hillman Foundation. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who recently hosted a book reading at MIT with Mr. Coates, a visiting professor at the school, said that “he is as fine a nonfiction writer as anyone working today.”

Without a Ph.D., Mr. Coates is an uncommon visiting professor at MIT. In fact, he doesn’t even have a college degree, having dropped out of Howard University, failing both British and American literature. Before that, he failed 11th-grade English.

“If you had told me he would be a big deal, I would have said, ‘Get real,’” said Times media critic David Carr. Mr. Coates’s first writing gig was at the Washington City Paper, where Mr. Carr was his editor. “He needed work. He was not a great speller. He wasn’t terrific with names. And he wasn’t all that ambitious.”

Indeed, it was an inauspicious beginning.

The article that launched Mr. Coates toward stardom, his first for The Atlantic, came on the heels of his departure from Time. In that piece, “This Is How We Lost to the White Man,” Mr. Coates situated Bill Cosby’s attention-getting criticisms of black men within the tradition of African-American self-help conservatism championed by Booker T. Washington.

Published in 2008, the article was well-received and eventually included in the collection Best African American Essays 2010. And yet, it almost was never printed. Mr. Coates had started working on the piece the previous year, when he was at Time, and it was rejected by several publications before Mr. Coates asked Mr. Carr if he knew of a home for it. The Atlantic editor James Bennet was receptive.

“I’m very grateful to both those guys,” said Mr. Coates, who was inked to a blog deal by The Atlantic soon after the article came out, “but it shows the power of that networking. I couldn’t help notice that it was one well-placed white dude talking to another well-placed white dude to get it published.”

Ideas about race and racial identity have always been with Mr. Coates. He was introduced to the writing world by his father, a former Black Panther and Vietnam vet who ran an Afrocentric publishing house out of the family’s home in West Baltimore. “I was surrounded by books and ideas. We literally had the machinery for creating books in our basement,” said Mr. Coates, who is tall but carries himself casually. (In his Atlantic author photo, he sports thick black-framed glasses and a driving cap, which is what he wore on the day we met as well.)

The printing press existed alongside the geek paraphernalia that Mr. Coates constantly mentions in his writing—video games, comic books and Dungeons & Dragons are among his obsessions. Mr. Coates’s writings are also filled with anecdotes and lessons extracted from his time spent in an urban reality most American journalists know only from watching season four of The Wire (which was actually filmed at Mr. Coates’s old school, William H. Lemmel Middle). In this way, he finds relevant insights into debates that are mere abstraction for so many other pundits.

Of course, growing up in difficult circumstances doesn’t inherently confer wisdom. In another writer’s hands, the constant invocation of childhood adversity would seem like a ham-handed attempt to assert credibility. But Mr. Coates’s talent is a lottery-ticket-rare ability to both reveal his personal life and seem extraordinarily humble. He also has a disarming habit of smiling as he speaks.

Once, when confronted by the conservative Daily News columnist John McWhorter about something mean-spirited Mr. Coates had written about him, Mr. Coates immediately apologized, saying, “It was tremendously unkind.”

Mr. McWhorter was taken aback by the honesty. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he admitted.

And while it must be said that Mr. Coates’s memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, fails in pulling off the delicate balance between remembrance and braggadocio, the book does advance a theme that has underscored much of his work—that the dismissal of hip-hop as merely “a symbol of the decline of the West if ever there was one,” as the National Review recently argued, is only a subtler form of the same lazy ignorance that runs through centuries of racist stereotypes of young black men.

“I learned about writing from hip-hop,” he said. “More than any books I’ve ever read, hip-hop’s use of language and sense of geography influenced me—there is something about the condensed space that music forces you into.”

Nelson Fernandez, Jim Fallows, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

But he is no music critic. Mr. Coates’s writing about hip-hop is normally a segue into his main subject: race. In a February Times column, he suggested the White House study the rapper Kendrick Lamar’s new album as a way to understand the effects of gun violence, among the most unlikely public policy proposals of recent years. But Mr. Coates bristles at suggestions that race is his beat. “I think I write about America, and about things that interest me,” he told The Observer.

When The Village Voice asked Mr. Coates to write a column about black men, he objected. “The moment you put that upon yourself—‘black correspondent’—that’s always with you, you never get rid of that,” he said.

Still, racial issues are what Mr. Coates writes about most, and what he is best known for. Everything Mr. Coates has written for The Atlantic’s print magazine, for which he serves as senior editor, has regarded race in one form or another.

Perhaps his best-known piece is a 10,000-word article called “Fear of a Black President,” about Barack Obama’s inability to mention race without alienating white voters. It snakes through the importance of Mr. Obama’s presidency for African-Americans while showing the limitations of that achievement. The article “had the kind of impact for which magazines hunger,” wrote a blogger at Harvard’s Neiman Foundation.

For Mr. Coates, the job of the writer, even the pundit, is not to persuade. “The job of the writer should be one of humility, I think, one of being ignorant and learning—not to stand up and pretend to know everything,” he said. “I’m not a consultant or a race expert.”

Indeed, Mr. Coates is particularly anxious about being seen as some kind of black spokesman. And even Stephen Colbert poked fun at this idea when, in January, Mr. Coates appeared on The Colbert Report and the host asked him: “Are you guys still all excited about this first black president thing, or have you gotten over that?”

Mr. Coates says he is uninspired by the emails he receives telling him how his writing has helped someone win an argument. “That ain’t my burden. I don’t write to help others with their racism, and I’m not here to educate you,” he said. “I’m here to be insanely curious.”

It’s not hard to see how Mr. Coates’s sphere of influence has grown along with his outsized online community. Some even say he has redefined the blogging form. “There’s really nobody else who does what he does, in terms of creating a community of people around his blog,” said Mr. Carr. “He does a ton of moderating that blog and putting in time with it, and it’s become a self-policing community, which is really remarkable. He goes where he wants to go, and the community goes along with him.”

According to Natalie Raabe, communications director for The Atlantic, it has “by far the most engaged community in our comments section.”

If Mr. Coates is notable for popping into his own comments section to praise or criticize posters, it’s because he has a distinct vision of blogging. “It is its own space; it’s not the entire web—there are plenty of places to go if you want to do other things,” he said. He gestures to the establishment we’re in. “This is an individual place—if you started yelling in here or screaming that they need to be serving chicken if they don’t want to, they’d kick you out. They have the right to be their own spot.”

And yet the blog might end soon. “Managing a community is tough,” Mr. Coates admitted, adding that he’d like to be able to just be a fan of things without feeling the need to constantly comment. “I’m leery of talking too much—I feel like I need to sit with an idea for a year or two if I want. Isn’t that what a writer’s supposed to do?”

Mr. Coates is currently finishing a novel on the Underground Railroad and will soon be submitting to a publisher a book of essays about the Civil War, a subject he has been infatuated with on his blog for five years.

And blog or no blog, Mr. Coates is likely staying at The Atlantic. The Times asked him to become a regular columnist, but Mr. Coates rejected the most coveted real estate in American journalism. He would not comment on the matter, but recently wrote on his blog about the difficulties of writing a twice-a-week Times op-ed column. He suggested that he would be taxed writing so frequently at such length, and feared his writing would suffer.

“I won’t go so far as to say I’d fail,” he wrote. “But I strongly suspect that the same people who were convinced this would be a perfect marriage, would—inside of a year—be tweeting, ‘Remember when that dude could actually write?’” Of course, that humility is exactly what makes readers want to see Mr. Coates on the op-ed page twice a week. The fact is, wherever he writes next, the man has arrived.

Pat Kiernan Deserves Better: According to a recent report, SNL head writer Seth Myers is inexplicably in the lead to be Kelly Ripa’s permanent co-host when she returns from vacation, while NY1 cult fan favorite Pat Kiernan is supposedly in "second." The world deserves better. [Showbiz 411]

Page Six as the NewsCorp Nuptials Page: Today in Page Six, an announcement about the birth of one New York Post staffer's son, and another about a Post staffer's marriage. While admittedly adorable, what's funny about this isn't the fact that it's under the "WE HEAR" heading—You couldn't confirm it?—but that it seems to keep happening. We should note, though, that this item is in fact both more positive and less restrained than the stiff-necked gun-to-back coverage of Post executive editor Jesse Angelo’swedding. [Page Six] 

A Few Good Fareeds: Did you happen to see Newsweek International editor Tunku Varadarajan’s defense of Time's Fareed Zakaria on The Daily Beast/in Newsweek? A few things of note:

1. Invoking the words "lynch mob" in reference to what happened to Fareed Zakaria.

2. The stated idea that "media reporters of the kind who hounded Mr. Zakaria occupy the lowest rung and exult at the prospect of pulling people down."

3. Use of the term "Schadenfareed," which was not attributed to Ron Mwangaguhung—which it should be, because he was the first to coin it.

4. This is in defense of Mr. Zakaria: "He also writes academic-lite books that presidents clutch as they clamber aboard planes, and gives speeches at—it is said—$75,000 a pop."

Mr. Varadarajan's perspective implies he is so deep inside a certain media institution that he has only a colonoscopic view of anything outside of said media institution. Mr. Zakaria, for his part, resigned from a position at Yale recently, which is definitely not an admission of anything and which you should clearly take to mean nothing. [The Daily Beast, NH Register]

Matt Drudge Just Wants to Dance With Somebody: BuzzFeed's John Herrman posted a brilliant story tying Matt Drudge to the insidious forces of Israeli house music. This is brilliant, hilarious and wonderful. [BuzzFeed]

Lede of the Day: This one comes to us via New York Times dining writer Jennifer Steinhauer:

JUST as the culinary cognoscenti press us into embracing certain food trends (“You will eat pork belly! Love cupcakes now! Hate cupcakes now!”) so, too, do they dictate our drinks.

Meta, much? It's a piece from someone actively participating in the "culinary cognoscenti" engaging in the exact act she is decrying. An astute copy editor need only make two small changes in order to lend this sentence accuracy:

JUST as the culinary cognoscenti press us into embracing certain food trends (“You will eat pork belly! Love cupcakes now! Hate cupcakes now!”) so, too, do they we dictate our your drinks.

See? Easy. [NYT Dining]

Syndication Power: Why is CNN Money so successful? Its partnerships and syndicated content. A simple, smart and important take, here. [24/7 Wall Street via Talking Biz]

Roger Clark Deserves Better: NY1’s gonzo reporter Roger Clark could not get into infamous nightclub Tunnel in the ’90s. We need to know more about this in the form of a picture of his hair from that era. [@RogerClark41]

Leathery Lacey: Yesterday, David Carr took on the matter of former Village Voice staff writer Rosie Gray, who penned a think piece for BuzzFeed (they do those!) about the ongoing downsizing at the Voice. It's odd to hear Village Voice Media's Kegmeister and Pledge Hazing Chair Mike Lacey imply—to the New York Times, no less—that one of his staffers was "let go" when she actually quit. Carr noted:

“Of course it is disappointing to let Rosie Gray, or any staff person, go,” he wrote. (Ms. Gray actually left the paper, she was not laid off.) 

Is that objectively sleazy? We think it might be! [Media Decoder, Buzzfeed]

Long Drop Off A Short Pier(s): Here's a video of Piers Morgan interviewing a chair. Compelling stuff. [Dylan Byers/Politico]

Pando Penenberg: The Adam Penenberg—yes, the guy who busted Stephen Glass—is joining Sarah Lacy’s PandoDaily as editor. Yes, the PandoDaily of Sarah Lacy, a site whose mission statement alone stood for everything terribly conflicted about tech journalism. Conclusion: This is either a turning point for Lacy, or for Penenberg. Here's hoping it's the former. [PandoDaily]

From Soft News to Soft Drinks: Speaking of moves to dark sides, the head of ABC's This Week is leaving to work for Pepsi. Unfortunate for This Week and ABC News on the whole, which isn't exactly having a great week. [NYT Media Decoder, Atlantic Wire]

Sharp Penn: They might not have much of a football program these days, but incoming Penn State students who aspire to get into this journalism racket are in the right place: Their campus newspaper rightly made the top spot among its contemporaries. [College Media Matters via Romenesko]

- - -

Sleazy media gossip? Tips? Ideas? Conspiracy theories? Favorite words on Urban Dictionary? Please, by all means, let us live, and send them our way.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Yahoo, despite its tattered reputation, is No. 1 in 10 content categories, according to the measurement service comScore, including news, finance, sports, entertainment and real estate. Yahoo reaches more than 75 percent of the total Internet audience in the United States, with 167.2 million unique users in June. On any given day, 30 million or more people stop by. Globally, about 700 million people visit the site in 30 languages every month.

Which actually will come as a surprise to plenty of people.

As far as what their news operation is (or isn't)? Bookforum and The Baffler editor Chris Lehmann weighed in along with Gawker's John Cook, both erstwhile Yahoo! News employees. Surprisingly, neither exactly had positive marks for the iteration of it they experienced. The official word? Emphasis ours:

I exchanged a dozen e-mails aimed at setting up a chat with Mickie Rosen, a senior executive in charge of media and commerce, to get Yahoo’s take on the matter. But the interview was canceled just before it was supposed to occur.

Oh, come on: Mickie Rosen—as we all well know by now—just isn't that great with the email machine. Maybe the newly-promoted Hillary Frey will help out with that one (both the question of what Yahoo! News is, as well as Mickie Rosen's email issues).

Finally, some attempts at answering the "What is Yahoo?" question on Twitter?

Sure:

• "I asked this and was accused of being a 1%er."
• "I want to say 'delicate.'"
• "Once again an empty vessel."
• "Asking CEO "What is Yahoo?" is such a gimmick. Its not like 'What is Microsoft' or 'What is Google' have easy answers."
• "And "WHY is it?" Must get the WHY."

Note that all of those answers share a common trait: They are generally unintelligible, and difficult to assess the meaning of. Like Yahoo!?

Question for a C.E.O.: What Is Yahoo? [NYT]

[Previously: Whoops: Yahoo VP Forgets to Remove Laid Off Bloggers from Non-BCC’d Bagel Brunch Invite, Sassed in Return]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

This talk was covered six ways to Sunday. (http://www.imagethink.net)

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson spoke at SXSW in Austin, Tex. yesterday, further proof of her tolerance for meta-media spectacles previously hinted at by appearances at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Iowa caucuses.

Ms. Abramson, well within her area of expertise, appeared in a conversation about “The Future of the New York Times” with Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith.

Less than a year after her predecessor, Bill Keller, wondered aloud in the Times magazine if Twitter was making us stupid, Ms. Abramson said that the real question was whether or not to break news on Twitter without a story to link to. Some of her political reporters wanted to "issue an edict" against it, but she's not ideological about it. She'd seen on the campaign trail that Twitter was a “revolution” for news gathering.

(Not that you have to tell us. The Observer curated—or is it aggregated?—all the information in this post from the safety of New York, using SXSW-goers manic Tweets and Poynter editor Steve Myers's liveblog. Is there a symbol for that?)

Pressed on that front—the difference between her and Mr. Keller—she said, “He reads poetry on the subway, I’m reading my horoscope in the Post on the subway.” (Ms. Abramson is a Pisces.)

The functional difference, of course, is the 6-month digital sabbatical Ms. Abramson took before taking his post, which she described to Mr. Smith. A “scary and hopeful” time, she learned she had a lot to learn but was comforted by the fact that new media tools advance old school work like investigative reporting. Longform investigations are among the Times most popular online articles, she said.

The rest of Austin was gossiping about CNN’s rumored acquisition of Mashable, but Ms. Abramson praised the Times’s internal development team, including Andrew DeVigal and Aron Pilhofer.

Not that they get it totally right all the time.

For example, Clara Jeffery, editor of Mother Jones, asked why the Times has the irksome habit of never linking out.

Ms. Abramson said there’s no policy against it, and there will be more of it in the future.

While Times tech and media reporters Jenna Wortham and Brian Stelter Instagrammed on the newspaper’s official SXSW Tumblr (Ms. Wortham packed a glittery vest! Mr. Stelter flew in to Dallas to save money!), Mr. Smith asked Ms. Abramson if the Times, once upon a time, wouldn’t have frowned upon strong individual reporter brands, “the David Carr-ification of the New York Times.”

Ms. Abramson said the relationship was symbiotic: Mr. Carr benefits from the institutional clout as much as the Times benefits from the Page One star’s wattage.

“No one is going to convince me otherwise,” she said.

Although Ms. Abramson’s appearance was undeniably good diplomacy toward the powerful tech leaders to which media companies now find themselves beholden, keeping pace with SXSW’s rapid-fire self-documentation is easier said than done.

Ms. Abramson herself hasn’t tweeted since December.

“I don’t pretend that I know everything but it’s been exciting and very  eye-opening and great listening time for me here,” Ms. Abramson told Forbes's Jeff Berovici before the panel.

In the video below, Ms. Abramson dressed in a leather blazer, told him she was spending her first SXSW trip meeting individually with people from Twitter and Apple, going to some sessions, and, hopefully, seeing some music. Mr. Bercovici asked which acts she was hoping to catch.

“One of the concerts that I’m hoping to go to tonight may get packed so I have to keep mum about it,” she demurred.

“You’re going to Jay-Z," he said. “Say ‘Hi’ to him for me.”

“I’ll send him your love,” she replied.

Later that night, Jay-Z sent his love to Ms. Abramson and The New York Times, as well as The New Yorker, New York magazine, and The New York Post, whose logos flashed when he performed “Empire State of Mind” in miniature tribute to his hometown media, according to the Times' Lexi Mainland.

The Observer wasn't there to take take it personally.

Already the Curator's Code-- created by Maria Popova and designer Kelli Anderson because of something David Carr said on a SXSW panel they were also on--has caused the web to explode with commentary, both pro and con. Some people love the idea, some hate it, and some are just taking issue with the word "curation." But aren't we all missing the bigger picture(s) here? Hieroglyphics are the new hyperlinks! But we think the two that have been created already don't really connote all the different ways people cull information and reprocess it on the Internet. That's why we've made our own symbols, based on the hobo code. (The photos of which we took from Wikipedia. Infinity symbol?)

The article (by Kristen Hinman who was a longtime writer for other VVM publications) posits that underage prostitution does exist, tragically, but it's largely conducted voluntarily and independently, contrary to the archetype of the young girl manipulated by a nolder pimp. That misconception, she argues, distracts policymakers from the more meaningful task of lifting child prostitutes--many of whom are boys and transsexuals, she notes--out of the cycle of homelessness and poverty that led them to it.

It includes a plea to write to Senator John Cornyn and Senator Ron Wyden in support of a bill they've authored that would provide federal money for shelters for victims of underage prostitition.

The Village Voice's skin in this game is disclosed: That stereotypical form of prostitution sometimes transpires over Backpage.com, the online classifieds site owned by Village Voice parent company Village Voice Media (VVM).

The arguments in defense of Backpage.com are significant. As David Carr pointed out in his column Monday, it's a First Amendment issue, and if it is shut it down, the business would just pop up somewhere else. Backpage.com benefited from this phenomenon when Craigslist's erotic services section was shuttered.

Mr. Carr concludes that this amounts to a "principled stand, and just because it aligns with their business interests doesn’t mean it isn’t valid," but he never addresses VVM's editorial campaign. Is journalism that aligns with their business interests still valid?

“And The New York Times, meanwhile, is writing about surfing,” he said, “and I’m sitting there going like, ‘You know what? I’m not going to talk about surfing, I’m going to talk about cannibalism, because that fucks me up.’”

“Just a sec, time out,” Mr. Carr interrupted in his authoritative rasp. “Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide.”

He went on. “Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do. So, continue.”

Having once made the mistake of criticizing The Times before the self-admittedly “tribal” Mr. Carr, Off the Record couldn’t help but cringe watching the exchange.

It would have been worse had we  known then what we know now: Mr. Smith is the boss of Mr. Carr’s daughter Erin Lee Carr, an associate producer for Vice’s VBS.TV, the same outlet that put out The Vice Guide to Liberia!

We were tipped off by a recent Carr tweet: “Take w/grain of salt but this @erinleecarr chick can really write,” the proud papa wrote, linking a story about cyborg eyes.

Off the Record reached Ms. Carr at Vice’s Williamsburg office to find out what her bosses thought about her dad’s strong pro-Times advocacy. Ms. Carr wasn’t working at Vice when her father wrote about the company and the scene was shot, though she was when the movie came out.

“We thought it was funny,” Ms. Carr said. “Everyone took it with a grain of salt.”

Idioms, like journalistic prowess, tend to run in families.

“Her whole take away on the movie was ‘You’re always yelling at people,’” Mr. Carr said. “Well, why should work be any different than home, really?”

Mr. Carr said his daughter has inherited his company loyalty, and that he himself thinks Vice is “totally gangster.”

Gangster?! Oh my god, David, no one says that anymore.

Mr. Stelter, fan of 'Doug.'

In one of the more quotable moments from the documentary Page One, media reporter David Carr refers to his colleague, television reporter Brian Stelter, as "a robot created by The New York Times to destroy me."

Since then, Mr. Stelter's been doing damage control on his metallic reputation. He's escorted CNBC beauty Nicole Lapin down the aisle at the documentary's premiere, graced the star-studded pages of Page Six in an item about their relationship, and then landed a book deal. Now, he's talking at length about the warm and fuzzy memories he has watching "Doug" and other classic Nickelodeon shows. We liked "The Adventures of Pete & Pete" too, Brian! You just can't be a robot!

As The Observer reported just days ago, TeenNick will begin playing shows such as “Clarissa Explains It All” and “Kenan & Kel” between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. (It bears repeating, from the previous article, that these are prime drinking hours.)

"Some of the original children of the Nickelodeon channel for kids are growing up, and they're saying they want their old Nickelodeon back.," Mr. Stelter explains in the video.

He goes on to note that his favorite of the bunch was always "Doug." And with the news today that Mr. Stelter and his girlfriend have parted ways, perhaps that classic cartoon is the right balm to ease heartbreak. Doug Funnie never got with Patti Mayonnaise, either, man. It's going to be all right.

Also, the "Doug" theme song is now permanently stuck in our head.

And with it, a star is born: New York Times media reporter David Carr.

Yes, those same movie theaters that beam Twee indie movies like Garden State or Sophia Coppola's latest into people's heads are now bringing Jersey's own Timesman, Mr. Carr—pictured above, left—to the silver screen. It was a natural fit long before the cameras entered the building: the Media Equation writer has had a wild career long before ascending to the Times, including but not limited to dalliances with crack cocaine as detailed in his memoir, The Night of the Gun. Debate about the film's politics or message aside, those writing about the film seem to single out Mr. Carr in particular: his "performance" in the film has been pored over more vividly than the image of any other reporter in the country—and certainly, the Times—in recent memory.

New York Times reporters don't get the movie star treatment without causing some kind of intense ruckus (see: Judy Miller, Jayson Blair, or alternatively, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, or Andrew Ross Sorkin). The last two Times writers to appear in major films at all only had brief cameos (Mr. Sorkin in the HBO adaptation of his book, Too Big to Fail, and Paul Krugman as a comic foil to Jonah Hill and Russel Brand in Get Him to the Greek).

The descriptors used for Mr. Carr are not what you'd normally find in those typically characterizing Times reporters; they sound more like that of a film noir detective; they could also easily be mistaken for another "survivor" in a "treacherous environment" (such as the Times is), Man vs. Nature's Bear Grylls (pictured above, right).

As such, here's a (by no means comprehensive) grouping of the adjectives and descriptors from the last few weeks of press on Page One and Man vs. Nature. Are they describing David Carr, or Bear Grylls? Go!

• "Grizzled."
• "Unshaven."
• "Actually looks pretty well put together."
• "Hard-boiled, asphalt voiced."
• "Weathered."
• "A train-wreck."
• "Insightful."
• "Hardly fits standard notions of a movie idol."
• "Like a western maverick."
• "Daredevil."
• "Like a domesticated Hunter Thompson."
• "A colorful, unconventionally mediagenic character."
• "Salty."
• "Pacino-like saltiness."
• "Few better people to be left stranded in the wilderness."
• "Screechy-scratchy."
• "Shameless hambone."
• "Quasi-bohemian, self-regarding wiseguy."
• "Unlikely but charismatic."
• "Adventurer."
• "Grotesque, annoying, yet somehow transfixing."
• "A wisecracking fireball of charisma."
• "A voluble personality."
• "Pointedly eccentric."
• "Off-beat."

Finally, an easy one, but extra points if you guess the author:

• "The Snooki of journalism."

A sequel to the film is unlikely, but in the event film producers have extra cash on hand, the Observer is currently crafting a pitch wherein Mr. Carr and media desk men Brian Stelter and Bruce Hedlam eat a fistful of peyote in the desert and are tasked with coming back from a vision quest with new ways of making the paper more profitable. Given the aforementioned reviews of Page One and the star-like qualities evident in the Times newsroom by them, we're practically insuring a sure-fire formula for all stripes of audiences' enjoyment everywhere.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Mr. Sorkin's hatred of bloggers stems from an incident during his West Wing days, when he took to a Television Without Pity message board to defend himself against criticism, and was given a harsh shellacking on the board and in the press for doing so. He channeled this into a particularly wonderful episode of The West Wing. Since then, he's taken every chance he can to sideswipe the matter of these pesky bloggers who blog things (it's often argued that he wrote an entire film about his distaste for the democratizing nature of the internet, let alone the press he did for it), forgetting the fact that he still often takes to those same blogs to communicate with the hoi polloi whenever it's called for.

But even for him, this—from an Interview magazine Q & A with David Carr, a New York Times media reporter and the primary Times staffer featured in Page One, the documentary about the Times—is a particularly bad look.

Mr. Sorkin is discussing with Mr. Carr the matter of Brian Stelter, the other Page One protagonist who was hired by theTimes' media desk in 2007 after the acquisition of his television industry news blog TV Newser, all while he was still in college. A blogger, hired at the Times! One would think Mr. Sorkin, once considered a wunderkind of sorts for his play A Few Good Men, could relate.

And then, this happens:

SORKIN: And The New York Times felt that [Stelter] should be working there?

CARR: Yeah, which seemed like a pretty weird idea at the time. But he has become such an asset. We collaborate a lot. The robot part is that he moves his elbow and content comes out. While he’s chatting, he’s also tweeting and blogging—and, you know, I’ll think that’s cute, and then the next day he’ll be on the front page with a synthetic piece about the analytics of television or new media, which he also covers. If Brian wasn’t such a decent guy, I would actually slip something into his food or quietly suffocate him with a pillow.

SORKIN: I’m glad to hear he’s a decent guy who has the respect of his co-workers. So then I’ll speak to this idea more generally: I know when I read something in The New York Times that whoever wrote it had to be very good to get the job that they have. But I don’t know anything about the person who is blogging online. It’s an easy job to get. Anybody can be a blogger—you just set up a site and blog. But there isn’t the same kind of accountability. I mean, The New York Times makes mistakes—Jayson Blair, Judith Miller—but when it does, it’s a very big deal.

Not so much, but that—like Mr. Sorkin's erroneous and wide-reaching assessment of the action of blogging as the mating call of the bottom feeders of the entire internet and not as another format of writing (one quite celebrated at the Times), or his complete misunderstanding of the concept of "citizen journalism" by comparing it to "citizen medicine" —is, of course,  a different story, though not one Mr. Sorkin will ever read, since, of course, he's not so big on reading bloggers.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek