But Conor Friedersdorf, the libertarian columnist at The Atlantic, has a more complex answer. Much of the reason that American media organizations fail to accurately cover important stories on a combination of audience interest and business pressures; cable news infotainment is more common than well-researched 10,000-word magazine pieces because most Americans prefer the former. (The American Conservative/The Atlantic)

On that happy note, here's the rest of your media news:

WTFOIA? The Associated Press has found that a number of Obama's political appointees are using secret email accounts, which could hide their emails from Freedom of Information Act requests. (AP)

Tom Goldstein, publisher of the Supreme Court-focused blog SCOTUSblog, will contribute coverage to NBC's coverage of upcoming Supreme Court decisions. (Politico)

New York magazine's television critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, is taking over as editor of RogerEbert.com (FishbowlNY)

Fox Business News rejected an ad that criticized Fox News contributors Erick Erickson, Juan Williams, and Lou Dobbs for sexism. (Huffington Post)

And finally, an extensive investigation by Mother Jones reveals that New York's Approval Matrix is actually a Cartesian plane, not a matrix. (Mother Jones)

“The traffic melted the needle of our live meter,” said Monika Bauerlein, an editor at the liberal magazine, when we reached her this afternoon. “Our metric software just couldn’t keep up.”

“But you know, online publishing metrics are kind of voodoo anyway,” she said.

Ms. Bauerlein noted that the video has gotten 2.4 million views – that they know of.

Though they are unsure of the total number of visitors, the magazine’s website received a record number of hits after they published the footage of Mitt Romney speaking candidly at a fundraiser. Their analytical capacities were overwhelmed by the onslaught of traffic, the web site did not go offline because Mother Jones beefed up their back-end in anticipation of an increase in traffic.

Though they knew the video would do well, Ms. Bauerlein told us it exceeded all of their expectations.

Mr. Romney responded to the video with a hastily-scheduled, late night press conference. Although Ms. Bauerlein said she wasn’t surprised by Mitt Romney’s immediate reaction, she “didn’t expect such a full-throated defense.”

Despite Mother Jones' decidedly liberal leanings, Ms. Bauerlein said she sympathized with the Romney campaign and that she would not hesitate to publish similar video of President Barack Obama.

“If we got a video like this of Obama, we would go to town on it just as hard,” she said, although she noted that these kinds of scoops are pretty rare. In fact, Ms. Bauerlein encouraged tipsters who might have a similar video of the President to send it her way.

“These are the revealing moments about the people who run our country,” she said.

Screengrabs

Videos recorded in the last month or so apparently caught Mitt Romney speaking perhaps a bit too frankly to a captive group of donors. The covertly-recorded videos, spotlighted by the liberal publication Mother Jones, reveal that the Republican nominee has a more controversial view of a significant percentage of the American electorate than has perhaps been heard from him before.

Mother Jones's David Corn didn't shy away from presenting the videos with a dash of cloak-and-dagger theatrics:

Mother Jones has obtained video of Romney at this intimate fundraiser—where he candidly discussed his campaign strategy and foreign policy ideas in stark terms he does not use in public—and has confirmed its authenticity. To protect the confidential source who provided the video, we have blurred some of the image, and we will not identify the date or location of the event, which occurred after Romney had clinched the Republican presidential nomination. Here is Romney expressing his disdain for Americans who back the president

The most controversial clip is below, and while Mr. Corn published several more excerpts from the former Massachusetts governor's talk to millionaire donors, this portion in particular may not bode well for Mr. Romney's already troubled campaign:

An especially contentious portion of Mr. Romney's statement comes when he says, "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."

A good indicator of the impact of these words: by Monday night both "David Corn" and the hashtag "#47Percent" were top trends on Twitter.

Mother Jones published quite a bit of Mr. Romney's talk about "the 47 percent," but short clips of text and video appear to have first been published on YouTube on August 27, by a user with the somewhat obvious handle, "Anne Onymous." They seem to have been taken from the same perspective as the Mother Jones videos. The following is a smaller clip of Mr. Romney's statement about "47 percent" of the voting public:

"Anne Onymous" uploaded 10 videos in the last three weeks. Based on the upload dates and visual cues in the portions of the videos where Mr. Romney can be seen speaking at a podium across the room, they all seem to have been made at the same dinner, which occurred, according to Mother Jones, "after Romney had clinched the Republican presidential nomination."

Is "Anne Onymous" the source for Mother Jones's potentially damning exposé? Probably--a Google+ account linked to the YouTube profile led to Twitter, and @AnneOnymous670's very first tweet, directed at David Corn:

@davidcorndc More leaked Mitt Romney fundraiser video. He admits buying sweatshop. More to come. Foreign policy, etc. youtube.com/playlist?list=…

— @AnneOnymous670 (@AnneOnymous670) August 28, 2012

Given that Anne Onymous has steadfastly maintained anonymity all along via the play on words in their screen name, knowing that they are the source Mr. Corn has worked carefully to protect may be moot. A more interesting question: was "Anne Onymous" chosen as a clever yet obvious pseudonym, or is the screen name a nod to Anonymous, the controversial hacktivist collective?

Whoever they are, they were determined from the first tweet to David Corn on August 28 to get this story out--nearly every tweet posted by @AnneOnymous670 since then has been devoted to asking various politicos and publications to look at their videos.

With Mother Jones promising further revelations to come, it looks like that mission has been accomplished.

Protesters in the free speech zone during Obama's midtown fundraiser (via Mother Jones)

Last night, demonstrators who arrived in midtown to protest a Barack Obama fundraiser found themselves corralled into a "free speech zone" on 53rd Street and 7th Avenue. Reporters--like Josh Harkinson from Mother Jones and Meg Robertson from MSNBC --were not allowed near the penned-in demonstrators, despite Commissioner Ray Kelly's recent orders that the NYPD was to play nice with journalists covering OWS. This directive came after the events of the November 14th raid of Zuccotti and the Day of Protest on the 17th left 26 reporters arrested.

Gothamist reports that journos trying to get near the pen were told by police officers that the demonstrators were in a "frozen zone," and not able to leave. Journalists were barred from speaking to them.

A video of Mr. Harkinson and Andrew Katz, a reporter for The Brooklyn Ink after trying to question protesters who say they were being held captive, was put online on Mother Jones' website. The video also shows the police leading them away from the pen, being told "You can't stand in this area.":

It is unclear whether Mr. Harkinson or Mr. Katz had NYPD-issued press badges, or any sort of marker indicating them as members of the press instead of civilians. Not that would have made a difference.

On learning to be funny growing up in the Bronx:

I was small and weak and Jewish instead of large and fierce and Puerto Rican. You need something.

On drugs:

Brother was six years older, which explains why I gobbled crystal meth at 12, smoked hashish at 13, and was shooting smack at 17, which explains how I got Hepatitis C, which was the basis of my first book, which was a humor book about dying.

On his two work modes:

I report as a machine; I write as a person.

On how he started writing:

I walked into the college newspaper and discovered the elation delivered by a byline.

On when to stop reporting and start writing:

It is never time to stop reporting, but you have to make the call at some point. In my case, it's usually when I know I have a good top and a good kicker, and feel relatively certain I've got enough to fill the spaces in between, and to answer all the really big questions.

On how people read:

They create a theater in their minds.

On his favorite piece to report:

[T]he time I used petty cash to finance a visit to a whorehouse for a column.

Read the full exchange here.

The team behind 48 Hour Magazine announced a theme for the issue ("Hustle") on Friday at noon to a list of volunteer contributors. The team raced through the over 1,500 submissions that came in before Saturday at noon, and then began editing and designing the issue to ship Sunday.

Gizmodo's Joel Johnson asked one of the editors working on the project, Mat Honan, what the magazine industry could learn from the project.

I've been thinking of becoming a family farmer because it seems like it might be a better long-term career move. Of course that's not true, I know magazines are rebounding. Yet I do think you're going to continue to see a winnowing down of major titles. There will be fewer major magazines on the stand, and those that are there will really have to prove themselves. But I also think there could be lots of room for niche players, like us, with weird models. Only magazines can save magazines.

It will be a week before anybody knows what "Issue 0" of 48 Hours Magazine looks like, but the project looks like it was a success. Before going to bed on Sunday, the team wrote that this will not be the only issue: "Are we going to do this again? Yes. Ask again tomorrow, but right now, hell yes."

"We all had both personal and professional relationships with people in a lot of different newsrooms," said DocumentCloud co-creator Scott Klein, ProPublica's editor of online development and expat of The Nation, The New York Times and Condé Nast.

Eric Umansky, a senior editor at ProPublica and former editor of MotherJones.com, told The Observer "it was usually a pretty easy sell."

"The reality was we were basically telling people we're gonna make your documents easier to find; we're going to give more attention to your reporting and, in exchange, it doesn't cost you anything and you don't have to make any commitment besides good faith in your documents," he said.

As The Observer reported in June, DocumentCloud was co-created by Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news technologies at The New York Times, and Ben Koski, a software engineer in The New York Times' interactive news technology group (who worked on that Gauging Your Distraction online game for The Times). Their proposal for the high-tech data archive was one of nine projects to receive a total of $5.1 million in grants to come up with new ideas on reinventing news and information organization using crowd-sourcing, mobile technology and other digital journalism tactics.

The team received a two-year grant of $719,500 (they were originally seeking $1 million over three years) and are now in full-swing development mode.
DocumentCloud's software, once its fully built, will take all those papers that reporters, bloggers and civic groups usually stack in their bottom drawers or computer desktop folders at the end of their investigations, and extract all the information so that it's findable, shareable and searchable on the Web.

Think of those huge PDFs displaying political donations, legislative votes, sports players' stats or even VIP lists from socialite dinners and parties—all extracted and put online in their rawest forms.

Using software from DocumentCloud's partners, users will be able to play with the data and create displays. They would also be able to search for documents by date, topic, person or location, and make connections between them in all kinds of ways. All of the information will be free and searchable by the public, according to Mr. Klein and Mr. Umansky.

The New York Times, ProPublica, Talking Points Memo, the National Security Archive and Gotham Gazette have been partners from the beginning from the project.

Other publications that will be contributing their resources and documents include the Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Arizona Republic, Minnesota Post, St. Petersburg Times and the Voice of San Diego.

Nonprofits and organizations joining in are the ACLU National Security Project, Center for Democracy and Technology, the Centre for Investigative Journalism at City University in London, the Center for Investigative Reporting in California, the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Workshop at American University and the Sunlight Foundation.

PBS' NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is also partnering with DocumentCloud.

Creating these partnerships will "give us tons of documents to train the system, to test the system, put us on the right track for practicalities of the system, and also train our software in terms of symentic data extractions," said Mr. Klein. "But we want them to be kicking the tires as we go. They should be telling us, 'This is what is interesting and helpful to us as a newsroom and these are the things that we find confusing.'"

Right now, only these partners will be able to upload documents into the system. But once the beta test of DocumentCloud is up and running (they hope to have something for the public to see by next August) any journalist, blogger or regular Joe will be able to access all of that information.

Their programming and open-source projects will all be free and open for other developers to use as well. They'll be releasing them throughout the year as they work.

Although the DocumentCloud team is considering pay models to sustain the project once their grant money runs out, "for now, we're very much thinking of this as something that is going to benefit society and help newsrooms get their messages out," said Mr. Umansky. "We're a charitable nonprofit."

“The demand for our product is overwhelming,” Mr. Benzi told The Observer by phone from his home office in New Jersey. As Plastic Logic’s vice president of business development, Mr. Benzi spends only about a week a month in Mountain View, Calif., at Plastic Logic’s U.S. headquarters, using the rest of his time to take meetings in Manhattan, trying to woo publishers to partner with the company.

So far, the Financial Times, USA Today and digital publishers like Zinio—which converts print magazines from Cosmopolitan and InStyle to Mother Jones and The Economist into digital formats—have, among others, partnered with Plastic Logic. “I see a lot of companies who want to be with us tomorrow,” Mr. Benzi said.
Current e-reader products on the market weren’t made with print media in mind—they were made for books. Sure, the “Kindle store” currently offers e-friendly formats for newspapers and magazines, but the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader have hokey black-and-white screens that seem to replicate the inside of a book.

Apple’s iPhone has free, handy apps, such as Stanza and eReader, to compete with expensive digital readers, but those palm-size screens don’t provide enough room for the visual experiences magazines will need to appeal to readers and advertisers—those full-page, color pictures, “charticles” and information graphics, not to mention leggy models splayed across two-page spreads.

“We’ve worked closely with our magazine partnerships, our newspaper partnerships, to make sure we’re building something that they would publish to,” Mr. Benzi said. “It doesn’t mean books aren’t important to us, because they are. But we are able to go to magazine and newspaper companies with a different type of reader for them.”

Plastic Logic is developing an e-reader with a display that is about 8.5 inches wide and 10.7 inches long—the same size as most magazines and nearly twice the size of the Kindle screen (and more than four times the size of iPhone and Blackberry interfaces—where many of us skim our New York Times headlines in the morning).

Their prototype is made out of plastic, so it’s lightweight, and thinner than a pad of paper. Mr. Benzi said the company’s “secret sauce” is its flexible screen, which can feel a bit like a magazine and has an added bonus of making the device nearly unbreakable.

Plastic Logic plans to release a product on the market by 2010. Once they perfect the actual product’s look, Plastic Logic would include some kind of “content store” similar to what is available on the Kindle. Users could subscribe to publications, and new issues would update automatically—and they could download their own Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PDFs onto the device, too. Currently, the reader incorporates black-and-white display technology from Cambridge-based company E Ink, just like the Kindle.

But color screens are “on our road map,” Mr. Benzi told The Observer. “We’ll either get there with E Ink or another way. The one thing we have noticed with publishers, even though they know it’s on our road map, is they say as soon as I get there [with color screens], they’ll come with me.”

The success of the product may also depend on a larger market shift. Amazon, which is notoriously tight-lipped, hasn’t released official sales numbers for the Kindle, but Citi analyst Mark Mahaney guesses that Amazon is selling anywhere from 190,000 to 500,000 devices, in their first-year rate. Kindle’s numbers aren’t exactly on fire—yet.

About 376,000 iPods were sold during their first year on the market, 2001. In his 2005 book, The Cult of iPod, Leander Kahney described how the iPod became an icon—not only by redefining Apple as a leader in product design, but also by creating a culture around digital music that no other device maker could compete with. “More than a computer, a car, or a fancy pair of shoes, it’s part of your makeup, your personality," he wrote. "What’s on it—the music—tells who you are. Music is deep in your heart and soul.”

Perhaps magazines and newspapers can cling to their cultural and personal relevance with an e-reader. How many of us still keep old issues of the magazines that defined our teenagehood—like Sassy, the precursor to Jane, or Spy magazine—not only for their content, but for the advertisements, which are a pop-culture time capsule of their own? The Web is a great platform for specific articles displayed on a page, and some Web whizzes are working on better visual experiences to mimic browsing an entire, themed issue of a magazine or newspaper. That's key for branding and advertisers. On a digital reader in the right size, readers will experience the same colorful, image-heavy design experience that they see in the print editions—without the added pains of lugging around a laptop.

So could the next digital reader be the "iPod of magazine publishing?" Will a tech toy save the media business?

“I think [publishers] are kind of pissing in the wind,” Mr. Kahney told The Observer. He said Apple “already has a device and it’s called the iPhone.”

But perhaps Apple’s e-reader will come in a different form. A rumor in Mac-obsessed circles is that Mr. Jobs is working on his answer to the netbook, the slimmed-down version of laptops with smaller screens and reduced processors. Apple’s version would “be like the Kindle but with a multi-touch screen, like a 9-inch iPod touch,” Mr. Kahney said. That would mean a magazine-size, touch-sensitive, full-color tablet that would also have basic Internet, iChat, and Skype videoconferencing capabilities—the perfect environment for digital magazines and newspapers.

Maybe a toy alone won’t save print media. But certainly publishers must evolve those inky materials into digital products that work not only on the Web—but on the next Kindle killer, too. Mr. Jobs, we’re waiting.

greagan@observer.com

He’s not wrong: Time currently has seven Washington reporters devoted to covering politics—the same number as Mother Jones, with the addition of Mr. Corn. The magazine’s aggressive Washington strategy, coming as it does at a time when most mainstream news outlets are cutting back, may be a sign that in this election season, the lefty media is generating all the heat.

In the past few months, Mother Jones has assembled a team of liberal-media name-checks like James Ridgeway, the longtime Washington correspondent of The Village Voice; Laura Rozen, a national-security writer for The American Prospect; and Stephanie Mencimer, a former editor of the Washington Monthly and National Magazine Award nominee.

But the bureau-chief job proved tougher to fill. Late last year, according to a source with knowledge of the exchange, Mother Jones offered a version of the job to Ken Silverstein of Harper’s, but the veteran D.C. investigative reporter declined. Another candidate, offered the job more recently, also passed it up, according to the same source. And according to a different source, Mother Jones also reached out unsuccessfully to Michael Tomasky, an alumnus of this newspaper and of New York magazine, who last year left his job as the editor in chief of The American Prospect to start up The Guardian’s American Web site, Guardian America. (Both Mr. Silverstein and Mr. Tomasky declined to comment).

But Mr. Corn—a well-sourced political reporter who last year teamed with Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff on a book, Hubris, that dug into the Bush administration’s efforts to sell the war in Iraq—was always an attractive target*. The magazine first approached him, he said, over the summer, and from then on were “persistent suitors” until the deal was finalized last week.

He said it was the prospect of a real Washington bureau that enticed him to leave The Nation, for whom he’d manned a somewhat lonely outpost in the capital for two decades. “The idea of being in charge of what is kind of a start-up within an existing entity, focused on reporting and news and analysis … was very appealing,” he said. “I’ve always wondered what could happen if there were five of me.”

“It just felt like kismet,” said Mother Jones co-editor Clara Jeffery about her conversations with Mr. Corn. “We approached things in the same way.”

Mr. Corn offers two other attributes that the magazine was looking for in its bureau chief: an ability to raise the magazine’s profile on the Washington talk-show circuit, and a facility with new media. He regularly appears as a liberal commentator on Fox News, and since 2003 has produced his own blog, a mix of original reporting and commentary that will become a part of Congressional Quarterly's soon-to-launch expanded site*. He has also blogged for The Huffington Post.

He’s already met with the bureau staff, though he won’t start work officially until next month. And one of the objectives he outlined was to position the bureau as a leader in the blogosphere.

“I think there is a quasi–neo-backlash to the blogosphere,” he said. “The blogosphere has been very good at presenting rants … and critiquing the media. But it hasn’t generated, too often, news.”

Using the Web, he said, “I can, on one level, compete with The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Internet has leveled the playing field in certain ways. So I’m hoping that Mother Jones can take advantage.”

And what about competing with his alma mater, The Nation?

On the day Mr. Corn’s departure was announced, another of The Nation’s Washington writers, Ari Berman, who authored a widely-praised May feature on Hillary Clinton’s campaign guru Mark Penn, relocated to The Nation’s New York headquarters, though he’ll continue to cover national politics.

Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel said she plans to replace Mr. Corn, and, hopefully Mr. Berman, quickly. Those two hires, along with Washington correspondent John Nichols, who spends about two weeks a month in the capital, and veteran liberal columnist William Greider, will allow her to “bring these components together in a four-person bureau of strength.”

Don’t look for a Mother Jones–Nation death match, though. The rising tide of anti-Bush sentiment is lifting a lot of boats, and both magazines—along with other titles, including The American Prospect, the Washington Monthly and In These Times—are members of The Media Consortium, which was launched last year by liberal opinion magazines to combine resources where possible. The group hired a Washington reporter earlier this year.

* These sentences have been corrected from an earlier version.