"They're not concerned at all. They're happy to have a party with black people drowning," Chalian said over a break in an ABC News/Yahoo News webcast. Mr. Chalian was referring to the fact that the Hurricaine Isaac was  hitting the Gulf Coast during the convention in Tampa. Mr. Chalian, who was quickly let go, apologized for "making an inappropriate and thoughtless joke."

John Harris, Politico's editor-in-chief, told Dylan Byers that the August incident was taken into account.

"David screwed up, admitted he screwed up and paid the price of losing his job for screwing up. He certainly would have been held accountable for the lapse in judgment had he been on the POLITICO staff at the time," Mr. Harris told Politico. "He’s made clear that remark did not reflect his personal views or professional standards. This is a journalist who carries with him more than a decade of accomplishment and a well-earned reputation for fairness.

At Politico, Mr. Chalian will be part of a push to expand and develop video content.

"His mission at POLITICO is simple: build on the tremendous success of our video team and POLITICO LIVE shows. The production quality and content of our videos, the graphics and marketing efforts are second to none. It will be David's mandate to take a winning product and take it to the next level as POLITICO continues to innovate across existing and new platforms," Politico C.O.O. Kim Kingsley wrote in an internal memo.

Full memo below:

POLITICO’s work in video and TV programming is a huge success story of this election cycle. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Sara Olson, Matt Sobocinski, Julio Negron, Alexander Trowbridge, Madeline Marshall, Carrie Stevenson, Olivia Petersen, Jacqueline Corba and our newest addition -- Senior Producer Christine Delargy -- our video traffic has grown by 85 percent in recent months, and our live shows are generating both buzz and acclaim.

We are thrilled to announce that we’re taking the next step: David Chalian will join us this month as Vice President of Video Programming to guide our expanding video efforts.

David is a well-known talent and a well-respected figure among many people in our newsroom. He’s a political expert with a long and distinguished career as an innovator and a producer of must-watch political programming, and he’s a journalist with a deep understanding of politics and source networks that go deep into both major parties.

His mission at POLITICO is simple: build on the tremendous success of our video team and POLITICO LIVE shows. The production quality and content of our videos, the graphics and marketing efforts are second to none. It will be David's mandate to take a winning product and take it to the next level as POLITICO continues to innovate across existing and new platforms.

David most recently served as the Washington Bureau Chief for Yahoo! News, where he directed its political coverage across the entire Yahoo! Media Network. In addition to campaign politics, he managed editorial coverage of the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court.

Prior to joining Yahoo! News, David was the political editor for PBS NewsHour, where he guided all of the political coverage across the program's broadcast and digital platforms. He also served as an on-camera political analyst, appeared in regular political webcasts on the Online NewsHour and co-authored the NewsHour’s daily political newsletter.

Prior to joining the NewsHour, David was the political director for ABC News, where he helped oversee the editorial content of all political news across ABC News's broadcasts and platforms. He created and co-anchored "Top Line," a daily political webcast on ABCNews.com and on ABC News Now, the network's 24-hour digital outlet.

David won an Emmy Award as part of the team that produced ABC News’s inaugural coverage in January 2009 and prior to joining ABC News, he produced "Inside City Hall," a widely acclaimed nightly political program for NY1 News.

Please join us in welcoming David to the POLITICO team.

Kim

Mr. Williams, a former D.C. deputy bureau chief for The Boston Globe, had his impartiality called into question when, during an appearance on MSNBC, he said that Governor Mitt Romney appeared on Fox and Friends so often because he was most comfortable around other white people. (Apparently, being cognizant of race now constitutes a liberal bias.) The Washington Free Beacon flagged the video, and soon Breitbart.com and The Daily Caller unleashed their liberal media bias-sniffing hounds, scouring Mr. Williams's Twitter and uncovering one retweet of a lewd joke about Ann Romney and the following critique of Politico: "what’s most irritating is the overlay of blatant racism. that’s the secret sauce in the Politico shitburger."

Still, Mr. Williams seemed to part ways with Politico on good terms. "Joe is an experienced and respected journalist, with keen insights into politics," founder John Harris told Politico's Dylan Byers. "After nearly 30 years in the business, he has the authority and is ready to give voice to his insights and conclusions in a new setting."

Today, things took a turn for the worse. FishbowlDC reported that on May 24 Mr. Williams pled guilty to second degree assault of his ex-wife, author Amy Alexander, and his on probation until November 24. She told Fishbowl: "I can’t comment on a legal case but will say that I sincerely hope that Joe Williams finds his professional footing and that he also begins to take seriously his responsibilities as the father of our two children."

Discussing why Mitt Romney appears so frequently on the Fox News program Fox and Friends—the subject of a New York Times story yesterday—on MSNBC's Martin Bashir, Mr. Williams said that Governor Romney is comfortable with people who are like him.

"They're like him," he said. "They're white folks who are very much relaxed in their own company."

A former deputy chief of the Boston Globe's D.C. bureau, Mr. Williams's Politico bio states that he is a "telegenic, quick-witted analyst" who examines the "intersection of race and politics."

The video was first flagged by conservative websites the Washington Free Beacon and the late Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism, which also called attention to liberal leaning jokes Mr. Williams made on Twitter about Governor Romney's wealth.

"This is our MSM. This is Politico. This is why God created Andrew Breitbart," wrote Breitbart.com writer John Nolte.

"POLITICO journalists have a clear and inflexible responsibility to cover politics fairly and free of partisan bias," Politico editors Jim VandeHei and John Harris wrote in a memo to staff last night. "Regrettably, an unacceptable number of Joe Williams's public statements on cable and Twitter have called into question his commitment to this responsibility."

Video below:

http://youtu.be/RhWo3-yJXsI

The collaboration, which serves to lend the Times’ growing video department a jolt of buzzy, young talent while cementing BuzzFeed’s nascent journalistic credentials, was born from the Twitter-based mutual admiration of New York Times assistant managing editor Jim Roberts and BuzzFeed editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. The two met IRL when they sat on a panel together during Social Media Week in February. 

The TimesCast team was then gearing up to go all-out on its live broadcast of Super Tuesday, which incorporated dispatches from almost twenty reporters and columnists.

“Once we got that done we started immediately thinking about what we’d do for the convention,” Mr. Roberts told Off the Record. “I put the convention and Ben together and reached out to him.”

Mr. Smith visited Times headquarters, met with executive editor Jill Abramson and some video editors, and media old and new formed a partnership.

Scratch that. Times legal would prefer we don’t call it a “partnership.”

“We’re teaming up,” Mr. Roberts clarified. “We’re collaborating. It’s nothing that formal. It’s an alliance. It’s a chance to take advantage of some of the signature strengths of two interesting news organizations.”

Mr. Smith and his crew of social media-savvy journalists (which just poached Roll Call’s John Stanton as their D.C. bureau chief and Metro Weekly’s Chris Geidner as a reporter) will contribute to TimesCast segments in the months leading up to the convention, but the Times has not yet decided whether it will syndicate the videos back to BuzzFeed, Jonah Peretti’s hub of LOLs and WTFs.

Asked what he thought l’esprit de BuzzFeed would bring to the paper of record, Mr. Roberts said he was looking for some creative input.

“There are a lot of things to conquer, the technical aspects, the distribution aspects,” he said, “but the actual creation aspect is something we need to master. And I would love for a little of their social media mojo to rub off on us.”

But according to Mr. Smith, a Politico alum hired to oversee the social aggregator’s move into original reporting, BuzzFeed’s “mojo” is rooted in Times news values.

“My broader view is that great journalism is what will wind up winning the social space,” Mr. Smith wrote Off The Record in an e-mail message, “there’s no trick.”

The upstart also brings an awareness of a political dialogue occurring on social networks.

“Twitter is going to contain a kind of giant parallel conversation to the conventions,” Mr. Smith wrote, “one that will weave nicely around the livestream.”

(Speaking with Talking Points Memo last week, New Yorker White House correspondent Ryan Lizza said the Twitter club’s eagerness to meme-ify every gaffe had created a “crisis” for political journalism, but that’s yet another conversation.)

Mr. Roberts stressed that the Times was still in an exploratory mode when it came to video content.

“I’ll be the first to admit the process of creating video is sobering to me,” he said. “It’s expensive. It’s hard. I have the utmost respect for the people to do it.”

Which, he pointed out, is just about everyone these days. “We’ve got competitors big and small in the space.”

Over the past year, previously text-based news operations have rapidly turned to video content—where embedded commercials are more valuable than banner ads—to help stanch the loss of print advertising revenue. Spending on video advertising is expected to increase 43 percent in 2012 and will be a $7 B. industry by 2015, according to the most recent Pew study of digital advertising. As a result, most robust print and digital news organizations are racing to stretch their journalistic DNA to a new medium.

The Wall Street Journal launched “DC Bureau,” a weekly politics show hosted by DC bureau chief Jerry Seib, on Friday.  The latest addition to the now nearly five hours of daily WSJ Live programming, its debut featured interviews with David Axelrod and Kevin Madden.

The Huffington Post is staffing up for the July launch of Huffington Post Live, a "nonstop" news talk show streaming twelve hours a day, five days a week. And after CSPAN broadcast Politico’s live streaming coverage of Super Tuesday in March, editor-in-chief Jim Vandehei promised more Politico TV was on the way.

Off the Record wondered how print journalists—historically afforded a margin of schlubbiness—were adjusting to their imminent close-ups. According to Mr. Roberts, Times reporters needn’t rush off to get their teeth bleached a blinding Fox News white.

“We don’t want to mimic broadcast or cable television,” he said. “We’re looking for our a voice, a style that comports with us as journalists and as a newsgathering organizations. While I don’t think anyone wants to do video of people slouching at their desks and eating potato chips, I don’t think that we want to be glossy either. There’s a middle ground for us.”

A house ad in the May 30 print edition of Politico.

Politico enraged much of the media this morning when it published an article accusing top competitors The New York Times and The Washington Post of biased campaign coverage, favoring President Barack Obama.

To us, it seemed like a shameless beat-sweetener. Signal to the G.O.P. that you think the other guys were unfair, the thinking goes, and then watch the Mitt Romney exclusives roll in.

GQ's Devin Gordon took it even further, concluding that the piece is a "thinly disguised, fundamentally craven argument for Politico's superiority in the world of political coverage." (Especially considering it was penned by Politico's two most prominent editorial employees, executive editor Jim VandeHei and White House correspondent/newsletter writer Mike Allen.)

"Let's call this article for what it was," Mr. Gordon wrote. "It wasn't journalism. It was business."

Looking at it that way, the article does seem of a piece with this Politico house ad that appeared in the Wednesday print edition. Name-checking comScore and Poynter.org, it's obviously targeted at a media-conscious audience, and it boasts that Politico strikes a "perfect balance" and has "the most balanced audience."

Arianna Huffington delivers the good news.

For the first time since 1977, no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction at the 96^th annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music, announced at Columbia University Monday afternoon. The unworthy finalists were Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Karen Russell's Swamplandia, and the late David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.

The fiction jurors nominating the books were former Times-Picayune book editor Susan Larson, "Fresh Air" book critic Maureen Corrigan and Michael Cunningham, author of the Pulitzer-winning novel The Hours. It was the board's decision not to award the prize.

The Pulitzer website says that according to The Plan of Award, "If in any year all the competitors in any category shall fall below the standard of excellence fixed by The Pulitzer Prize Board, the amount of such prize or prizes may be withheld."

Also stiffed was editorial writing, whose finalists were Bloomberg News, for its European debt crisis writing; Tampa Bay Times, for its coverage of Florida Governor Rick Scott; and Burlington Free Press, for a campaign that resulted in open government reform.

24-year-old Sara Ganim, who broke the Penn State sex abuse scandal, won the local reporting prize along with members of Harrisburg, Pa.'s Patriot-News.

The Huffington Post took home its first award, for David Wood's National Reporting. (There was indeed champagne in New York, though in D.C. they had Natty Light.) Five-year-old POLITICO also won its first Pulitzer, for editorial cartooning. The Associated Press's NYPD team won the investigative reporting prize (as did The Seattle Times), and the late Manning Marable won the history prize for Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

More categories with winners below.

2012 Pulitzer Prize Winners
JOURNALISM

Public Service - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Breaking News Reporting - The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News Staff

Investigative Reporting - Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley of the Associated Press

and

Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong of The Seattle Times

Explanatory Reporting - David Kocieniewski of The New York Times

Local Reporting - Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff, Harrisburg, Penn

National Reporting - David Wood of The Huffington Post

International Reporting - Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times

Feature Writing - Eli Sanders of The Stranger, a Seattle (Wash.) weekly

Commentary - Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune

Criticism -Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe

Editorial Writing - No award

Editorial Cartooning - Matt Wuerker of POLITICO

Breaking News Photography - Massoud Hossaini of Agence France-Presse

Feature Photography - Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post

LETTERS, DRAMA and MUSIC

Fiction - No award

Drama - "Water by the Spoonful" by Quiara Alegría Hudes

History - "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," by the late Manning Marable (Viking)

Biography - "George F. Kennan: An American Life," by John Lewis Gaddis (The Penguin Press)

Poetry - "Life on Mars" by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf Press)

General Nonfiction - "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern," by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton and Company)

Music - "Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts" by Kevin Puts (Aperto Press)

It is not a primer on the acquisition of friends. In September, Facebook introduced "Subscribe," an option which allows other users to receive only your public updates. You can encourage subscribers to hang on your every word without having to let them into your photo albums, contact information, etc. It's just one of many new Internet-based relationship categories (Gchat sources, Twitter crushes) for which journalists (an historically unpopular race) should be grateful.

Do you think these people would read  your stories if you were out hawking papers on the corner? Do you think they would talk to you if they knew you came to work dressed like that? Acquiring many Facebook subscribers is the ideal way to get your stories out to the kind of people who don't read newspapers and fashion yourself as a pseudocelebrity in their eyes.

So, for the newsroom troglodytes, a few tips and tricks for making your posts the most seductive to new subscribers, courtesy Facebook:

• Be relevant. "Commentary and analysis on current events and breaking news receives 3x as many likes and 2x as many shares as the average post."

• Acknowledge the existence of others. "Reader shout-outs can increase in feedback by as much as 4x. Also, asking for recommendations can lead to a 3x increase in comments above an average post."

• Be smart. "In-depth analyses on global issues can yield a 1.5x increase in likes and 2.5x increase in shares."

• Be something to look at. "Powerful photos can yield an increase of a 2x inengagement (likes, comments and shares). Also, behind-the-scenes photos resulted in up to a 4x increase in engagement (likes, comments, shares)."

• Be funny. "Jokes in posts or a humorous picture can yield a 1.5x increase in likes and almost 5x increase in shares. Humor often shows the lighter and more personal side of the journalist, which is likely why it results in higher engagement.

Not so different from making friends and influencing people IRL, huh? Except when you do it on Facebook, the company is gathering everything you and your readers say, running it through sentiment analysis, and selling the data to your competitors at Politico. Keep up the good work!

*Disclaimer: We only watched the trailer of the Social Network.

Mr. Smith (image via Politico.com)

A major editorial expansion is in the works at BuzzFeed, the viral content aggregator best known for its panda slideshows, and it will be led by an unlikely figure.

Ben Smith, Politico senior writer and longtime New York politics reporter, has been named editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, the company announced today.

According to the release, Mr. Smith will help the site get into the business of original editorial content, hiring new reporters and launching new content sections.

BuzzFeed's content sections are currently limited to "lol", "cute", "win", "fail", "omg", "geeky", "trashy", and "wtf?". The site recently snagged two writers from Gawker Media, Jezebel's Whitney Jefferson and Gawker's Matt Cherette. There are whispers of a redesign early next year.

"Social media is what moves a story," Mr. Smith said in the announcement. "BuzzFeed is the best in the world at distributing content on social sites, and it is a tremendous opportunity to join BuzzFeed--and its millions of reader--to build a new model for high-quality reporting."

Meanwhile, Mr. Smith relaunched his Politico blog a little over a month ago, teaming up with Dylan Byers and Keach Hagey to shift its focus toward political media. He will continue to write about politics for Politico once a week, according to the announcement.

"It's the best place in America to be a political reporter," he said in the announcement.

(For those keeping score, BuzzFeed is "best in the world" for social media, Politico is "best place in America" for political reporting.)

Although Mr. Smith's move may baffle other journalists and politicos, there is probably some financial muscle behind the site's ambitions. BuzzFeed is backed by Softbank, Hearst Interactive, RRE Ventures, Ken Lerer, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, and John Johnson.

Plus, BuzzFeed management knows its way around a pivot.  Co-founder Jonah Peretti and chairman Mr. Lerer were co-founders of The Huffington Post and have since seen it grow from a liberal version of the Drudge Report to a non-partisan super aggregator and national news operation.

"Social is the new starting point for content sites," said Mr. Peretti, noting that BuzzFeed has grown from eight million monthly unique visitors to over 20 million.

"Social sites are where everyone is getting their news, entertainment, and information and BuzzFeed’s technology platform, combined with original reporting will accelerate this massive shift," said Mr. Lerer.

Ginger Gibson, currently a political reporter at the Star-Ledger, begins as a Politico national politics reporter on November 7. Prior to covering Governor Christie, Ms. Gibson "drew notice for her aggressive coverage of Christine O'Donnell in the 2010 Senate race," according to an internal memo. After the election, she'll join Politico's Congressional team.

Ms. Gibson is just about the same age as Kendra Marr, who recently left Politico amid allegations of improper borrowing from other news sources. Here's hoping she responds better to the "extreme pressure to get up to speed."

Family Huntsman, from September's Vogue

Vogue editor Anna Wintour is one of President Obama's 27 mega-bundlers--individuals who collected $500,000 or more in donations apiece for a joint account for Obama’s 2012 campaign and the Democratic National Committee, reports Politico.

Other mega-bundlers include former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and Hollywood producer Jeffery Katzenberg.

With phone calls and Calvin Klein-co-hosted dinner parties, she's raised three times as much as she did in 2008. Since then she's been appointed to the President's Committee on Arts and Humanities.

President Obama has taken flak for his "elitist" dinners at Ms. Wintour's home but, according to a different Politico article, the fact that the Obamas are glamorous and photogenic enough for Vogue's pages seems beside the point for Ms. Wintour.

Her brother is the politics editor of The Guardian and she supports a number of lower profile politicians, including Representative Tim Bishop, who represents the district of her vacation house in Mastic (She's especially involved in his campaign to cleanup the Forge River there.) and former Houston mayor Bill White, who ran for governor of Texas and is a friend of her long term boyfriend Shelby Bryan.

And as for the magazine, Ms. Wintour manages to keep her political identity out of it. She did not attend the photo shoot or interview for Michelle Obama's Vogue cover story. And that shiny Huntsman clan is making balanced coverage easy.