The internal memo announcing the hires was written by the Times' Deputy Editor of Interactive News, Sasha Koren:

We’re thrilled to announce two additions to the social media and community team: Michael Roston and Daniel Victor.

Michael Roston, who has deftly operated the home page on the overnight shift for the last year and a half, will join us as a social media producer. Michael came to our attention last year with his smart, clever Twitter feed, then impressed us with his in-depth knowledge of Reddit, which he generously shared, encouraging us to do more to speak to that platform’s quirky user base.

Of his time on news presentation, Patrick Laforge notes: "Not many people could walk into the overnight home page job with as little time in the producer's chair as Michael did. He became an obsessive student of the stylebook and headline writing, and a pioneer in using his down time from the job to embed himself in rewrite, copy editing, social media and other opportunities. He was always a cheerful presence on the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, greeting his Twitter followers in the wee hours with witty remarks from the 'Tower of News.' If you're not following him, you should be."

From his work keeping @nytimes relevant with breaking news during the wee hours, we suspected he had an appetite for making more use of social media tools and thinking in the service of Times journalism. He’ll bring that appetite and a knowledge of homepage operations to the job, along with a deep experience in online news from previous positions at True/Slant, the New York Sun and the Huffington Post. He’ll move to daytime hours on June 11.

A brief interlude: Somehow, Roston's witty Twitter acumen and familiarity with Reddit came before the fact that the guy was pretty much the last person out the door at both the New York Sun and True/Slant, the pay-writers-what-they-earn project that he basically helped give unlikely life to—and preserve said unlikely life—before it was gobbled up by Forbes (in one of the more depressing content model about-face moves in recent media history).

Onward:

Also joining our team as a social media producer will be Daniel Victor, who comes to us from ProPublica, where he has been the social media editor. There and in earlier positions at Philly.com and TBD.com, he has conceived of and run successful and innovative projects making use of social media and other tools to thoughtfully engage readers. He was a reporter at the Patriot News of Harrisburg, Pa., and holds a B.A. in journalism from Penn State. He’ll join us at the end of June.

Please join me in congratulating Michael and welcoming Daniel.

— Sasha Koren

ProPublica's social media presence is one of the few from media properties that actually deserves distinguishment beyond being mere promotional tools: Take, for example, their Officials Say The Darndest Things blog hosted on Tumblr, or the way they started a Patent Harm Facebook Group off of their stories about the health care industry, or the way they're crowd-sourcing research on campaign finance. Also not a bad guy to bring on board, especially if the Times wants to do more with their social media than, say, the NYT Fridge.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Fox Hole: Want to know why somebody wouldn't become the Fox Mole? Via Mediaite, here you go. Then again, this is the same site for whom a former editor was sent off with a video starring none other than Glenn Beck. In the likely event you didn't make it to the end of that "confessional": "Editor’s Note: Andrew Kirell will begin as a full time editor at Mediaite on April 25." Confidential to Joe Muto: That's where you go after Fox News!

For Your Consideration? The Daily is running a campaign for a Webby Award, and they're using their mailing lists to do it. We'll spare you the text, but the amusingly twee illustration looks like this:

Now you know

(A) What readers of The Daily look like.
(B) That The Webbys have a 'Tablet' category.
(C) That people—or people running companies—actually care about Webbys.
(D) That The Daily—a product that is fundamentally, arrogantly insistent on not having any sort of substantial web presence by design—can be nominated for a Webby. Which serves well to illustrate the extent to which one should care about The Webbys.

Media Power Mazel Tovs: Also from inside The Daily, we hear Media Power Couple (Class of '11) Mike Nizza and Claire Howorth are engaged! Matrimony fever appears to be spreading: Another Media Power Couple (Class of '11) from The Daily—their Fearless Leader/Murdoch Dream-to-Reality Manifester Jesse Angelo and Rebecca Dana of The Daily Beast are also, we hear, now engaged and set to marry in the coming months. Boy, to be a fly on a caterer's tray at that wedding. Also, we had something about destination weddings being the norm here vis-a-vis the whole "you can only read it on an iPad" mandate but it didn't make it through the subway ride this morning.

Media Power Apparel: T-Shirts are the new Tote Bags! Just ask ProPublica, who are now selling them with the tagline "JOURNALISM WITH MORAL FORCE" emblazoned on the front. Can't say we didn't predict this trend, because we did.

Adios, Nomigos: Here's a not-at-all-fond adieu to the absurdity that are entitled commenters, who Gawker Media killed en masse at 6AM yesterday morning. Somehow, the simple point of "THEY ARE COMMENTERS" escapes most high-falutin' discussions about their nature. To briefly editorialize, it is this writer's opinion that comment sections should be treated like cow dung: disregarded and overlooked as a rule, except when in search of psychoactive fungi growth. This is the first time comments have been offline on all Gawker posts since September of 2005, when they first introduced them. Silence is golden.

Tale of the Steak: Except when it isn't. Here's a hilarious comment about Mark Bittman left on our post about a famous New York Times commenter:

When do you do a piece on how Bittman used to steal steaks from the Stop & Shop in New Haven and boast about it in the newsroom of the New Haven Register?

When people mourn the olden days of journalism and dread the future, it should be noted that stories like these are actually what's at—ahem—steak, here.

Selective Restructurings are the New Layoffs: Out Magazine lays off their entire staff just as Aaron Hicklin decides to open up a consulting shop and pick a few people up on contracts for their first client, Out Magazine. This means that they won't have to pay benefits and salaries and certain taxes that come with having an actual payroll, while cleaning house as well, and dispensing cash-flow responsibilities to staffers (or "contractors," as they are now) which is pretty crafty. Interesting? Yes, because according to Paula Froelich's Twitter, happenings at Punch Magazine—the iPad project Maer Roshan was handling until he "stepped down" from day-to-day responsibilities and Jim Windolf took his place—sound the same: "Everyone else fired," P-Fro noted.

The Zooey Mole: One Zooey Deschanel has offered to be Gawker's Zooey Deschanel mole. This may be someone's high-water mark.

Confidence People: People trust journalists way less today than they did when Watergate broke. People who question and/or are surprised by this assertion or why it is are like climate change "opponents" in that it is stunning they actually exist.

All Bourbons Are Whiskey, But Not All Whiskeys Are Bourbon: Slate wants to know if The Huffington Post is a newspaper because it won a Pulitzer. We've got nothing for that one. By the way, people who are surprised a website can win a Pulitzer would be well advised to note that the NoLa Times-Picayune won one in 2006 for their news blog's post-Katrina coverage (via Romenesko).

Brief Housekeeping Note: The Observer's media "desk," Kat Stoeffel, is out for the week on what may be the single most-deserved vacation from this newspaper since Peter Kaplan left. With apologies to her, this writer will be taking her place for the next seven days. Please send any tips, gossip, or malice-lacking-and-well-outside-the-legal-definition-of-slanderous journalism id to fkamer@observer.com.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Says ProPublica:

The investigation echoes the SEC's suit earlier this year against investment bank Goldman Sachs. In April, the SEC charged Goldman with misleading investors in the creation of a CDO called Abacus 2007-AC1. The bank did not disclose the role of a hedge fund, Paulson & Co., that helped put together the deal as part of its bet against housing. In June, Goldman paid a $550 million fine to settle the case [9]. The agency didn't charge Paulson with any wrongdoing. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported [10] that the agency had stepped up its probes of Magnetar's deals.

Avid readers of ProPublica will remember Magnetar from an April investigative piece that concluded that through shady CDO dealings, Magnetar played a substantial role in perpetuating the housing bubble.

It remains to be seen what will come of the SEC investigation, but perhaps it's worth noting that the Goldman settlement of $550 million earlier this year constituted the largest SEC fine against a financial firm -- ever.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

"You don't have a trading partner? Create one," a former executive told the reporters. They found 85 examples over only two years when pairs of CDOs bought up pieces of each others' unsold chunks. It added up to $107 billion. Fifty CDO managers are apparently under investigation. 

The piece has some fun sections on go-go era executives like Merrill Lynch's Chris Ricciardi. Back before the big collapse came, Mr. Ricciardi got a Wall Street Journal profile that said he liked to be called the grandfather of CDOs, and that he helped "turn Merrill into the Wal-Mart of the CDO industry." He took potential partners out for golf and dinner: "I'm going to make you rich," his pitch went, according to a former colleague, "You just have to be my bitch." When he left the firm, the CDO business was taken over by a poker player named Ken Margolis, who was once threatened by a casino owner with "a fork through his eye."

By the first quarter of 2007, even as the market was tanking, Wall Street turned out $70 billion in new mortgage CDOs. The credit agencies, meanwhile, wouldn't "check whether you were buying good bonds," a CDO manager executive said. To see what the buying and selling of "rotting pieces of CDOs" looked like, try ProPublica's cartoon Welcome to CDO World!

There is also a song that was apparently commissioned from Auto-Tune the News for the story. Sadly, it doesn't have to with CDOs, and, frankly, isn't as good as "Bed Intruder Song." And it's certainly no "Bet Against the American Dream."

In October 2007, Paul Steiger told The Observer that he wanted to use a Wall Street Journal pay model to recruit staffers to his fledgling nonprofit, ProPublica.

"I'm prepared to spend $200,000 on the exact right person, but if the exact right person isn't there, then I'll get three people at $60,000," he said.

Since then Mr. Steiger has found at least a half a dozen people that fit the "exact right person" bill.

ProPublica's Form 990, as first reported by FishbowlNY, gives a clear look at how its staffers are well compensated. So let's investigate the investigators! Eight employees made more than $160,000, topped by Mr. Steiger, who brought in $571,687, plus an additional $13,000 in compensation. (Life is definitely good for Mr. Steiger-he reportedly made up to $5 million when he left The Journal in 2007.) Other big wage-earners include managing editor Stephen Engelberg ($343,463) and the best paid reporter, former Washington Post writer Dafna Lizner ($205,445, or, if you examine her 17,000 or so words, roughly $12 per word in 2009).

On the one hand, ProPublica has the totally defensible position of promoting investigative pieces at a time when no one invests in them. One of their pieces-in collaboration with The Times Magazine-won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award. (If you click on their Web site, there are many other awards and nominations; Mr. Steiger has always been award-happy). Also, they're funded by Herbert and Marion Sandler (who gave an additional $4.5 million in 2009), so bless them for that.

But on the other hand: They make whaaaaaaaat? The journalism business has been rough recently, which makes Mr. Steiger's salary seem particularly ...

"Obscene," tweeted Tunku Varadarajan, a former Journal staffer who is now an editor at large at the Daily Beast. In another tweet, he nicknamed the news outfit "ProSteiger."

So what's the deal? Mr. Steiger didn't return our calls. Instead, Richard Tofel, former assistant publisher at The Journal and current general manager of ProPublica, spoke to us. 

"We were not the New York Yankees of journalism," said Mr. Tofel, who made $320,978 plus another $21,392 in compensation.

"We've said from the very beginning of this, that we were going to pay market salaries to people for their work, and so we do," he continued.

The new hires include Kim Barker, a former Chicago Tribune bureau chief; Sebastian Rotella, an L.A. Times reporter with more then 22 years of experience; and Marian Wang who has experience in both investigative reporting and social media.

With the three additions, ProPublica's full-time news-gathering staff has grown to 32. 

Other non-profit things are growing too, like NPR's audience. National Public Radio CEO Vivian Schiller told the Wall Street Journal that her organization is enjoying record ratings.

Here's ProPublica's release:

New York, NY - June 7, 2010 -- ProPublica has recently hired three more journalists, including two veteran international reporters and a new reporter-blogger. The three additions bring ProPublica's news staff up to 32 full-time journalists.

Kim Barker, the former South Asia bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, will join ProPublica as a reporter in June. Barker just finished her term as the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where she studied, wrote and lectured on Pakistan and Afghanistan and U.S. policy. She was the South Asia bureau chief for the Tribune from 2004 to 2009 and was based in New Delhi and Islamabad.

At the Tribune, Barker covered major stories such as the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and rising militancy in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. She began covering the region after Sept. 11, 2001, and spent two years on a project called "Struggle for the Soul of Islam," a series about Islam that sent her to Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia. "Kim began her career as an investigative reporter in the Pacific Northwest and her five-year journey as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan has brought her an unusual combination of skills that will serve her well at ProPublica,'' said Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica's managing editor.

ProPublica also strengthened its international reporting capability with the addition of Sebastian Rotella, an investigative reporterwho worked for 22 years at the Los Angeles Times. In 2006 he was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting for coverage of terrorism and Muslim communities in Europe. He was most recently a national security correspondent in Washington, D.C. and has served as an international investigative correspondent and bureau chief in Paris and Buenos Aires with assignments in the Middle East and North Africa. He speaks Spanish, French and Italian and is the author of Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border, which was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1998. "Sebastian Rotella is one of the finest intelligence reporters in the world and his experiences covering immigration issues and the border will prove valuable in the coming years,'' Engelberg said.

Marian Wang started in her position as ProPublica's first reporter-blogger on March 1. She previously worked for Mother Jones, where she spearheaded the magazine's social media strategy, and she worked in Chicago as a freelance investigative reporter and blogger for The Chicago Reporter, Chi-Town Daily News, and ChicagoNow. "Marian has added value to ProPublica by keeping a sharp eye on investigative news reports, adding context and following up," said Senior Editor Eric Umansky. "She's been a great addition to the staff."

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. It was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. With the largest news staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting, ProPublica is supported by philanthropy and provides the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own web site and to leading news organizations selected with an eye toward maximizing the impact of each article.

Ms. Fink’s 13,000-word piece, which was funded in part by the nonprofit ProPublica, told the story of the nightmarish events that led to the deaths of 45 patients at the hospital in the days after the hurricane hit. The proposal Ms. Bennett sent around to editors describes a much expanded version of the piece. “There is much, much more to say,” Ms. Bennett said in an email Tuesday, noting that while her client has “a few additional lines of inquiry that she will want to pursue” as well as some new sources to talk to who have come forward since the Times Magazine piece ran, “most of her research” is already done. Ms. Bennett said Ms. Fink will meet with publishers this week.

Mr. Pilhofer was calling in to The Observer from MIT in Boston yesterday, where the Knight Foundation had just announced the winners of their 2009 Knight News Challenge. Mr. Pilhofer's DocumentCloud, a data archiving project he created with three other journalists and developers at ProPublica and The New York Times, was one of nine projects to receive $5.1 million in grants total to reinvent news and information using crowd-sourcing, mobile technology and other digital journalism tactics.

DocumentCloud received their own two-year grant of $719,500 (they were originally seeking $1 million over three years). 

Mr. Pilhofer explained that DocumentCloud plans to collect all those papers and PDF documents that reporters, bloggers and civic groups usually stack in their bottom drawers or stow away in random folders on their desktop at the end of their investigations, and extract all the information so that it's findable, shareable and searchable on the Web.

His team's original idea stemmed from The Times' DocViewer software, which created a searchable database of the more than 11,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s public schedule during her eight years as first lady in the White House.

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

"Suddenly, that document becomes a more valuable resource than, say, if it's sitting on the New York Times Web site or if it's a link to a downloadable PDF somewhere," Mr. Pilhofer said.

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, location, and make connections between them in all kinds of ways.

For example, "If I want a particular topic, say the Iraq war, or the Vancouver Olympics or something like that, geography can come into play," Mr. Pilhofer said. "Like give me every document about the Vancouver Olympics within 50 miles from Vancouver." You got it.

"You'll be able to make references between documents and within documents that you just weren't able to do before," he said.

"We're the card catalog of primary-source documents—we're developing the data," he added.

The project was created by Mr. Pilhofer, who previously worked for the Center for Public Integrity in Washington; Eric Umansky, a senior editor at ProPublica, former editor of MotherJones.com and a previous Slate "Today’s Papers" writer; Scott Klein, ProPublica's editor of online development and expat of The Nation, The New York Times, and Condé Nast; and Ben Koski, a software engineer in The New York Times' interactive news technology group.

The Times has partnered with them on the project, offering up some of their own software and data to add to the "card catalog," along with ProPublica, Gotham Gazette, Talking Points Memo and the National Security Archive.

Back in November, DocumentCloud came under fire from N.Y.U.'s Jay Rosen, who criticized their application on his Twitter, and suggested that The Times should be giving money to the Knight Foundation, not seeking it. Mr. Pilhofer emailed a response to Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab:

I can understand why some would feel that way, but I think it’s more a misunderstanding of what the project is and who it’s intended for…This is a grant submitted by us, but it’s not for us…The project is to create what we’re calling a consortium, some sort of entity that is not The New York Times, that is not ProPublica. Ideally, this will incorporate all sorts of media organizations and bloggers and watchdog groups and universities…If anything, Professor Rosen has it kind of backwards: We’re contributing to this effort. We’re contributing development resources, we’re contributing our time.

Mr. Pilhofer said his team hopes to have a launch before the end of the year.

John Koblin reports that New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.'s son, Arthur G. Sulzberger, will begin writing for the paper on the Metro desk starting February 23rd. One staffer calls the 28-year-old, "Quite nice, eager to please and humble." Plus: Times 'Updates' Make Clark Hoyt Want to URL; ProPublica's 60 Minutes of Infamy?

Leon Neyfakh writes, "Niko Pfund, the 43-year-old publisher of Oxford University Press’ academic and trade division, has had one occasion after another during the past few weeks to squeal with delight."

Plus: Oscar and Me... Fashion Week's Brave Face... Begley the Bookie

ProPublica has farmed out 48 reports to news agencies over the past eight months, and 60 Minutes was the first it worked with.

Back in June, ProPublica worked on a story that aired on 60 Minutes about Al-Hurra, an Arab television network bankrolled by the U.S. government that’s been something of a disaster—to the expense of the taxpayer.

Sounds like enterprise pay dirt!

But after this past Sunday, you’d reasonably think that that might be their last coproduction. Scott Pelley, a 60 Minutes correspondent, opened a segment on this week’s show with a question: “How did the mortgage industry destroy itself and set off an economic collapse that ruined the finances of millions of Americans?”

Look no further than World Savings Bank and its former owners, Herbert and Marion Sandler. For the next 13 minutes, Mr. Pelley reported relentlessly on the Sandlers as the twin perpetrators of the mortgage industry collapse.

Mr. and Mrs. Sandler, incidentally, are the investors behind ProPublica, who reportedly invest up to $10 million a year to support Mr. Steiger’s venture.

So we decided to check in with Mr. Steiger to see how things were doing with 60 Minutes and ProPublica.

“I don’t see it as affecting that at all,” he said of the future relationship.

When asked a follow-up question, Mr. Steiger replied, “I just think I want to leave it there. I don’t want to go into a long discussion of this. I don’t see it as a problem with future relations.”

jkoblin@observer.com