Still not kidding.

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch emailed editors at Reuters and Fortune today to let them know that he won't be contributing columns to either publication going forward.

While Mr. Welch's email, published at Fortune, merely notes that he and wife Suzy, with whom Mr. Welch pens his columns, get better "traction" at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune senior editor Stephen Gandel notes that Neutron Jack's resignation follows reporting by the two organizations on a certain somebody's jobs report tweet on Friday.In case you missed that one, Mr. Welch surmised that last month's jobs report—which stated the lowest unemployment rate since January 2009—had been fixed to aid President Barack Obama's re-election campaign. Yesterday, Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer went on MSNBC and criticized Mr. Welch's sentiment. Reuters, meanwhile, referred to allegations that during Mr. Welch's tenure at the helm of GE, the firm used well-timed transactions to ensure it hit Wall Street's earning estimates.

For his part, Mr. Welch didn't back down from his tweet. Per Reuters:

"These numbers just don't go with the economic activity," Mr. Welch said. "You draw your own conclusions."

And:

He says he went through reviews of more than a dozen companies in different industries this week and none were stronger in the third quarter than they were in the second. "You can't just call me old and senile," he said.

And we won't.

I, Roger.

Fox News chief Roger Ailes is trying to get that paper. Elsewhere in News Corp, two locals go all Benedict Arnold on a certain tablet newspaper and a certain tabloid newspaper. What's it like to get an employee evaluation at Reuters? How's that whole Media-and-Race thing going? All that and more in your Thursday Evening Media Briefs.

Roger, Dodger: Fox News chief Roger Ailes is renegotiating his contract according to Fox News' least-favorite journalist, New York contributor Gabriel Sherman (who's working on a book about the network). Some things you probably didn't know:

1. Ailes' personal lawyer appears as a Fox News contributor. Synergy, now!
2. If he were to leave Fox News, Ailes possibly wants to buy the Cleveland Indians, thus fulfilling his destiny as the real-life basis for the villainous owner in the next Major League movie.

And onto the numbers we go (emphasis ours):

One source familiar with the talks speculated that, given Fox's record profits, Ailes could ask for a mega deal, worth more than $30 million per year. But another source close to Ailes explained that, for Ailes, signing a new deal is not only about the money. Ailes has to figure out what he wants to do next. But money is surely a consideration: Ailes is a guy who likes to keep score. And at News Corp., he's the third-highest-paid executive, behind Rupert Murdoch and COO Chase Carey. This week, it was announced Ailes made $21.1 million last year. With Fox News on track to earn $1 billion in profit, it's certain Ailes would want the biggest contract of his life.

Sherman makes an excellent point that—in light of News Corp's restructuring in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal—Fox News is a more crucial piece of the Fox pie now more than ever. Know this: Whatever Ailes' deal ends up being, it's likely going to say far more about how Rupert Murdoch intends leaving this planet than what Roger Ailes has done on it. Sherman's wonderfully juicy report is worth clicking over for the read. Do it. [Daily Intel]

The Murdoch-to-Mort Refugee Trail: Capital New York reports that the thoroughfare of employment between News Corp and the New York Daily News remains trafficked, as always. This week, it's the copy chief at The Daily—Jon Blackwell —who's off to the Daily News as a deputy managing editor for production. Apparently, he was with News Corp for over ten years, much of which was spent on the copy desk at the New York Post. Meanwhile, Don Kaplan—on the Metro desk at the Post, and previously their TV writer—is also off to the Daily News as their new TV writer. [Capital New York]

Media Employment and Race: The More Things Change, Pt. XXVIII. The Atlantic's Ta -Nehisi Coates pens a wonderful thinker on the diversity problem in the media business, which yes, absolutely still exists (to wit: look around you). As he put it:

Magazines have long had a diversity problem, and that diversity problem is inscribed in their DNA. You can add on to this the fact that the traditional way of breaking into magazines involve ways utterly inaccessible to most black people. The unpaid internship was long seen as a right of passage. Very few Americans can afford such a luxury, and fewer still African-Americans can afford it.

What's It Like To Be Probed/Evaluated For Your Worth at Reuters? Just let this marinate for a moment:

One correspondent was told that he doesn’t use enough pronouns in his writing when they couldn’t find anything else wrong with him.

The only thing less dignified than being taken out back and Old Yeller-ed because you're old is having someone come up with soft euphemisms, and past that, boldfaced lies about why they're doing it. [Jim Romenesko]  

The Boys, On The Wrong Bus. Today, in amusing corrections:

An earlier version of this story suggested an earlier report had mentioned a bus tour, which it did not.

[Buzzfeed]

The Boys On The Bender: Resident MSNBC delicate flower Chris Hayes needs sleep. At midnight. [@chrislhayes]

License to Jill: New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson —the first woman in the paper's history to have the job—made some Vanity Fair power list, which is great, except somehow she dropped a ranking and is less important than Jay-Z and Beyonce (who the Times uses in their ads). This reporter remains mystified at the fact that Graydon Carter once had something to do with Spy and also wide-eyed at his reverence towards celebrities, which—we've been here long enough, we shouldn't be surprised—we're slightly ashamed of. [Vanity Fair]

WaPo Wha-Wha? If you can explain what's happening in this Washington Post filing—or at the Washington Post, period—in three sentences or less, The Observer will send you a pastry* of your choosing. [Washington Post]

[*Pastry subject to avaliblity.]

- - -

That's it for tonight. Give us your shady, your sketchy, your salacious media gossip. Or tips on making a paper crane army with very little effort. We're still after that one.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Just before dawn on Oct. 14, Salon reporter Justin Elliott was on Twitter and in Zuccotti Park, awaiting the outcome of Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to clear out the Occupy Wall Street protestors for cleaning.

“On scene at Zuccotti, infusion of new protesters just arrived with signs "NYPD protects and serves the rich" | big cheers #ows,” Mr. Elliott tweeted.

A few days later, Nocturnalist columnist and New York Times staff reporter Sarah Maslin Nir kept followers up to date on the latest from her Zuccotti sleepover.

“Getting cold and tired, but every serious protestor has a tarp to block the wind. And I refuse to huddle for warmth #gonnadie,” Ms. Maslin Nir tweeted just before 1 a.m. on Oct. 17.

With freezing rain forecast for Saturday, staying warm is a major concern for Occupy Wall Street protesters and reporters alike. For many journalists, the movement is noteworthy for regularly drawing them out of the newsroom for long periods of time, demanding an on-the-fly mélange of traditional and social media reporting. 

Unlike, say, a political campaign—which can be adequately covered over the phone from the cozy dryness of the office—the demonstrations require hands-on reporting, Mr. Elliott explained.

“Because it’s so de-centralized, I think there’s a real advantage to being on the marches and in the park as much as possible,” he said.

For the same reason, OWS reporters keep one eye on Twitter, one of the main organization tools of the protest, at all times.

“You can’t be omnipresent,” said ANIMAL New York editor Bucky Turco. “So If I’m at Zuccotti and there’s something going on elsewhere in the city, it will usually end up on Twitter first and I can adjust.”

In New York, protesters and demonstrators typically coordinate with police before marches and acts of civil disobedience, explained Mr. Turco. (He had the procedure explained to him by Detective Rick Lee, the so-called “hipster cop.”)

“That’s what kind of makes it intriguing for the media, is that you don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Mr. Turco said. “It's organic and it’s not staged.”

With the help of a MiFi, Mr. Turco and other reporters blog, write and file copy directly from the scene or a hospitable fast food restaurant nearby.

“Sometimes I just do my normal routine from Zuccotti,” Mr. Turco said.

As populist uprisings in Iran and Egypt demonstrated, Twitter is more than a reporting tool. Professional reporters, like citizen journalists, treat it as a publishing platform for a complementary narrative, more personal than a newspaper story and delivered in real time.

“A lot of the stuff that’s being put out on social networks is kind of a blow by blow, giving a glimpse into the mechanics of things like the General Assembly,” said Anthony De Rosa, Reuters social media editor.

New York Daily News social media Anjali Mullany said she is increasingly spending more time organizing the paper's live reporting, as well as other forms of non-traditional coverage of Occupy Wall Street.

"Social media is also a great mechanism for reporting details and anecdotes that may not fit or work in a traditional article. So is live coverage and live blogging," Ms. Mullany said in an email to the Observer.

A live tweet can illustrate the excitement and urgency that hooks a reader.

“Tweeting scratches that itch for the reader,” Ms. Maslin Nir said. “Especially when police are about to close in and you’re getting these tweets like, ‘We’re being shoved down 42nd Street, the barricade is crushing us.’ You know, that’s really something that Twitter can do.”

But for others, covering OWS exemplifies one of the major tensions between new and old media. Swept up in the shallow stream of Twitter, do reporters miss the big picture?

“There’s a lot of people tweeting about Occupy Wall Street, but there’s actually very few people, if you start looking around, just on the scene, doing descriptive reportorial stuff,” Mr. Elliott said. He tends to live tweet when he’s on scene, and Salon posts both traditionally reported stories and live tweet feeds for readers.

Although Twitter tells reporters where to be and when, it’s little help once the tape recorder comes out.

"Because there are no leaders in the group, it's difficult to get a really representative statement on what's going on," said a reporter of a widely circulated New York newspaper who was gathering information at an OWS gathering on Oct. 26 in Union Square.

"It ends up being a lot of talking, to a lot of different people, and then, somehow, trying to find the truth between everything that you're told," added the reporter, who asked to remain anonymous for job security purposes.

The reporter's struggles raise an interesting question: Is the plurality of Twitter a more accurate representation of the movement itself than the forced, newspaper-friendly narrative?

Most news outlets are hedging their bet, combining new and old, in hopes of creating the most complete portrait of the movement possible, at the risk of their reporter's social lives.

“You have to devote a lot of time to it,” Mr. Turco said. “I haven’t seen my family and friends as much.”

Reuters caused a bit of a stir today when they published a story connecting George Soros to Occupy Wall Street. This did not go over well, because the connection was tenuous at best, and at its worst, patently questionable.

So: Reuters changed the story. Not "corrected," or "published a rebuttal to the original reporting," but "changed the story."

These are both at the same URL, with no correction or note appended at the bottom.

Before:

After:

The story's lede?

Before:

Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world's richest men.

After:

George Soros isn't a financial backer of the Wall Street protests, despite speculation by critics including radio host Rush Limbaugh that the billionaire investor has helped fuel the anti-capitalist movement.

The first quote attributed to Soros' camp?

Before (fourth paragraph):

"I can understand their sentiment," Soros told reporters last week at the United Nations about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, which are expected to spur solidarity marches globally on Saturday.

After (third paragraph):

Soros spokesman Michael Vachon said that Soros has not "funded the protests directly or indirectly." He added: "Assertions to the contrary are an attempt by those who oppose the protesters to cast doubt on the authenticity of the movement."

And so on. The entire thing is utterly baffling, as Reuters seems to be answering a question nobody but their reporters—who don't fall under their labeling of "critics"—were asking.

Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon has already weighed in on the mess, noting that "Reuters cannot — must not — get a reputation as a right-wing media outlet." #ReutersScoops has already become a mediapolitick Twitter comedy meme.

The new version—located at the same URL as the original version, with portions of the original's text intact—is right here. But because the magic of Google Cache eventually goes away, we've screengrabbed the entire original story, right here:

1. Soros' Open Society gave money to The Tides Center.

2. The Tides Center, a San Francisco-based quasi-clearinghouse for other nonprofit donations, gave money to AdBusters Magazine.

3. AdBusters—an anti-corporate Canadian magazine teenagers read when they're 16 and listening to lots of Rage Against the Machine and dreaming of protesting globalization before they spend four years at Colgate, afterwards, ending up with a job at Wieden+Kennedy or something—made a poster suggesting people Occupy Wall Street.

4. AdBusters becomes relevant for the first time in, like, seven years when people actually Occupied Wall Street.

5. Reuters quotes Soros regarding Occupy Wall Street, context aside, as saying "I can understand their sentiment."

6. Conclusion: George Soros is behind Occupy Wall Street.

7. Boom: Drudge Link.

This is basically like positing that because a Reuters reporter has an account at Bank of America and a history of spending money, he's clearly funding the anti-Occupy Wall Street hypercapitalist-lobby.

Naturally, critics have not taken kindly to this reporting. Some reviews?

• The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal: "This is how you do a hit piece on a distributed movement. Invent a leader with a Limbaugh quote and then attack him and the fictional mob he's hired. Wow."
• The Awl: "A+ Traffic-Trolling."
• New York's Noreen Malone: "This story might not be out of place on Fox News, but at Reuters, which has always taken pains to stay above the partisan fray, it smells suspiciously like Drudge bait."
• Max Read of Gawker: "which is better drudge bait, 'SOROS BEHIND TK' or 'MICHELLE OBAMA EATS FRIED TK'"
• New York Times reporter and The Lede blogger J. David Goodman: "Turns up little besides a shaky connection."
• Reuters columnist and social media shaman Anthony DeRosa: "I'd sum up my personal feelings on the article as: that's not @Reuters journalism."
• Retuers' own financial columnist Felix Salmon: "I think it's ridiculous."
• Notorious NYU journalism wonk Jay Rosen: "Seriously, Reuters? This is pathetic...I don't see everything they run. But I do respect their operation. And I've never seen anything that lame from Reuters."
• Executive editor of Thomson Reuters Digital Jim Impoco, following Jay Rosen's comments: "That is putting it kindly."
• Salon's Justin Elliot: "Is Kevin Bacon the force behind Occupy Wall Street? It's irresponsible not to ask."

And so on.

Soros has yet to respond publicly, and the Reuters reporters behind the story have maintained radio silence over Twitter.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Ms. McLean, a Vanity Fair contributing editor and author of the Enron book, The Smartest Guys In The Room, will write a fortnightly column on "finance, both high and low," according to a memo sent out by Jim Impoco.

A longtime Times business reporter, Ms. Fabrikant follows former colleague David Rohde to Reuters moneyed shores, where her weekly column "will put a human face on business, focusing on the bold-face names that behind who make the money world go round."

Their hiring corrects the previously noted gender imbalance in editor Jim Ledbetter's stable of columnists.

Ms. Freedman is a decorated journalist. (via Zimbio)

Alix M. Freedman has been named Global Editor for Ethics and Standards at Reuters. She comes from the Wall Street Journal, where she was deputy managing editor and page one editor. Before that she oversaw ethics and standards of high-impact stories in the paper and on the Dow Jones newswires. Ms. Freedman won a Pulitzer for her tobacco industry reporting. Full memo from editor in chief Steve Adler below.

Colleagues:

I’m thrilled to announce that Alix M. Freedman, one of the world’s most esteemed journalists, is joining Reuters as Global Editor for Ethics and Standards. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her extraordinary investigative coverage of the tobacco industry, Freedman was most recently Deputy Managing Editor and Page One Editor at The Wall Street Journal. Previously at The Journal, she was responsible for overseeing ethics and standards and supervising final-reading of high-impact stories in the newspaper and on the Dow Jones Newswires.

At Reuters, Alix will help fuel our drive for journalistic excellence by working closely with reporters and editors on major stories, final-reading many signature pieces, and holding us all to the high standards set out in the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles and the Reuters Handbook of Journalism. A long-time leader of ethics training at the Journal, Alix will also collaborate with our training team to make sure we provide the best possible instruction. She will report to me and serve as a member of Reuters senior leadership group.

Alix has spent much of her illustrious career as a reporter, with a keen focus on topics that require unusual reporting skill, courage, and dedication and that – in her hands – have produced stories of enormous resonance and enduring impact.  Among her many reporting highlights:

• ·         Her 1998 story, “Population Bomb,” an astonishing account of how two American contraceptive researchers arranged for chemical sterilization of more than 100,000 women in developing nations. It won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer finalist.

 

• ·         “Fire Power," a 1992 examination of how a secretive Southern California family dominated the market for low-priced handguns frequently used in crimes. It won the Gerald Loeb Award, one of Alix’s two reporting Loebs.

 

• ·         Reports revealing little-known ways that Saddam Hussein profited from the United Nations sanctions meant to punish him, stories that made her and a colleague 2002 Pulitzer finalists.

 

• ·         High-impact on-the-ground coverage of child soldiers in Sierra Leone who were conscripted by rebels and then branded to discourage desertion.  In 2003, Alix and a colleague also probed the failure of U.N. peacekeepers as a war-torn town in the Congo stood on the brink of genocide.

In December 2003, New York Women in Communications, Inc., named Alix winner of their 2004 Matrix Award in the newspaper category. She is also winner of the 2010 Lawrence Minard Editor Award, the Loeb’s special distinction for career achievement among business editors.

She is a graduate of Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in history and literature.

Please join me in welcoming Alix to our team.

Best regards,

Steve

 

"Jack's arrival at Reuters adds to a rapidly strengthening opinion and analysis bench. Award winning David Cay Johnston and David Rohde have recently joined Reuters as columnists, Felix Salmon continues to set the pace among financial bloggers, and the Reuters column line-up includes regular contributions from Larry Summers and Mohamed El-Erian," Mr. Adler wrote.

Reuters is flexing its hiring and salary muscles by grabbing Mssrs. Johnston, Rohde, and Shafer, but so far they seem overwhelmingly interested in one perspective. The opinions line up also includes George Chen, Brend Debusmann, Gregg Easterbrook, James Pethokoukis, James Saft, John Wasik, Christopher Whalen and Ian Bremmer. There is one marquee female opinion columnist, Chrystia Freeland, who is also the global editor at large for Reuters.com, and Susan Glasser just started a monthly column.

Today Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon launched a new website, Counterparties.com. Taking its name from his daily morning aggregation post, Counterparties curates the most talked-about and best news articles from Mr. Salmon’s personal Google Reader and Twitter feeds, using content curation algorithms developed by a start-up called Percolate.com. The company, which emails its users news digests based on the news being talked about by people they follow—is still in invite-only “double-secret alpha” mode, but Mr. Salmon is something of a power user. He subscribes to 908 blogs (about half of which are active), and follows roughly the same number of Twitter users.

After Mr. Salmon proposed the idea in the spring of 2010, Percolate.com developed a plug-in for Counterparties.com’s content management system, Wordpress, and licensed its API to Reuters. (Reuters’s logo and footer appear on Counterparties, but it is otherwise unconnected with Reuters, for now.) The site is ad-free, for now, but if that changes, Mr. Salmon hopes advertisers use display space to aggregate their own favorite links. Such experimentation is a luxury of working for wire giant Thomson Reuters.

“At other companies, the first question is, ‘How do we monetize this?’” Mr. Salmon told off the Record. Counterparties is an experiment, he said, but the Percolate platform may be rolled out for other Reuters writers.

Counterparties aggregates only linked headlines: No Huffington Post or Atlantic Wire-style rewrites. But unlike other algorithm powered headline-aggregators, like Techmeme, Counterparties has a little bit of voice. The site is edited by Ryan McCarthy, who re-writes headlines and adds tags in a dead pan style reminiscent of The Awl.

Aggregation done right encourages people to read more--a pet topic of Mr. Salmon’s blog lately. He thinks journalists especially need to do more reading than writing.

In case the aggregation battle lines weren’t drawn clear enough: A small box at the bottom of the screen houses “Stuff We’re Not Linking To.” Today these include headlines from Mr. Salmon’s nemesis Henry Blodget’s site, Business Insider and Mr. McCarthy’s former employer, The Huffington Post. And yes, they are linked.

(Keeping up with the Jones's is expensive when the Jones's are the Thomson Reuters's.)

As such, the terminal manufacturers will welcome BNA's 350ish publications and 600-odd reporters into their fold. BNA specialize in tax and regulatory law, which makes it useful for Bloomberg's burgeoning BGov and for competing with Reuters's News & Insight: Legal division, launched in March.

A sad footnote to this is that BNA sounds like it was a really great company:

According to its website, its been wholly employee owned--employees and retirees still own 100% of the company's stock--since 1947, and has racked up a number of best companies to work for awards from FORTUNE, Working Mother, Washingtonian.

But then, Bloomberg has free trail mix and one of a handful of the escalators the world that turn a curve.