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Leaving Lake Lucille Gone from Wasilla, Alaska: Joe McGinniss, the writer who moved in next door to Sarah Palin back in May to research a book about her. He packed up and headed back to Massachusetts on Sunday, the Associated Press reports. His decision to rent the house next to the Palin family’s on the banks of Lake Lucille initially prompted alarm from the Palins and from Glenn Beck. On May 25, Sarah Palin posted a photo of McGinniss on her Facebook page under a five-paragraph welcome message, noting he was “about 15 feet away on the neighbor’s rented deck overlooking my children’s play area and my kitchen window.” Her husband Todd dropped by to voice his displeasure. Beck urged a boycott of McGinniss’s publisher. Things eventually settled down, according to McGinniss, who endured “vile e-mails” from some Palin supporters and says he noticed a distinct “undercurrent of fear” among residents. He began interviewing locals, some of whom offered him the comforts of blueberry pie and hand guns. He came back East convinced that Palin is running for president: “Everything she’s doing is geared to that. And, she wants to be president. And God wants her to be president, so how can she say no?”


Travolta case dropped Citing John Travolta’s decision not to testify further, a judge in the Bahamas on Monday dismissed charges against two people accused of extorting money from the actor over the death of his


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KLMNO NAMES & FACES


TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2010


DAN JOLING/ASSOCIATED PRESS PACKING UP:Writer Joe McGinniss has left Sarah Palin’s Alaska neighborhood.


16-year-old son, Jett. With a retrial of ambulance driver Tarino Lightbourne and his attorney,


former Bahamian senator Pleasant Bridgewater, set to begin, the prosecutor in this case submitted a


FREE TO GO:Tarino Lightbourne, left, and Pleasant Bridgewater.


motion to drop the case. In a written statement explaining the


“heavy emotional toll” the case has taken on his family since Jett’s January 2009 death, Travolta said that “after much reflection I concluded that it was in my family’s best interest for me not to voluntarily return to The Bahamas to


testify a second time.” Travolta’s son died after suffering a seizure associated with autism.


Lightbourne, one of the paramedics who arrived at the family’s home, allegedly threatened to sell


stories to the news media suggesting Travolta was at fault unless he received $25 million from the actor.


Jerry Hall is downsizing Model Jerry Hall plans to auction some of her art collection next month, including a famous portrait by Lucian


Freud that shows her nude when she was eight months pregnant, Sotheby’s said Monday. The auction also will include works


by Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, David Bailey and other prominent artists collected by Hall, ex-wife of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. The works will be sold on Oct. 15-16 as part of a larger contemporary art sale, Sotheby’s spokesman Simon Warren said.


Sotheby’s specialist Oliver Barker said the Lucian Freud portrait called “Eight Months Gone” is the centerpiece of the auction and is expected to fetch more than 300,000 pounds ($460,000). “It’s a wonderful painting,” he said.


“It was exhibited shortly after it was done at the Tate Gallery. [Freud’s]


ALASTAIR GRANT/ASSOCIATED PRESS BARE-BONED:Jerry Hall is auctioning off some of her art, including a nude shot.


always been interested in maternity. It’s a very tender, loving painting.” Hall, who separated from Jagger in 1999, said the unusually intimate painting came about after she and Freud were seated at a dinner together when she was eight months pregnant with her son Gabriel. The artist asked her if she would pose for him and said they had to begin immediately because she was so close to giving birth.


Spotted Shrugging off her recent Las Vegas cocaine arrest: Paris Hilton on the Hawaiian island of Maui buying $700 worth of groceries, RadarOnline.com reports. —Christian Hettinger, from Web and wire reports


If this formerly clever headline could talk, would it be agog over Lady Gaga? media notes from C1


headlines to what content to post on your site, and people like me are hardly exempt. If I write about Radar revealing Mel Gibson’s abusive calls to his girlfriend, or the coverage of Tiger Woods’s multiple mistresses, my traffic will undoubtedly soar above that for a sober report on how nonprofit groups are pursuing investigative reporting. Like most of my colleagues, I try not to let that affect my judgment, but it hangs in the ether. Newspapers, of course, have


always chased circulation, dating back to the days when editors used racy headlines or sensational crimes to goose street sales. The tabloids still play this game. But now, for the first time in


history, newspapers no longer have to rely on polls and focus groups — or crude guesswork — to determine their most popular offerings. Instead, editors know instantly how many hits a story, column or blog is getting — and can adjust their strategy accordingly. What’s hot may get bigger display; what’s not may shrink or be kicked off the home page (which makes a statement, even if most readers don’t come in through that front door). “When people worry about


whether we’re straying from our mission,” says Marcus Brauchli, The Post’s executive editor, “what they’re worried about is are we overemphasizing a photo gallery about a celebrity in hopes of generating traffic. Are we impairing our ability to do good journalism in the areas that matter most to us? And the answer to that is no.” While The Post is a


general-interest paper, its mandate is covering Washington “as a place for people who live here and work here” and as “a seat of power,” Brauchli says. Of course, he says, the goal is


tapes will take precedence over corruption in Afghanistan? Why pay for expensive foreign bureaus if they’re not generating enough clicks? Doesn’t all this amount to pandering? Potentially, sure. But news organizations such as The Post and the Times have brands to protect. They can’t simply abandon serious news in favor of the latest wardrobe malfunction without alienating some of their longtime readers. What they gain in short-term hits would cost them in long-term reputation. The cynical view would be that


Senate primaries are out and animal videos are in. But the track record suggests that enough people have an appetite for good reporting that the feral cats can be kept to a minimum. Now let’s see, what sizzling search terms can I enter for this column? Tiger Woods, multiple mistresses, Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Hurley, Katy Perry. . . .


PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE WASHINGTON POST


WHAT ARE YOU LOOKIN’ AT? From left, John McCain, Lisa Murkowski; Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt; Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren; and Miley Cyrus are all newsmakers in modern journalism.


“connecting our journalism to the greatest number of eyeballs possible. There’s a great deal of skepticism among old-school journalists about these practices.” As if to underscore that The


Post’s priorities are paying off, four of the top 10 blogs always involve politics, while two chronicle the Redskins and one is Celebritology, an aggregation of bold-faced gossip. That seems like a healthy balance. But minute-by-minute


temptations remain, even if organizations don’t follow the Gawker model of paying writers bonuses for pieces that draw the most hits.


On a recent Wednesday morning, some Post editors were frustrated that the primary election results weren’t garnering many hits — despite the fact that


IMOGEN QUEST by Olivia Walch Winner of The Post’s “America’s Next Great Cartoonist” contest.


“Are we


impairing our ability to do good journalism in the areas that matter most to us? And the answer to that is no.”


Marcus Brauchli, The Post’s executive editor


John McCain had just won his party’s nomination and Lisa Murkowski was on the verge of losing hers. What was hot, the traffic directors said, was Woods’s ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, telling People that her life had been “hell” since the golfer’s sex scandal, a photo of an alligator in the Chicago River, and a video posted on Gawker of a British woman throwing a feral cat into a dumpster.


On the same morning, the


hottest Google search was for Alaskan election results (in that Senate race in which Murkowski lost to a political unknown backed by Palin). Next up were Atlantic City air show 2010; Hurricane Danielle path; Nicole “Hoopz” Alexander (winner of a VH-1 reality show and Shaq’s girlfriend), and Kat Stacks (a


buxom blogger who dishes dirt on celebrities). No, I wasn’t familiar with the last two, either. Zaleski says such trend research is used mainly to tweak headlines and search terms. But, she adds, “what we’re realizing is that we can’t live in a vacuum, where we decide what people want to read.” Some sites make no bones about packaging policy pieces with NSFW photos. Female critics have taken particular aim at the Huffington Post, whose approach to blogging, headlines and aggregation have made it a huge success. In recent weeks, Arianna Huffington’s site has included such prominent headlines as “Elizabeth Hurley: My breasts are natural”; “Miley loses virginity, flashes Brazilian wax in new movie”; and “Heidi, Spencer & Former Playmate Exchange Profanities Over Sex Tape.” One recent day, the site’s second most-popular story was “Katy Perry Shows Off Her Curves, Wows on Letterman”; another, it was “When ‘Real Housewives’ Wear Bikinis.” But no publication is exempt.


On Friday, the second-most e-mailed Times storywas headlined “For the A-Cup Crowd, Minimal Assets are a Plus” — a feature contending that these days “it’s not uncommon for women with modest busts to flaunt what little they’ve got.” Naturally, those who grew up as analog reporters wonder: Is journalism becoming a popularity contest? Does this mean pieces about celebrity sex


DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau CUL DE SAC by Richard Thompson


An international star President Obama received far


more favorable coverage from Arab television networks than on American newscasts during the first 18 months of his term. In a research paper by Stephen


Farnsworth and Robert Lichter of George Mason University and Roland Schatz of Media Tenor International, the coverage on Arab networks was 7.7 percent more positive than negative last year, compared with 2.6 percent more positive on European networks and 7.9 percent more negative on the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News evening newscasts. The five Arab networks


examined include al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyah. The authors, who examined 76,844 statements and presented their findings to the American Political Science Association, also looked at two BBC channels and two state-run networks in Germany. Obama’s coverage was less


favorable in the first six months of this year, but the geographic disparity remained: 4 percent more negative than positive in the Middle East, 6.5 percent more negative in Europe and 12 percent more negative on American networks. “Reporting on the president’s character was amajor part of international news reports on Obama, and was an area where Obama was highly regarded,” the study says. kurtzh@washpost.com


ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM Howard Kurtz debuts a


real-time Media Notes blog with television clips, items, links and a Twitter feed at washingtonpost.com/ medianotes.


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