Book Deals, Threat or Menace

Michael Schmidt of the NY Times, an excellent reporter, has a book coming out with all sorts of scoops about Trump administration shit that happened in 2017-2018 when he covered the White House. If I'm the publisher of the Times, he's getting grilled six ways to Sunday on when he learned all this fascinating stuff and why it didn't appear in my newspaper first. Then I'd fire his ass. IMO what you learn on the job that's news is your outlet's intellectual property. People don't tell Schmidt stuff because they love him, it's because he works for the Times, the most important media property on the planet. Who you work for comes first. If he wanted to write a book of poetry, OK, but don't find shit out and then not put in the paper first.

 

I've long wondered about this stuff myself. This is what should happen with folks who work for media outlets in which the information should have appeared in the outlet first.

And folks like John Bolton should held in contempt for disclosing the crap he did in his book yet refuse to testify in a certain person's impeachment hearings (not trying to make this political, mods, but this is a massive issue as well).

 

Is the Times getting a cut?

 

I have seen many books written by sports beat writers after championship seasons. Someone will rush out a book recapping the season for the local market. I would guess at least one Boston sportswriter has authored such a book. The material for the book would have been generated as part of the sportswriter's employment. Did these books require the approval of management? Did the publisher of the paper get a cut? And if such a thing has never happened in Boston what of other markets?

And where is the line drawn. For example, Ian O'Connor wrote a biography of Belichick. I think O'Connor was working at ESPN at the time. While O'Connor must have covered Belichick at some point for ESPN I would think he would not have been able to write the book off of his notes but would have needed to do a lot of extra interviews. Should ESPN get a cut?

 

Then we get no Jordan Rules. Smith had his paper’s permission, but I’m guessing Schmidt did too.

 

I can only assume the Times is involved in the publishing otherwise, as Rick Wilson and Molly Jong Fast would say, “fuck that guy.”

 

The Globe has put out quick turnaround books post-championships, but a lot of the copy is repurposed from earlier use.

 

And books commemorating a championship season are a whole lot different and less relevant than a book about a fascist trying to complete his destruction of America.

 

I should make myself clearer here. I also assume Schmidt got permission from the Times. He violated no rules. I'm saying there should be rules. Yes, Boston sportswriters have written books about athletes/teams they covered. Many of them involve extensive rewriting, mostly expanding, things they wrote for their papers already. But there's a big difference between recapping a championship or an as told to book and presenting what's front page news two years after the fact in a book. Whenever Schmidt found his scoops out, they should've been in the Times immediately.
The Times' cooking section has been publishing its own books, many of 'em great of their genre, for about 60 years now. Again, I submit a recipe for gazpacho and new information on corruption in the Dept. of Justice are very different kinds of information.

 

Yes. Schmidt sat on important news that not only may have uncovered a crime, it may have uncovered actual provable treason. And he didn't tell anyone.

 

This came up in my journalism classes in the 1990s re: Bob Woodward. Holding back info is really a disservice to the public. It's not like Schmidt put out a book about Ed Muskie's 1972 presidential campaign which contained a bunch of previously undisclosed info.