Ever since Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's Last Theorem, the greatest intellectual puzzle facing humankind has been: How does The New York Times' "Most-emailed" list work? Science has finally given us the answer!

A team of sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania undertook an exhaustive study of the New York Times most-emailed list. They first assembled a data set based on the contents of the list over more than six months. Then they dug in to see why stories ended up there. Thus they unlocked the secret of journalism's holy grail—and perhaps even of virality itself.

Their findings, as reported by the Times' John Tierney, are a mix of the totally obvious and the Slate-y counter-intuitive. The obvious: A prominently-featured article is more likely to make the list, as is one written by a famous person. Slightly more surprising is the fact that longer articles were more e-mail-worthy.

But the most fascinating findings are also the most useful for anyone hoping to make it on the only list that matters, journalism-wise. Using complicated math, researchers identified four qualities of an article which resonate with the 'email-this' part of readers' brains. Most-emailed articles are:

• Awe-inspiring: Being 'awe-inspiring' was the quality which most improved an item's odds of making the list. These articles blow readers' minds by dealing with something physically or intellectually enormous—a natural wonder, a work of art, a big idea, the indomitable human spirit, etc. People like to share awe-inspiring New York Times articles at lunch so they can forget their own puniness long enough to finish the workday. (Example articles: "Fury of Girl's Fists Lifts Up North Korean Refugee" and "The Promise and Power of RNA.")
  
  
• Emotional: If you want to convince a reader to hit the 'email this article' button, try tugging on their heart-strings with a weepy tale of struggle or redemption. Soon, their offspring will be deleting yet another email from Mom with the subject "You HAVE to read this article. SO SAD!". (Example: "Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness.")
  
  
• Positive:"If it bleeds it leads"—the old newspaperman's cliche—did not hold up under our researchers' critical gaze. People like to share happy things, apparently. (Example: "Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love With the City")
  
  
• Surprising: Unsurprisingly, people like to share articles that are surprising. Think, things that make you go "woah." (i.e. a story about chickens in Harlem, or a marathon-running restaurateur.)
  
  

  Using these four variables, we have visually dissected the top five most e-mailed Times articles as of 11pm, Feb. 9th, 2010. Study them, for they hold the secret of Internet immortality:
  
  
  

  1. America is not Yet Lost
  2. Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord
  2. The New Math on Campus
  4. Have Faith in Love
  5. For Students at Risk, Early College Proves a Draw

The Daily Beast writer who confessed Friday to "unintentionally" lifting several sentences from a Miami Herald article also copied passages on four other occasions, as far back as July 2009. And now he's taking a "time out" from the Beast.

On Friday, it looked like writer Gerald Posner had his minor plagiarism scandal under control. Slate's Jack Shafer busted him for one case of copying, but Posner claimed it was accidental and his editors said he would keep working. Now Shafer has three more examples of Posner stealing from the Herald, plus one involving Texas Lawyer, and Posner writes he's been suspended. He blogged: "I now realize that a method of compiling information that I have used successfully since 1984... obviously does not work... at the warp speed of the Net." Or under the bright light of Google.

(Pic: Posner's Facebook)

The New York Times' David Kirkpatrick delivers the shocking and troubling news that Wall Street bankers are so disappointed in Barack Obama that they've started giving money to Republicans. Bankers! To Republicans!

Apparently Wall Street has long been a bastion of support for Democratic political candidates, but now that Obama has launched a campaign — unprecedented for a Democrat — to enact policies that may cut into corporate profits, some bankers are holding their noses and cutting checks to Republicans:

But this year Chase's political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.

The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry's campaign to thwart Mr. Obama's proposals for tighter financial regulations.

Here's a chart illustrating that "shift" in giving, from the Center for Responsive Politics. It shows political giving from political action committees and individuals associated with commercial banking, going back to 1990. In every year since 1994, Republicans got more money than Democrats.

To make his case, Kirkpatrick cites CRP figures showing that individuals and PACs from the securities and investment business gave $89 million to Democrats in 2008, a 57% to 43% edge over Republicans. That's true. It's also true that, according to the CRP, the securities and investment sector favored Republicans over Democrats in the 2006, 2004, 2002, 2000, 1998, and 1996 election cycles. It's also true that, overall, the wider finance, insurance, and real estate industry has favored Republicans 55% to 45% since 1990. This is because people who care about money want Republicans to win elections, and always have.

But what about Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase and Obama's Chicago pal? Kirkpatrick makes much of the fact that JPMorgan Chase's PAC has "rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees" and given "$30,000 to their Republican counterparts."

He calls this a "shift." JPMorgan Chase has two PACs. One of them, it is true, gave 58% of its $130,427 in disbursements in 2008 to Democrats. But the other one, which handed out $797,977 in 2008, gave 53% of it to Republicans. In fact, both PACs have favored Republicans in all but two of the last six election cycles—one being the aforementioned 2008 cycle, and the other being 2002, when one of the PACs split its money 50-50. So Chase's shift to the GOP is more of a return to the way it's always behaved and should always be expected to behave, since "Wealthy Bankers Give Money to Republicans" is sort of axiomatic.

In your Byzantine Monday media column: searching for a rich media savior, a recipe duplication scandal, the future of robot media is $1 per hour, and STEPHEN A. SMITH is back in your area code.

Simon Dumenco points out the impolite fact that "much of the best of contemporary journalism has been produced, and continues to get produced, simply because of the largess — and the emotional needs — of a small group of rich people." And where is the next crop of generous, fabulously wealthy media patrons, he wonders? Hmm. Well nothing will dissuade Jared Kushner for at least a few more months, so that's one.


Recipe scandal: Health magazine re-used some recipes from fellow Time Inc. title Real Simple! If consumers cannot be absolutely sure that no subscribers to semi-related magazines have ever prepared this particular chicken dish before us, how are we to live?


David Carr takes a look at robot "journalism" word factory Demand Media, which pays poor freelancers paltry wages to write up stories on computer-generate Google-trending topics like, oh, I don't know, "How to pick the lock of the Jersey Shore house with a Swiss Army brand pocketknife." Carr notes that after spending 20 hours on his story, "At Demand's current pay rate, I'd be making almost a buck an hour." Oh, does the New York Times pay more than that? ZING.


TERRIBLE, DECLARATIVE SPORTS COLUMNIST STEPHEN A. SMITH IS BACK TO WRITING FOR THE PHILLY ENQUIRER. HOLLER AT STEVE—IF YOU MAKE THE CUT.

After the weekend's blindingly obvious NYT scoop that the police department fudges the crime stats for its own benefit (they showed that on the The Wire like years ago, duh), the question remains: What do New Yorkers "at churches, businesses, community meetings and along the sidewalks on a bitingly cold Sunday morning" think about all this? The paper sent lowly metro reporter and publisher-to-be A "to the" G Sulzberger Jr. to find out, mostly because it was a good excuse to send the kid out on a "bitingly cold Sunday morning." Stay strong, AG. You'll be able to fire all those editors before long.
[NYT]

Terri Cullen, one of the founders of The Wall Street Journal Online, was announced as the wealth management editor at Reuters less than a month ago. Now, she's gone due to a story that required a White House-requested retraction. Huh?

To recap, Cullen writes a story headlined "Backdoor taxes to hit middle class" that runs on February 1st. Reuters has tried to make it disappear, but it's still available via the magic of Google Cache here. The lede:

The Obama administration's plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families.

Except, as it turned out, that wasn't the case. First came the Reuters feedback page on the story, which was mostly made up of notes like this:

This story is filled with errors that truly offend any sense of even-handness, accuracy and diligence. The budget only rolls back the Bush tax cuts for those making over $200k in some instances and $250k in others. The rates for the tax brackets below that are not being rolled back, which is the whole underpinning of this story. What an embarrassing mistake. Also, calling the Estate Tax the Death Tax is straight from the conservative playbook.

And then, the retraction:

The Feb 1 story headlined "Backdoor taxes to hit middle class" is wrong and has been withdrawn. The story said lower-income families will pay more under tax provisions scheduled to expire Dec 31. The Obama administration's budget calls for the extension of those tax provisions for households earning less than $250,000. There will be no substitute story.

Unfortunately, that didn't stop the story from becoming a Republican propaganda talking point party. Drudge tried to spin it, but kept covering as the story got pulled further and further from the public eye. Crafty. And yesterday, the blog E&P in Exile announces Cullen's departure from Reuters:

The reporter who wrote that article earlier this week alleging an Obama "back door" tax hike for nearly everyone, which became a rightwing cause — and then was withdrawn by Reuters — has now left the company. Jumped or pushed?

Good question, but the better one—and what makes this story so fascinating—is: How the hell did this happen? Reuters is a massive wire service. Their stories go through check, after check, after check before they run. As Ryan already mentioned, this is the second high profile fracas this year regarding a Reuters story; the first was when their editor-in-chief spiked a story about billionaire hedge fund manager Steven Cohen without providing his pissed off reporters with kind of reasonable explanation for doing so. Barely a month later, Cullen—a seasoned financial reporter—gets a story pulled after a pissed off White House calls up the wire service and tells them how wrong their report is. The operative term there being "seasoned." Again, via MediaBistro:

In 1995, Cullen was instrumental in the launch of The Wall Street Journal Online, and for the 13 years following, served as an editor and columnist overseeing personal finance and financial markets coverage for WSJ.com. She also produced its award-winning "Fiscally Fit" column and was the author of "The Wall Street Journal. Complete Identity Theft Guidebook," published in 2007.

Put it like this: given a lineup, Cullen wouldn't be your first bet to flub a story like this. Which leads to a few questions, mainly: Why did Cullen make a mistake this large? How did it get through to print? Did Cullen leave, or was she fired? And what the hell is going on at Reuters when a high profile hire screws up a pretty easy story to such an extent that it merits a call from the White House and a departure less than a month after she was picked up?

The Nashua Telegraph quoted a White House official saying a Q-and-A with area high schoolers was "off the record." But it turned out the conversation about being "off the record" was itself "off the record," so they retracted that, too.

Here's the correction:

A story on Page 1 of Tuesday's Telegraph quoted a White House official explaining that a Q-and-A session with dozens of teenagers in Nashua High School North on Monday was "off the record." However, the explanation about the talk being "off the record" was, it turns out, also "off the record" and should not have been quoted.

...and here's the bewildering skeleton of a corrected story, now bearing the headline "Staffers Visit, White House Remains Mum." [via BoingBoing] [Pic via Inju's Flickr]

With great power comes great responsibility. But AOL's media borg Seed.com can't stop its horde of desperate underemployed journalists from mobbing story subjects, like the angry woman who heard from seven Seed writers in six days. Frightening.

The woman started hearing from Seed writers after her Tumblr started getting a measure of online buzz. Mushrooming links and chatter about the blog, devoted to ridiculous Rosa Parks comparisons, must have spiked through one of the online tripwires at Seed, which robotically generates story assignments using data from search engines. (We've agreed not to use the blogger's name in the post, since she used to work for AOL, although you may well be able to figure out who she is from her site.)

As you can see in the email chain below, the torrent of interview requests started Jan. 29 and never let up. The first Seed writer sent a few emails, asking for an interview. When that writer ended up empty handed, different Seedsters put in their own interview requests, one after another. Out tipster said she wrote people back at first, but eventually gave up on responding to everyone.

Gave up, that is, until the eight or ninth email, at which point she kind of snapped and sent the missive at bottom, saying Seed "generally devalues the hard work" of writers and editors.

Well, sure, but only if you don't buy into Aol's innovative "human wave attack" style of journalism. Those sorts of tactica can be very effective, if you're a general. Not so fun if you're one of the infantry, inside the human wave.

(Top pic by Dan Coulter)

This is how the transcript of today's White House press briefing begins. Can anyone explain who Bill is? And also what the hell was going on in the Brady Briefing Room today? Real journalists doing real journalism.

Aha. Bill is Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton and apparently he made a killer round of Fuzzy Navels for everyone when he did the press briefing yesterday.

In your foreboding Thursday media column: Jared Kushner has a bright idea, Howard Zinn's reputation impugned, David Letterman plays a funny joke, and Janice Min somehow survives being rich as fuck.

Look what dashing young man-about-town and charitable New York Observer owner Jared Kushner is doing now: he's starting a free newspaper in Las Vegas! Because he already has New York in his pocket. (No idea.)


NPR's memorial report on dearly departed lefty historian Howard Zinn included a quote from conservadork David Horowitz saying "There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect." People complained that he should not have been quoted! But as much as he is wrong, we are in favor of dissenters being included in obits, because otherwise obits get so mawkish, god.


News of the Weird: David Letterman's television show has hired its very first lady, to write jokes? So I guess it's either just a stunt for some kind of " bit," or another, more powerful joke about ladies aren't funny? David Letterman, you're America's favorite cad!


Former US Weekly editor Janice Min reveals for the first time: It was totally stressful how she earned so much fucking money that one of her paychecks dwarfed her emasculated husband's entire tiny, unsatisfying yearly salary. How did she survive this nightmare situation? She will tell you in the New York Post.