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The article discusses an interview Truman Capote, an author and journalist for "The New Yorker" magazine, conducted with actor Marlon Brando in Japan in 1957 during the filming of the motion picture "Sayonara," directed by Josh Logan. The author discusses the history of Capote's rise as an author and Brando's rise as an actor. Topics include Capote's interview with artist Andy Warhol, Capote's interview style and his ability to remember his interview subject's remarks without a tape recorder, and Brando's attempts to stop the publication of the interview in "The New Yorker."

This article offers a look at the television program "To Catch a Predator," on Dateline NBC, which shows an elaborate operation targeting adults using the Internet to solicit sex from minors. According to the article, after realizing that he had been tricked and would be seen as a sexual predator, Louis Conradt, Jr., a county prosecutor from Terrell, Texas, killed himself in front of police officers and the Dateline camera crew. The author discusses the positive and negative influences of the show on the lives of Americans. The article provides quotes from Chris Hansen, a Dateline correspondent.

This article focuses on the issue concerning the need for newspaper firms in the U.S. to become privately-owned companies. The combination of the precipitous decline in stock prices, shareholder unrest and the general pessimism of the market concerning the newspaper business have raised an interesting issue on whether it is viable for newspapers to remain publicly traded companies. Newspapers are ideal candidates for leveraged buyout because they have such high operating margins, meaning they can service a lot of debt without drowning in it. They also do not have to make a lot of capital-intensive expenditures on research and development or infrastructure. Private ownership has the potential to give newspapers the needed space to plan and invest in long-term strategies, on both the business and editorial sides.

Presents an article about the impact of Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans, Louisiana on "The Times-Picayune" newspaper of the city. Status of the city following the attack of the hurricane; Efforts of the newspaper staff to cover the disaster; Challenges being faced by the newspaper staff following the disaster.

Ahmad Chalabi's defectors told stories to a lot of reporters who now wish they'd kept their distance.. The memo outlined something called the Information Collection Program, an INC operation that now appears to have provided bogus information about Saddam Hussein's weapons and terrorist connections to the American government and to the press in the run-up to the Iraq war. The list includes articles from nearly every blue-blooded news outfit in America, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly, 60 Minutes, USA Today, the New York Daily News, UPI, and Fox News. The purpose, apparently, was to introduce Isikoff to Sabah Khalifa Khodada, an Iraqi army defector who claimed to know about a secret training camp near Salman Pak, twenty miles south of Baghdad, where Hussein was training Islamic extremists. And a few reporters deserve special recognition for their work in exposing problems with the program, including Drogin, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball at Newsweek, and Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder.

The article discusses whether the mainstream news media in the United States exhibited a liberal bias that may have helped 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama win the election. It discusses research by the Project for Excellence in Journalism showing that press coverage of the campaign in the fall of 2008 was actually fairly balanced regarding Obama, but tilted more negative regarding his opponent, Republican candidate John McCain. The article closes with suggested responses to future accusations by conservatives of liberal media bias.

This article presents the author's views on newspaper and magazine circulation in the U.S. as of May 2004. During the past few years, newspapers and magazines have devoted millions of column inches to the shenanigans and suspect accounting of various corporate malefactors. But comparatively little attention has been paid to allegations of financial impropriety leveled at one segment of the business world, media companies. The press has had little to say about the question whether some newspapers and magazines routinely overcharging advertisers by goosing circulation numbers, a form of fraud. The issue surfaced most notoriously earlier this year during the food fight between the ex-talk show host Rosie O'Donnel and the publishing giant Gruner+Jahr (G+J), following the demise of Rose magazine. During the course of dueling $100 million lawsuits for control of Rosie, Diane Potter, the circulation manager of G+J, testified that she had inflated circulation numbers to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the group charged with policing circulation for newspapers and magazines. Given the general notion that circulation figures are padded by steep discounting and bulk distribution, the dismay that greeted the Rosie revelation had something of a Casablanca air to it.

Focuses on the threat of the Internet in making journalists vulnerable to long-distance libel lawsuit. Libel suit filed by Joseph Gutnick against Dow Jones; Arguments of Dow Jones on the jurisdiction of the suit; Concerns of media lawyers on the ruling.