Federal Bureau of Investigation | Security Management
The FBI has posted a list of traits of corporate spies, and Security Management's Carlton Purvis says they'd have helped identify Joe Muto as the Fox Mole: "What Muto did wasn’t exactly espionage," Purvis writes, "but Fox News would no doubt categorize him as an insider threat."

The trouble with this theory is that the FBI's tip list sounds a lot like your average Mediabistro job listing, or lines from a pretty good annual review. Possible moles:

• "work odd hours without authorization." • "take proprietary or other information home in hard copy form and/or on thumb drives, computer disks, or e-mail." • "unnecessarily copy material, especially if it’s proprietary or classified." • "disregard company policies about installing personal software or hardware, accessing restricted websites, conducting unauthorized searches, or downloading confidential material." • "engage in suspicious personal contacts with competitors, business partners, or other unauthorized individuals." • "buy things they can’t afford." • "are overwhelmed by life crises or career disappointments."

The Charlotte Observer
Gerry Hostetler wrote close to 2,500 obituary columns for The Charlotte Observer; on Sunday the newspaper published her last, about her own life. She was 76. Hostetler started working in the Observer's newsroom as a part-time obit clerk in 1978, and in 1991 she pitched the newspaper on an obituary column, "It's a Matter of Life." In her last column she explains (in third-person) her thinking:

"I would do an occasional obit-news story," Gerry said, "and they became quite popular. That prompted me to envision a column with more information and above all – more warmth."

She describes a life of hard work, including 20 years working two jobs. She also offers a bit of advice for journalists doing this work: (more...)

So far, spring speeches at academic institutions have told students to consider a major other than journalism (newspapers are "dreary"), and that "Most people’s voices are not worth being heard."

Now it's graduation time, and media types are back at the nation's podia, though not at Barnard College today, where President Obama speaks after bumping New York Times editor Jill Abramson.

Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel told Butler University's graduating class Saturday:

Information doesn’t want to be free; people want free information. And we’ve trained people to expect free information – but you know, you get what you pay for. A comment on a blog is free. But you will have to pay for the insight of a Joe Klein or a Fareed Zakaria, for there is a deep investment that has been made in their experience, their talent, their contacts, their perspective. That’s worth a lot. Information feels like it’s free because it comes to you in a frictionless way with a click on your keyboard. But the information – the knowledge you get from a TIME story about the Middle East -- comes at the cost of keeping correspondents in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Jerusalem.

Zakaria, meanwhile, was at Duke University, where he told chair-fillers "this is an extraordinary world [and] country you're coming into," mentioning mobile devices as evidence, "which some of you are looking at right now, and don't think I don't see you." (more...)

The New York Times | The Daily Beast
A lovely bit of New York condescension leads Alexandra Robbins' Sunday New York Times article on the fallout from Jeff Himmelman's book about Ben Bradlee: Washington is "perhaps the only city where journalists can be at the peak of the social establishment," news that might come as a surprise to several members of The New York Times' management and to most Washington journalists, but the reporting underneath that silly assertion is a solid look at a journalistic relationship gone bad. Himmelman was Bob Woodward's mentee, and he was close to former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Sally Quinn, who in better times asked Himmelman to co-author a book with their son Quinn Bradlee.

Richard Cohen told Robbins that Bradlee and Quinn are "repulsed" by the book. Woodward called it "bad journalism to the core." Robbins sketches Himmelman's past as a student at Sidwell Friends, a Yalie a capella type, and a D.C. musician with a day job heaving facts for Woodward and taking dinners with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. The beef of these former pals? Himmelman quotes Bradlee as having doubts about Woodward's reporting during Watergate and "reveals intimate details of his family life, including piecing together a letter Mr. Bradlee once wrote to Sally Quinn (then his girlfriend and now his wife), ripped up and filed away without sending."

In The Daily Beast, Himmelman says his subjects' claims he was some sort of double agent are absurd: (more...)

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REST IN PEACE
• Five journalists are presumed dead in a jet crash in Indonesia: "Femi Adi, a reporter for Bloomberg Market; Dody Aviantara, a journalist for the monthly Angkasa magazine; Didik Nur Yusuf, who also worked for Angkasa magazine; Ismiyati Sunarto, a reporter for the national station Trans TV; and Aditya Sukardi, who worked for Trans TV."

• From The Economist:

We are very sorry to announce that Peter David, our Washington bureau chief, Lexington columnist and former foreign editor, died in a car accident on Thursday night. He had worked at The Economist since 1984 and was a much-loved colleague and friend. We will pay fuller tribute to him in next week’s issue.

• Daniel Rapoport died April 11. A former journalist for UPI, National Journal, Congressional Quarterly and Washingtonian, he founded Farragut Publishing.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD

• Viola Nora Folkenflik was born to NPR's Jesse Baker and David Folkenflik Wednesday. (more...)

Digiday | GigaOm | Felix Salmon
Gawker Media honcho Nick Denton is weaning his sites off banner ads, he announced in a staff memo Thursday: "In two years, our primary offering to marketers will be our discussion platform." That's the new commenting system Gawker sites began rolling out at the end of April, one Denton thinks can be sold.

Gawker's sort of throwing up a leaky paywall around the system; Mathew Ingram wondered why advertisers wouldn't just hop into Gawker comments for free. Denton told him:

Advertisers will pay for promotion of the discussions in which they engage. Just like any marketer can go into Twitter — but sponsored tweets give them more prominence. They will also be paying for our help in discussion management. Just like they currently contract with us to create sponsored content in the voice of the web and the Gawker readership.

If Denton's new model works, it'll represent an important shift from online content to online discussion. In this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Binyamin Appelbaum delivers a profile of Business Insider blogger Joe Weisenthal, who epitomizes what one might call the "old Gawker" model of real-time, iterative blogging. Felix Salmon reads a dig at that approach in the piece:

Yet again, it seems, the NYT Magazine has published a blogger profile which makes bloggers seem weird, immature, and hyperactive — the kind of profile where the subtext is that “it’s OK if you don’t care about the second-to-second noise and the personal revelations, you’re fine ignoring the blogosphere completely and getting a more considered view of things from the NYT instead”.

Weisenthal's doing what Denton seems to be hoping the comments system will do in the future -- digest, correct, and move stories forward. And if that's where advertisers want to be instead, maybe there will soon -- gulp -- be notably fewer bloggers for The New York Times to profile or the rest of us to read.