Cosby Says Black-Press Freelancer Duped Him Bill Cosby’s attorney John P. Schmitt issued a statement Monday criticizing journalist Stacy M. Brown, who interviewed the comedian for a story published online Saturday in the New York Post and the Washington Informer. “Schmitt alleges his client was unaware the conversation was being recorded and would wind up in the Post,” Travis Reilly reported…

Senate Democrats’ Study Reveals Leaks to Journalists ” The Central Intelligence Agency leaked classified material to reporters to shape the perception that its detention and interrogation program was an effective tool in thwarting terrorism, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday,” Noam Cohen and Ravi Somaiya reported for the New York Times. “The…

Younger African Americans Hear Message of Racial Progress “President Obama is delivering a pointed message to younger African Americans that the nation has made progress on race relations, urging patience and resolve in the wake of new protests in New York and elsewhere,” David Nakamura and Vanessa Williams wrote Monday in a front-page story for…

Attorney General Repeats, “No Reporter’s Going to Jail” Before Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart ended his interview with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. at the Washington Ideas Forum Wednesday, he asked one final question: “What’s the one decision you made that you wish you could do over again?,” Matt Wilstein reported for Mediaite. “Without much…

Publisher Says She’ll Focus on Online Edition Sister2Sister, a women’s magazine that focuses on black Hollywood, has filed for bankruptcy protection and put the print edition on hiatus so it can focus on its website, publisher Jamie Foster Brown told Journal-isms. Brown, a onetime secretary to Black Entertainment Television co-founder Robert Johnson whose website describes…

Fabled Editor, Dead at 93, Acknowledged His Ignorance After Benjamin C. Bradlee entered hospice care in mid-September, this columnist asked a few female reporters and black journalists who worked under Bradlee in the Washington Post of the 1970s to assess him, anticipating the inevitable. Most declined. It is clear, however, that while the Bradlee era…

Online News Assn. Conference Makes Strides in Diversity When the Online News Association ended its three-day convention in Chicago on Saturday, 35 percent of the presenters had been people of color, and half were women, according to its organizers. That’s the most diversity the ONA — founded in 1999 and the newest kid on the…

Questionable Framing of Story on “Scandal” Creator It was just three weeks ago that the New York Times was vilified over a story calling the slain 18-year-old Michael Brown “no angel,” a mistake partly attributed to insensitive editing. On Friday, critics paid and unpaid leaped on a Times story in which the error was not just…

St. Louis Paper Compiles “Most Comprehensive” Account The St. Louis Post-Dispatch told readers Sunday that it had “put together the most comprehensive public account chronicling the police response” in the hours after the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last month. “To determine why the body remained on the street for…

Richard Prince’s Book Notes™: Journalists’ Fall Offerings (Part 1) Mark Whitaker, a former network news executive who spent the bulk of his career at Newsweek magazine, has produced a reader-friendly biography of entertainer Bill Cosby, an icon who has been part of American life for 50 years. The book seems destined for the fall best-seller…