Judging Blair by His Cover; Jayson's Book for Sale on Amazon (ranked 1,289,847)

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER ONLINE ^ | DECEMBER 04, 2003 | Greg Mitchell

[Liz]

NEW YORK -- The long wait is over. Now you can order Jayson Blair's forthcoming book, Burning Down My Masters' House: My Life at The New York Times at amazon.com.

The cover of the tightly guarded book, which will not be published until March, is also available at the online bookseller. It features a mock front page of the Times, with the paper's logo partly cut off at the top, the book title as a huge headline, and a fairly small picture of Blair in a light colored T-shirt (but looking very serious) in the lower right corner.

You can order it for $17.47 -- well off the list price of $24.95 (or think twice about that: see Why the Big Payoff for Tainting Journalism?). The book is 288 pages long. Amazon customers who order the book now won't receive it until after the official printing date.

The amazon page holds a few other interesting tidbits. "Customers interested in this title" are also interested in "Masters Degree Programs in the New York City area." And those who "shopped for this item" also shopped for books by former ex-Timesman Rick Bragg, Bob Kohn's Journalistic Fraud and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

But apparently there have been few shoppers so far, as its amazon sales rank at last check was 1,289,847.

Source: Editor & Publisher Online

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Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P.

[martin_fierro]

Pingenfreude.

[Liz]

The cover of (NYT ex-journo Jayson Blair's) tightly guarded book, which will not be published until March, is also available at the online bookseller. It features a mock front page of the Times, with the paper's logo partly cut off at the top, the book title as a huge headline, and a fairly small picture of Blair in a light colored T-shirt (but looking very serious) in the lower right corner.

[GulliverSwift]

It looks like they almost forgot the apostrophe.

[martin_fierro]

Ooooh, he must be smart. He's wearing glasses now.

[Portnoy]

By the title are we to assume that BLair was held Captive by, and was a slave of, the NY TImes?

[PBRSTREETGANG]

Someone is supposed to believe what he writes now?

[Liz]

Wearing glases? No wonder he fooled the NYT. Guy is a (sob) victim who couldn't see what he was doing.

[Liz]

Bob Kohn's, Journalistic Fraud, is the one we need to read.