Seth Mnookin worked as a senior writer on the National Affairs staff of Newsweek, where he covered media, politics, crime, and popular culture. He wrote Newsweek‘s cover story on the Jayson Blair scandal, and authored a weekly online column about the media titled “Raw Copy.” Prior to joining Newsweek, Mnookin was a senior correspondent for Brill’s Content and Inside.com. He also served as the city editor of the Forward and as a metro reporter for The Palm Beach Post, covering topics ranging from Jewish motorcycle gangs to Boca Raton residents upset at the amount of pink stucco in their city. Mnookin has written about music and pop culture for a number of publications, including The New Yorker, New York, Details, Spin, the New York Observer, Slate, and Salon.com. His writing has appeared in two anthologies: The Best American Non Required Reading, 2002 and Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. Mnookin is a graduate of Harvard College with a B.A. in the history of science. During his Fellowship, he wrote Hard News, a book about the Howell Raines era at The New York Times and the rapidly changing media landscape, published by Random House in 2005.
Setting the Agenda: The New York Times’ Jayson Blair Report and its Impact on American Media
January 1, 2005
A paper by Seth Mnookin, spring 2004 fellow, examines the making and results of The New York Times’ Jayson Blair Report. The report helped demonstrate The New York Times’ power to shape the national news agenda, argues Mnookin, and in doing so, helped codify the way in which newspapers were expected to respond to accusations
