Editors

When editors at Baltimore magazine heard that one of their free-lance writers was a juror in last fall's Dontay Carter trial, they got an idea: Why not call him and ask him to take notes for a first-person article on the experience?The editors got their story, and they also got a subpoena. Lawyers for Carter said the contact with the juror while the murder trial was under way was improper and grounds for a new trial.In the end, Circuit Judge John N. Prevas denied the motion for a new trial, ruling yesterday that the incident did not taint the juror or deny the East Baltimore teen-ager due process.

The death toll from AIDS will soar past 25 million worldwide by 1997, earning it the grim title of history's most lethal epidemic, a Johns Hopkins medical researcher predicted yesterday."

The top three executives at the New York Times apologized in turn yesterday to the newspaper's staff for lapses that allowed a former junior reporter to fabricate and plagiarize dozens of stories despite warnings by supervisors. "We are deeply sorry," Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said during a private meeting with hundreds of Times journalists held at a movie theater near the paper's Manhattan headquarters. Sulzberger sat on stage flanked by Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, all in director's chairs, according to several reporters who attended.

Editors at USA Today now say they forced former star reporter Jack Kelley to resign after he deceived them during an internal inquiry into whether he had fabricated some of his high-profile reports from abroad. Last September, Mark Memmott, the senior reporter assigned to review Kelley's work, grew suspicious of Kelley's account of an interview that served as the basis of a front-page story in July 1999, according to the newspaper. The high-impact story provided seemingly clear-cut evidence that former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had ordered ethnic cleansing - the strongest connection yet uncovered.

WASHINGTON -- Acknowledging a "tension" between his administration and the press, President Bush confronted an often critical audience of newspaper editors yesterday with a heavy helping of the disarming charm and self-confidence he has exuded since his re-election. "I know there is a tension now," Bush told members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors pressing him to make the work of his White House and many agencies more open to the public. "I understand there's a suspicion that ... we're too security-conscious."

The student editor of Towson University's independent newspaper The Towerlight has stepped down after a standoff with President Robert L. Caret over the publication of an explicit sex column. Editor Carrie Wood, a junior from Reisterstown, resigned Friday after exchanging e-mails with Caret over a column called "The Bed Post." The newspaper's editors have since discontinued the column because it was published under a pseudonym and the author wished to remain anonymous. But they have said they might continue to publish it online.

SAN FRANCISCO -- President Clinton noted in a speech to newspaper editors here Thursday the "stark contrast between a free society with a free press and a closed society where the press is used to manipulate people by suppressing or distorting the truth."But while U.S. journalists are not being shot dead, as one dissident editor was this week in the Balkans, some of America's most prominent opinion-makers are accusing the Pentagon of kidnapping the facts on the war in Kosovo.In a letter to the Pentagon this week, seven editors and bureau chiefs of national news organizations said they are getting far less information than they did during the Persian Gulf war and the more recent bombing campaign in Iraq.

The editors of the Spectator, the conservative-minded magazine at the Johns Hopkins University, know just how to pound the campus' hot buttons.For example, there was its critique of the Introduction to American Politics course that featured a non-traditional syllabus including "Malcolm X Speaks" and the film, "Berkeley in the '60s," instead of old-fashioned staples such as de Toqueville or the Federalist Papers."

WASHINGTON -- If a handful of editors and marketing people make a right turn at a big publishing convention and no one hears it, did they make a peep? Hardly. On a recent Saturday afternoon at the huge new Convention Center here, filled to capacity by that massive annual trade show of the book business called BEA (BookExpo America), a group of conservative editors and sales execs took a chance. They gathered in their chosen venue, Room 203AB, for a panel on "Selling and Promoting Right of Center Books Via Left of Center Channels."

Apparently, Jayson Blair is angry, not contrite. The former New York Times reporter has acknowledged plagiarizing, fabricating and inflating accounts in dozens of articles for the paper before resigning May 1. But Blair says in a new interview that he was repeatedly wronged by petty and often racist mid-level Times editors who attempted to prevent his rise. In the interview, published yesterday in The New York Observer, the 27-year-old Blair ascribes part of his problems to his abuse of alcohol and cocaine.