Now that's what I call the mainstreaming of porn.
Daniel RadoshThe New York Times confesses that Bernie Weinraub lifted a passage about Anthony Pellicano from the blog of Luke Ford. "The Times should have credited the Weblog for its version," reads the editor's note in typical disingenuous fashion, as if the Times would ever credit a blog, much less one by porn journo Ford; what they meant to say was, "The Times should not have lifted the paragraph in the first place."
I'm proud to say that Ford is a sometime visitor to this site, and he'll surely object to being labeled a porn journo, as he sold his industry-watch site a few years ago, and now writes a sui generis gossip/politics/celebrity/theology/personal site that I find extremely hard to follow, but which you have to credit for its distinctive voice. Though I can't be sure, it seems pretty likely that Luke is also involved somehow in Set Go, a fabulous porn-news blog that's like the Romenesko of the XXX biz.
This seems like the place to give a tentative thumbs-up to FleshBot, the new Gawker porn blog that is the first to bring funny (though shouldn't they be funnier?) and insightful comments to the all-important task of compiling photos of naked people. I wonder how you get paid to do something like that. For a sex-news site (not a porn blog) that's less wonky than Set Go, I recommend Daze Reader. I have little patience for the personal journals of pornographers or amateurs who think their sex life is interesting to the rest of us, but I do like the sex culture blog Eros, which keeps tabs on such things, as well as other naughty infobits. I should warn you, however, that proprietor Bacchus has recently acquired a online girlfriend and his posts about her make me a little queasy.
But back to Pellicano, I first heard that name from my colleague John Connolly who dished dirt on him in a Spy investigation. So I wasn't surprised to see that Jack Shafer traced the Weinraub/Ford anecdote further back, to an article Connolly wrote for Los Angeles magazine. I don't have the Spy issue readily available, but I'll bet it originated there.