Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Item:

Ex-NYT editor Howell Raines joins Conde Nast

The 64-year-old Pulitzer Prize winning journalist will be a contributing editor and media columnist for Portfolio.

You remember Howell Raines: Pulitzer prize-winner, memoirist, etc. who became editor-in-chief of the New York Times and proceeded to alienate his news staff and grossly mishandle the Jayson Blair scandal.

Well, focus for a moment on the first part of that description — “Pulitzer prize-winner” — and you can hold out hope that Raines’s tenure at Conde Nast will be fruitful.

Meanwhile, if you want a sober account of the disasters of Raines’s NYT reign, you can do no better than to find a copy of Seth Mnookin’s Hard News. While you’re doing that, I’ll pop the popcorn.  I imagine the media’s claws will come out once Raines gets going with his column.