Liberal media watchdog Media Matters announced yesterday that The Wall Street Journal had, “following criticism of its disclosure practices,” revealed the political affiliations one of its op-ed writers.

Max Boot is one of ten contributors to the Journal’s opinion pages whose views the newspaper has published without mentioning the writers' links to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to Media Matters.

“In a total of 23 pieces, the op-ed writers attacked President Obama or praised Romney without the paper acknowledging their Romney connections,” the organization asserted in a September 27 report.

“Op-ed writers aren’t supposed to be objective or to have no stake in the subjects they’re writing about,” Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Nicholas Goldberg is quoted as saying. “But when a writer does have a particular relationship to his subject that is not immediately apparent to the reader, it is important to disclose that so the reader can evaluate the argument intelligently.”

On September 28, below a book review by Boot (published in the print edition on September 29), the Journal included the following bio line: “Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an advisor to the Romney campaign.”

If you approached a newsstand a year ago today, no matter where on the planet you were, chances are good that you were reminded of the events of September 11, 2001, and their effect on the decade that followed. With photographs, infographics, special supplements and personal essays, news organizations around the world paid a great deal of attention to the tenth anniversary of the tragic attacks.

Today, however, even residents of New York City will find the front page wiped of the memory; both The New York Times and The New York Post left mention of the attacks off of A1, as Poynter observes, although both the Post and the Times feature it at the top of their websites.

For the second time in less than a week The New York Times’ account on the Chinese social-networking site Sina Weibo has been deactivated. Users wanting to interact with the NYT via the site are greeted with a “user does not exist” message. Techcrunch also reports that other Chinese social networking accounts bearing the NYTimes’ name have also been blocked, though the paper has yet to confirm that these are authentic.

As previously reported by the Editors Weblog last Thursday, The New York Times’ Sina Weibo account was suspended within hours of its launch, only to be reactivated the very same day. In the time before the account was reinstated, speculation was rife that the Times's efforts to expand into the Chinese market would be fraught with difficulty. This time the gravity of the matter appears to have escalated, as the Sina Weibo account has seemingly been deleted, not suspended as it was before.

Just over a year after The New York Times’ digital subscription model was launched, it provides the company with “incredible” audience data, the company’s chairman and CEO Arthur Sulzberger says at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference in London.

A total of 454,000 people have subscribed (not including print subscribers), and Sulzberger says much of the scepticism that abounded when the plan was first announced has since subsided. Given the number of media executives who have visited the paper’s offices over the last year, he expects many more payment models for digital content to be unveiled before long.

As well as the obvious financial benefit, Sulzberger noted that a key advantage of the subscription model is what it tells the paper about its audience’s reading habits.

Through the subscription model the Times has learnt that at the beginning of the day, many subscribers go to the Times in any format – print, tablet, phone or web – to scan the headlines. During the day, they look at the web or their smartphones, and in the evening they return to the print or tablet editions. The same subscribers tends to access the paper across multiple platforms, with different motivations, and the challenge now is to find better ways to deliver content most effectively across all devices, Sulzberger said.