New bosses often mean change. We here at Gawker would not know this, because all our managers die in their chairs, but we have heard from industry professionals that when there's a transition of a power at a company, the change often augurs new protocols, shifting job descriptions, the ominous possibility of layoffs, and, say, far worse, the loss of telecommuting. The immediate aftermath can be nerve-wracking—especially when the position at stake is CEO.

The past few months have been full of navel-gazing essays about the relative merits of writers writing navel-gazing essays. Blogger Kate Fridkis weighs in with one more this week—a fairly run-of-the-mill heave in defense of personal writing. One argument in particular deserves to be highlighted:

New York Times columnist and culture scholar David Brooks had some thoughts this week about the difference between hardworking Chinese students and lazy American students. The Chinese, he wrote, see education as a moral enterprise, built around the cultivation of discipline and other internal virtues, while Westerners focus on learning about things and are hung up on "critical inquiry" and "sharing ideas."

BuzzFeed's Rosie Gray today drops news that a number of people writing for a whole host of websites across the political spectrum were doing so on behalf of the Malaysian government. And for their work they were paid handsomely. In other words, they were secretly pawning off talking points from the Malaysian government as their own in exchange for money. This is how some journalists get paid now.

Working in journalism is, like life, harder for women than it is for men, what with the patriarchy and all. This point was driven home this week by Marin Cogan's New Republic story on the various sexual harassment-themed indignities of being a female reporter in Washington, and by the "Said to Lady Journos" Tumblr, which chronicles fun on-the-job remarks like, "Are you lost, little girl?"

Bob Woodward is not a reliable reporter. Readers of All the President's Men, which admirably chronicles several crucial errors and misrepresentations that he and Carl Bernstein made in the course of their—otherwise excellent!—Watergate reporting, have a sense of this fact. His old boss, the legendary editor Ben Bradlee, never really trusted him, wondering repeatedly and on the record whether the story and mythology of Deep Throat—the linchpin of the Watergate story that Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein sold to the American public—was in fact a giant fraud.

Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward received a "veiled threat" from the White House last week, The Politico reported on Thursday. What as the "threat"? "I think you will regret staking out that claim." Chilling! The threatener, Ben Smith later reported, was White House Economic Council Director Gene Sperling, who'd emailed Woodward over the origins of tomorrow's government sequestration: Woodward claims it was the Obama administration's idea; Sperling disagrees. (Other sentences from the email: "I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today," "But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here.") Surely, you can see the Nixon parallels? The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin could: "Obama will never be Reagan,"she tweeted last night, "but he could be the Dems Nixon." Probably not, and if he is, Woodward—whose journalistic practice, once so fun and unethical, is now mostly just writing down what important people tell him in his kitchen—certainly won't uncover it. "There is nothing less important about 'the sequester' than the question of whose idea it originally was," Salon's Alex Pareene wrote yesterday. "So, naturally, that is the question that much of the political press is obsessed with, to the exclusion of almost everything else." Not everything else: also the question of the proper tone in which one is allowed to speak to Bob Woodward. You'll be able to catch him declaiming on the topic tonight on the Sean Hannity program on Fox News. [Politico | CNN | BuzzFeeᴅ | Salon]

The Navy SEAL made famous for shooting Osama bin Laden in the face and then complaining about US-government negligence in an Esquire article published earlier this month is now under Pentagon investigation, according to The Hill's defense blog DEFCON Hill.

The Politico, America's worst media outlet, has a big story today about what's wrong with the White House's relationship with the political media, such as The Politico. According to Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, President Obama disdains, freezes out, and circumvents the representatives of the Fourth Estate, including reporters from The Politico, rather than opening himself up to their serious questions. "This is an arguably dangerous development," The Politico explains.

The Sunday Styles section of the New York Times exists to make folks mad, to be sure (and to sell handbag ads), but it is not really worth getting mad about this past weekend's paired section-front irritants—a profile of BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, and a trend piece about people forsaking Brooklyn to hipsterize towns in the Hudson Valley—at least not at face value. Each hits the obvious flabbergasting or infuriating notes as it is designed to: OMG LOL BuzzFeed b/w Aren't Hipsters Awful. As far as the intentional content goes, there's nothing to do but roll one's eyes and move on. Let's go ahead and do that, shall we? First BuzzFeedBen:

The human resources department at Fox News has certainly been busy the last few weeks. After dumping former Bill Clinton campaign manager-cum-conservative blowhard Dick Morris and Real Housewife of Wasilla Sarah Palin, Fox has signed on a slate of brand new contributors to wax political on the news of the day. Let's get to know them.

How do you respond to a New York Times piece that illustrates, in depth, the essential un-usability of your hot new $100,000 high-performance electric sedan? If you're Elon Musk, Tesla Motors CEO, you do what any good tech executive does when he wants to appeal to an audience of geeks: You dump a lot of data.

Jonah Lehrer, promising young golden boy of Gladwellian think-journalism, has had a bad eight months. Caught plagiarizing himself last June; soon after, caught fabricating quotes, and forced to resign from his plum gig at the New Yorker, and rapidly cast out of the chosen fold to wander the wilderness as a sort of fallen angel. Even the Knight Foundation, which just this week paid Lehrer $20K for his big mea culpa speech, is already saying that it regrets doing so. Some are urging him to donate the money to charity. All in all, his no doubt meticulously-planned return to the spotlight has fallen flat.

Her 20-year supply of pop-political topics exhausted, Maureen Dowd goes back and starts running 1992 columns over again.

The New York Post is known for its always subtle, never offensive covers. Today is nothing new; the morning after President Obama's fifth State of the Union and Christopher Dorner's death, the most important story the Post had to tell was about some clothes designer John Galliano wore.

Jonah Lehrer, the disgraced New Yorker writer, does not know how to do journalism. We have established this, repeatedly: he "plagiarizes" from himself. He actually plagiarizes from others. He fabricates quotes. He lies. This is why he was fired from The New Yorker, and why he is not currently employed as a journalist.

From the Associated Press today, a bizarre memo that specifies the terms "husband" and "wife" are to be used to refer to heterosexual couples only. The initial memo, posted first by Romanesko Romenesko, reads:

Having bungled one of the two central premises of their story about the Navy SEAL who is supposed to have killed Osama bin Laden, the editors of Esquire are now arguing that they were secretly right all along. Yes, Phil Bronstein's piece did say that "the Shooter," as the story calls the SEAL, gets "no health care" after leaving the service, when in fact—as Stars and Stripes pointed out—he is covered by the Department of Veterans Affairs. But according to the editors, that's a distraction from the real point:

On tonight's World News with Diane Sawyer, ABC will air several interviews with victims of the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, as well as graphic video showing the chaos in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The video is incredibly disturbing, and shows bodies of the dead and injured scattered across the floor, pools of blood everywhere. What the victims have to say is equally impactful.

Esquire has issued a response to a Stars and Stripes piece that questioned its huge Osama SEAL article's accuracy.