Nerds will appreciate today the strangest bit of sourcing ever used in the New York Times. The subject is Goldman Sachs employee-scapegoat Fabrice Tourre, whose emails "have been made available," to use the sort of passive construction the paper enjoys, to the Times for some unknown time. They were "provided by" a Nancy Cohen, "who says she found the materials in a laptop she had been given by a friend in 2006." Heh, go on? "The friend told her he had happened upon the laptop discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building. E-mail messages for Mr. Tourre continued streaming into the device…." Obviously, as has [...]

Today's in-house New York Times "Innovation" email-it comes out every Friday from the web folks and it touts, well, online innovation-addresses one of our favorite topics: The idiot emails that reporters blast the newsroom with when they are looking for random sources for a story.