Could it be that NY Times reporter Pete Kilborn reads Tech Central Station?

It is at least a little coincidental that slugging has been going on for 30 years in D.C., yet the NY Times doesn’t run anything on the phenomenon until exactly one week after my Tech Central piece ran. And Tech Central’s editor tells me he’s noticed that the Times frequently runs pieces on topics covered a week or ten days previous on TCS.

It makes sense, if you think about it. Tech Central has lots of smart, different thinking contributors, and they regularly run pieces that point out off-the-radar trends, new ideas, and such — exactly the kind of stuff the Times takes pride in scooping. But Tech Central isn’t household, and I’d guess it isn’t read on a wide scale outside the usual cadre of wonks and Beltway junkies. It’s the perfect place to find story ideas (that’s not to say that is shouldn’t be).

I wrote:

Here in Washington, D.C., we have another unique example of how two parties, each possessing something the other wants, have spontaneously found a way to help one another….

Slugs are entirely self-governed. Slug etiquette, for example, includes items like “never leave a woman standing alone in a slug line,” “don’t converse unless the driver talks first,” and in any case, “no talk of religion, politics or sex.” Slugs and scrapers self-police, because every slug who breaks a rule turns off a potential ride home to the system. The same goes for scrapers.

Despite the hundreds of slug transactions that have happened every day for decades in D.C. there has yet to be a documented case of slug-related theft, assault, rape, or murder. Only the occasional gripe about inappropriate music or bad driving on the slug message boards.

Imagine, an efficient, beneficial, self-correcting system of transporting people, and it all happened without a federal grant, an “impact study” or the oversight of an office of D.C. bureaucrats!

Mr. Kilborn wrote:

Slugging started by spontaneous eruption and runs by perpetual motion…. No government agency sanctions slugging, runs it, regulates it, promotes it or thought it up. The Census Bureau, which tracks most forms of commuting, knows nothing about slugging. In slugging, there is no supervisor, dispatcher or schedule, no ticket or fare…..

“When you get in the car, you don’t converse with the driver,” said David Howe, 41, a slug who works as a security manager for the Defense Department. “Only the driver can initiate a conversation. You’re basically a body in the car. You’re not to talk on a cellphone or with other people in the car.”

Slugs must not smoke, eat, fiddle with the radio, windows or air-conditioning or, if they are invited to talk, say anything at all about religion or politics, Mr. Howe said….

No government agencies, slugging Web sites or slugs and drivers interviewed could cite a single instance of crime and slugging.

Lest you think I’m delusional, check out this piece from Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post. Nut graphs:

When he saw the New York Times piece about a Texas woman whose soldier son was missing in Iraq, says Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, “I proceeded to read what I thought was our own story again.”

The similarities — from the descriptions of Juanita Anguiano’s house to the comments about her son, Edward, whose body was found this week — were so great that Rivard sent the Times a letter of complaint yesterday. “It’s a story I’d be embarrassed to have my byline on if it were me,” Rivard said.

On April 18, Express-News reporter Macarena Hernandez wrote: “So the single mother, a teacher’s aide, points to the ceiling fan he installed in her small living room. She points to the pinstriped couches, the tennis bracelet still in its red velvet case and the Martha Stewart patio furniture, all gifts from her first born and only son. . . . ‘I wish I could talk to a mother who is in the same shoes as I am who has her son missing in action. It’s very hard,’ said Anguiano, who speaks haltingly.”

On April 26, a story by Times reporter Jayson Blair began: “Juanita Anguiano points proudly to the pinstriped couches, the tennis bracelet in its red case and the Martha Stewart furniture out on the patio. . . . ‘I wish I could talk to a mother who is in the same shoes as I am, who has her son missing in action,’ Ms. Anguiano said.”

In another part of her story, Hernandez wrote: “Sleep these days only comes with a pill. . . . She said she has moments when she can picture her son in some Iraqi village, like the ones she has seen on TV, surrounded by a herd of animals and the Iraqis he has befriended.”

Blair’s Times story said: “At moments, Ms. Anguiano says, she can picture her son in an Iraqi village, like the ones she has seen on television, surrounded by animals and the Iraqi people he has befriended. . . . She said that while she still might have hope, sleep these days came only in the form of a pill that the doctors gave her.”

I’m not at all accusing Mr. Kilborn of plagiarism — not even close. I’m merely suggesting it’s possible that he hijacked my story, which I’d find both flattering and frustrating (peril of being a small-stakes writer — somebody with a bigger megaphone finds an angle or insight scoop you found earlier).

Of course, it’s also possible that Mr. Kilborn caught wind of the slugging scene at pretty much the same time I decided to write about it — despite that it’s been right here for the taking for a few decades.

UPDATE: Reader BFF provides the silver bullet: That Mr. Kilborn picked up the free-market, spontaneous order angle of slugging proves he must have gotten the story from my article. We all know such a revleation couldn’t possibly have occured to a NY Times reporter on its own!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2003 at 9:48 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.