After the Justice Department responded tersely to an AP letter questioning the government's decision to seize its phone records, the wire service has published a new letter saying the DoJ's explanation "does not adequately address our concerns."

The Associated Press found itself in an interesting predicament today when it was forced to report that the Justice Department surreptitiously obtained two months of its own employees' phone records.

The Newseum, a gargantuan space in Washington, DC, dedicated to educating the public about the workings of journalism, unveiled a new exhibit today: a cutting-edge interactive demonstration of how pressure groups control what gets published.

Citing only "undesirable activities," Pakistan has ordered the expulsion of the New York Times' Islamabad bureau chief, Declan Walsh. Surely this has nothing to do with the nation's impending elections.

Thomas Friedman manages decent structural analysis ("We now live in a 401(k) world—a world of defined contributions, not defined benefits") in his column today, smuggled in alongside Friedmanism ("where everyone needs to pass the bar exam and no one can escape the most e-mailed list"). We salute you, fellow traveler!

Australasian Legal Business, a publication owned by Thomson Reuters that covers business news in Asia and the Middle East, has welcomed back Michelle Boatley, one of their ace journalists, to their staff. Boatley, who covered layoffs in Bangkok, mergers in Shanghai, and hiring in Dubai, hasn't written for a few years.

Here's something you won't see on Gawker very often: Andrew Breitbart was somewhat right.

The BBC gained access to North Korea last month by using a London School of Economics student group as cover and posing as professors, while risking the unknowing students the ire of the North Korean regime.

Trying to report on that oil spill (that's technically not oil, for tax reasons) that has devastated a small Arkansas community? Well, you're going to have to go through ExxonMobil before taking a good look at the area, and they're not being too keen on allowing reporters onto the site.

An up-and-coming filmmaker who had decided to live on the streets for a week to document the plight of the local homeless population was found dead inside a boarded-up hostel just three days after his experiment began.

Ten years ago today, somewhere south of Baghdad, the editor and columnist Michael Kelly became the first journalist to die in the invasion of Iraq. His Humvee, reportedly under fire, went off the road and rolled into a canal. And there, inside some two and a half tons of the world's finest military equipment, he drowned.

Yesterday, the Associated Press released a story that soberly chronicled some of the deaths caused by gun violence on a single day in America. The single, typical day was January 19th, which as the article states, was the beginning of the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, as well as the weekend of the presidential inauguration. However, more importantly, it was also the inaugural "Gun Appreciation Day" as David Waldman points out. It's hard to believe that it could be a simple coincidence that the AP chose "Gun Appreciation Day" to highlight the deaths caused by that so worthy of appreciation.

New York Times travel editor Danielle Mattoon, who put Dwight Garner on a sexy boat, is now the paper's culture czar.

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.

National Journal writer Ron Fournier wants President Obama to do something about the government sequestration going into effect today. "I have... faith in him and his off[ice]," he tweets. Fournier's sick of tired Obama excuses like "I'm not a dictator" and "I can't Jedi mind meld" and "I can't send a team of SEALs to murder John Boehner and his wife in their bedroom."

Wikileaks has become a symbol for the radical, some say dangerous, new future of information distribution. But the story of its biggest leaker appears to have started in a very old-fashioned way. Bradley Manning, the 25-year-old former Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking huge caches of documents to Wikileaks, said in a hearing today that he initially tried to leak to journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post, and only turned to Julian Assange's shop after they didn't take him seriously.

Public editor Margaret Sullivan has a few questions about the editorial freedom with which the average New York Times columnist operates:

This might sound a little familiar: after filing for bankruptcy for the second time in three years, media company Journal Register Co. is being sold to an affiliate of its current owner. From the Detroit News:

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:

New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright's long-awaited Scientology book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, will be released this Thursday, and the reviews are already coming in. Based in part on a 2011 profile of director and former Scientologist Paul Haggis, the book focuses primarily on the legacy of L. Ron Hubbard and his successor, David Miscavige. It contains over 200 interviews with both "current and former" Scientologists from all ranks within the organization.