“Never pick a fight with someone who knows their way around the internet”

From Publishers Weekly Leopold, one of the reporters who broke the Enron story, is now breaking his own story: how he got addicted to cocaine, committed grand theft, cleaned himself up and found happiness as a “news junkie.” While residential rehab programs and an incredibly committed wife were key to his turnaround, what saved his life was his discovery of the adrenaline high of news scooping. After a few small successes, Leopold got lucky when he began investigating insider trading by aides to California’s Gov. Grey Davis and stumbled onto the extraordinary scandal of Enron’s manipulation of utility deregulation in California. By the time Leopold was pressured into resigning from Dow Jones in 2002, he was one of the few reporters who’d actually interviewed Enron president Jeff Skilling. He then rushed to publish a flawed exposé of the secretary of the army’s Enron connections, seriously damaging his journalistic credibility. Disillusioned by the institutional biases of mainstream media, Leopold finally decided to freelance with independent, Internet-based news services. While there’s a lot of lying admitted to in this scrappy memoir, from Leopold’s hiding of his criminal past to his playing of sources to get his scoops, it’s (probably) not an untruthful memoir—indeed, it might become required reading for aspiring journalists. (May 9) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I’m quite surprised that there have so far been no trackbacks on this new ‘word’. I wonder if ppl send this to as many bloggers as poss, it just might make it into next year’s OED.…

Narrenfreude would also have been a good one - same meaning :)

Wow, just wow. The guy is freaking out in public, on record.

As far as “coward” being Leopold, do you have a reason to believe that? For sure, “coward” is a left wing nut, but I noticed earlier in the comments that Seixon had identified someone (I didn’t see the sock puppet ID before it was changed) as Leopold’s ISP number and changed the name to reflect that reality. Other words, Seixon was already IDing Leopold earlier (and saying so) as “Jason Leopold”, so why would he suddenly start IDing Leopold as “coward” instead of “Jason Leopold” as he had been doing. Doesn’t make sense.