Where a Deadline Can Be Literal

Newspaper publishers take note.

Amid hard economic times--as newspapers and magazines bleed ad dollars and readership, and slash staff as a result--one paper may be on to something.

The New York Sun has found a heretofore untapped resource: using a prisoner as a contributing writer.

Convicted newspaper baron Conrad Black --serving six and a half years in federal prison for fraud and obstruction of justice --wrote a scathing book review that appears in today's Sun.

In it, Conrad belittles Rick Perlstein's take on Richard Nixon, Nixonland, as myopic and "unrigorous." A Nixon biographer himself, Black argues that Perlstein unfairly ignores Nixon's estimable road to the presidency.

"Nixon is portrayed as a mutant who snuck into the White House and remained there until the Washington Post, New York Times, and CBS pulled back his shower curtain and revealed his cloven feet," writes Black.

It's not known if the New York Sun paid Black, who owns a small stake in the paper. Calls to the paper seeking comment were not returned.

Federal prisoners earn on average 92 cents an hour, comparable to pay in the Third World. So writing for a New York media property has got to be a better deal, even for a lord.

"Federal inmates are allowed to write opinion pieces for newspapers, but it's a different matter if they are employed by the paper as a writer or columnist," said Felicia Ponce, a public affairs specialist at the Federal Bureau of Prisons. "That is not allowed."

By continuing to write and be published, however, Black may be trying to stay in the public eye as part of an effort to persuade a federal judge to transfer him from a low-security penitentiary outside of Orlando, Florida, where he currently resides, to a prison near his Palm Beach mansion.

After all, if Norman Mailer helped secure early parole for convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbott more than two decades ago, after Abbott wrote In the Belly of the Beast, obtaining a prison transfer for another author who committed mere fraud and obstruction of justice should not be considered impossible.

Black's projected release date is October 2013.

No writer's block in the cell block.

Alfonso Serrano F.