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South Park is brilliant. Their latest episode, the premiere of season 14, was exactly what the creators promised it would be: based on Tiger Woods, but not really about Tiger. They pulled it off. Here’s the thing: yes, it was morbidly funny. Hysterical, even. More than that, though, it was smart. Provocative. Thought-provoking. Unexpected. The episode, aptly titled “Sexual Healing”, was the best piece (…) Continue reading.
‘Project Amsterdam’. According to New York Magazine’s piece on Rupert Murdoch, that’s the name of his $15-million secret plan to defeat The New York Times. A very Bond villain-like name. Next month, if all goes according to plan, the Journal will launch an eight-to-sixteen-page metropolitan section that will directly challenge the paper of record on its home turf. This is fascinating. For the first (…) Continue reading.
On September 20th, 2009, President Obama offered his opinion on contemporary news media – specifically, and curiously, on their workflow. “Cable news and blogs, operating on a 24-hour news cycle, focus on the most extreme elements on both sides. They can’t get enough of the conflict,” the president stated. This environment, continued Obama, makes “it more difficult for us to solve problems.” The alleged rise (…) Continue reading.
The New York Times just published an intriguing study by University of Pennsylvania, where researchers spent a year intensively studying NYT’s list of most e-mailed articles, checking the changes every 15 minutes. What do the readers really share? “The results are surprising,” says Josh Tierney, who reported on the study. He goes on to say: I would have hypothesized that there are two (…) Continue reading.
Just a short one for all the journalists. This blog is leading a crusade on boredom, a keen observer would say. Well, now we are scientifically backed. Being boring is dangerous. In fact, it’s deadly. If you kill your readers, who will buy your newspapers and visits your sites?
In retrospect, it was our fault. Not the absurd amount of rumors – Apple is as much to blame for that as are the gadget blogs and Mac rumor websites (and NYT and WSJ, for that matter). Let’s be clear: Apple loved the hype. No money could have gotten them such amazing marketing. No, it was our fault, the media industry’s, the journalists’, the newspapers’ fault, to place all our hopes on (…) Continue reading.
I finally got my fingers, hands, legs and other bodily extremities on Morrill Goddard’s 1935 book, “What Interests People And Why“. Goddard was the magically successful editor of Pulitzer’s Sunday edition, The World on Sunday. After establishing The World on Sunday as the top-selling and highest-grossing newspaper edition in the world, he joined Hearst and created the Sunday edition of his newspaper, The Sunday Journal, from scratch. This, again, became the (…) Continue reading. A beautiful article by Jack Shafer in Slate on yellow journalism. I had been convinced nobody quite understood what I’ve been preaching for months, and, finally, I bump into this. Doesn’t quite nail all the points, but the headline alone makes it worth reading. Here’s an excerpt: “How many times while plowing through a New York Times or Washington Post news story have you muttered to yourself, “I haven’t had this much fun since the (…) Continue reading. A pretty cool concept of a Time Inc. digital reader (too bad Time magazine is so suicidally boring, not even a digital edition with video and audio would save it).
Here’s some more from The Uncrowned King, a book I discussed in my previous post. “The contemporary view that the yellow press existed on the level of the National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids is wildly off target. Far from being shady, squalid, or trivial, the yellows were big, rich businesses. There seemed to be no limit to their potential size and reach. Their dazzling color presses could spit out a (…) Continue reading. |
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