As the news broke that Nevada Senator Harry Reid was in a car accident, a major paper in his home state, the Las Vegas Review Journal, mistakenly identified the Democratic Senate Majority Leader as a Republican.
“U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, R-Nev., 72, was taken to the emergency room at University Medical Center in Las Vegas Friday afternoon following a traffic accident,” the story initially said. Read More
If there is one person we thought could handle the changing news industry, it’s Superman. Print may be dying, but if even the Man of Steel can’t hack it, well, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Clark Kent has finally give up on the Daily Planet in DC Comics’ latest installment of the longrunning comic. Apparently, the combination of lingering feelings for Lois Lane and an editor who is giving him a hard time for missing Superman scoops leads Mr. Kent to go out in a blaze of glory–ranting about how journalism has just become entertainment in front of the whole staff of the Daily Planet. Sounds like someone has been watching too much Newsroom. Read More
A man’s home may be his castle, but for Wall Street Journal readers, home is Mansion, the newspaper’s aspirationally titled Friday shelter section, which debuted last week. Because houses are all well and good, but, given the choice, aren’t mansions better?
“We all like to think of our home as a mansion, even if it is a humble abode, and we all have the license to aspire, so we have created Mansion to be the home of both aspiration and real estate realization,” WSJ managing editor Robert Thomson said in a statement announcing the launch.
The section bears a subhead with a quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet that is uttered by the titular heroine about midway through the play.
“O, I have bought the mansion of a love, But not possess’d it,” reads the subhead. Read More
When picking publications to model your fictitious newspaper on, we obviously have a bias. Still, it’s nice to see that the Warner Bros.’ viral marketing team agreed with us, as their late-June campaign for The Dark Knight Rises included clues to unlock the Gotham Observer, a newspaper that bears resemblance to our own organization in title only.
(We would never lead with a cover story on a ‘Festivity Day’…even if it was in honor of a fallen district attorney. Or if we did, we’d make the led much snappier.)
Blogging for the Washington Post probably isn’t that bad. Still, the Post‘s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, felt the paper deserved a spanking after the recent resignation of BlogPost blogger Elizabeth Flock. In his opinion piece regarding Ms. Flock’s resignation following what amounted to a (minor and perhaps unintended) plagiarism scandal, Mr. Pexton detailed the unrealistic demands made on young journalists who find themselves fielding blogging duties at a major newspaper. He noted BlogPost was expected to garner up to 2 million hits a month, with Ms. Flock publishing 5-6 posts a day. She wasn’t writing simple paragraphs hitting major points in a story either, but full-on 500-word pieces aggregated from multiple sources.
Traffic expectations and heavy workload contributed to Ms. Flock’s two mistakes, which included re-writing a Discovery News post without crediting the source, the incident that led to her resignation. “[Ms. Flock] said it was only a matter of time before she made a third one; the pressures were just too great,” wrote Mr. Pexton. Read More
The New York Times’ Sam Sifton is leaving his position as restaurant critic to be the paper’s national editor.
“I’m stepping down as restaurant critic to be the national editor of The Times. #checkplease,” he wrote on Twitter.
In her official announcement posted on the paper’s food blog, newbie Times executive editor Jill Abramson Read More
When New York Press shut down last month to make way for a revived Our Town Downtown, The Observer wondered what would become of the hundreds of kelly green Press boxes dotting lower Manhattan. Standing side-by-side with the red graffiti’d Village Voice boxes, they were a visual reminder that print newspapers do still exist. Would they Read More
The expansion of The Guardian‘s international presence online comes with a casualty: the demise of print editions of The Guardian and its Sunday paper Observer outside the UK.
This affects a whopping total of 40,000 people, whom we picture as a small tribe of eccentric British expatriates in velvet smoking jackets and ascots who probably Read More
To hear Martin Clarke tell it, The Daily Mail accrued its online readership in America nearly by accident. Lining a landing page with paparazzi shots headlined with expressions of awe and outrage, making the bikini a newsworthy event—that was not transatlantic outreach, just British custom. “Originally we focused ruthlessly on our British audience because that Read More
