Harry Reid (Photo: Getty)

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.

The error has since been corrected. Obviously, this was a fast breaking story and these types of mistakes happen. Unfortunately for those who report on breaking political news, "R" is right next to "D" on computer keyboards. The Observer reached out to Las Vegas Review Journal Editor Michael Hengel to see if he had any comment on the situation. As of this writing, he has yet to respond.

Mr. Reid was taken to the hospital after what appeared to be a rear-end crash on an Interstate that runs parallel to the Las Vegas Strip. According to New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney, Mr. Reid and his security detail are all "fine" and the Senator "walked into" the hospital.

Nevada Highway Patrol Office spokesman Jeremie Elliott told the AP six vehicles were involved in the apparent chain-reaction crash, including two Las Vegas police vehicles, two civilian vehicles and two Capitol Police vehicles.

View a screencap of the Google news result showing the Las Vegas Review Journal's original Reid lede below.

Superman is going to be his own boss.

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.

“This is really what happens when a 27-year-old guy is behind a desk and he has to take instruction from a larger conglomerate with concerns that aren't really his own,” Superman writer Scott Lobdell told USA Today. Maybe Superman should try a standing desk. Or one of those treadmill desks. (On an unrelated note, is Superman really only 27? Because wow, that makes us feel old).

But it isn't just The Daily Planet. It's the news industry as a whole.

"I don't think he's going to be filling out an application anywhere," Mr. Lobdell said to USA Today. "He is more likely to start the next Huffington Post or the next Drudge Report than he is to go find someone else to get assignments or draw a paycheck from."

Okay, fine. Mr. Kent can go make a new way to use journalistic tools to bring truth and justice to the world or whatever. As long as he doesn't make a Kickstarter campaign for his new venture, because there is no way we are donating to that.

“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.

This expression of unrealized romance seems like a tragic allusion for an aspirational section about houses in a newspaper, but maybe the Journal editors never got to the end.

Mansion is littered with pictures of, well, mansions. In the premiere edition, readers learned that Maya Angelou has three lovely large homes and that Silicon Valley millionaires are going SoCal and buying oversized houses on the beach. Who can blame them? In London, pop idols and footballers are living in a converted mental asylum.

The back page doesn’t feature a mansion, because its subject, William Shatner, once lived in a normal-sized shack! Oh, the horror. It was certainly no starship Enterprise, but we all had to start somewhere.

The section is headed by editor Emily Gitter (formerly a deputy editor for the old Friday Journal). “Many of you already know Emily for her sharp editing skills, her excellent judgment and a wit as elegantly edgy as a rough-hewn granite benchtop in a just-refurbished Old Greenwich home,” said a memo announcing Ms. Gitter’s promotion last summer. Her sensibility sounds appropriate for a rustic mansion.

That isn’t the only change on Fridays. Last week, the Journal also debuted  a revamped—and renamed—arts and culture section, Arena, which takes a look at the art market but also covers sports. It’s an odd mix, but the clashing content is appropriately gladiatorial, considering the title. Arena’s ads are mostly for movies (because what is a theater if not an updated arena) that mansion-dwellers may be inclined to enjoy. A banner ad on the front page of the section quotes Sean Hannity calling Atlas Shrugged a “must-see film.”

Arena and Mansion don’t match the guilty-pleasure ridiculousness of the yuppyish “how we live now” that is the Times Styles or the sheer over-the-top voyeuristic pleasure of the Financial Times’s lifestyle sections (we are especially fond of the “How To Spend It” column), but they were certainly passable reads in the first week out.Even the advertising gets in on the action. Ads in Mansion are mostly all homes—and yes, they are all quite spacious. From our perch high above the fray in the content coliseum, we’ll give these gladiators a thumbs up and let them live to fight another day.

The Gotham Observer (DewGothamCity.com)

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.)

Here are the pages of the fictional newspaper, which you can click to enlarge:

Well, obviously there are glaring discrepancies between Gotham's Observer and its New York counterpart. For one, we don't have a horoscope section. Secondly, these stories belie weekly publication...this seems more like a daily rag.

Still, if you want some clues about the upcoming film--which opens in eight days!!--the sports section gives a little more information on what those football stadium shots are all about. And now we know that Matthew Modine is in the film, we guess. Did we know that already? It's hard to keep track of the gazillion things Christopher Nolan is stuffing into epic finale of his Batman saga.

"The Romney post is going viral!" (via the Kheel Center/Flickr)

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.

Mr. Pexton feels Ms. Flock bears only some of the blame:

But The Post failed her as much as she failed The Post. I spoke with several young bloggers at The Post this week, and some who have left in recent months, and they had the same critique.

They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing. Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.

The Post's director of digital news, Katharine Zaleski, pointed out to Mr. Pexton that Post bloggers know what's expected of them. She also said executives are "deeply conscious of the imperatives our bloggers face" and do everything they can to support them, (like demanding they summon those Magic Traffic Faeries to the tune of millions per month).

In the end things may improve, however, as the paper plans to start cross-training reporters: "digital journalists will learn the ways of street reporters, and reporters will learn the ways of digital and social media."

As Mr. Pexton notes, the cross-training will come too late for Ms. Flock.

However, because veteran street reporters are often such big fans of blogging and social media, we're sure everything will work out great.

The New York Times

“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 explained the move, acknowledging Mr. Sifton’s lack of hard news experience:

“From his star runs at Dining and Culture, we all know that Sam is a superb editor who brings infectious energy and a host of original ideas, digital and print, to everything he touches. Correspondents and critics adore him. So who better to fill the shoes of Rick Berke? Sam’s background here isn’t hard news, but we all saw the newsiness and urgency he brought to the Culture report.”

In the same statement, Ms. Abramson also named Adam Bryant, formerly deputy national editor, senior editor for features, tasked with reviving the How We Live group.

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 be thrown away, or left abandoned, like the wire holders for The New York Sun still lurking in subway newsstands?

On September 1, following the final issue of New York Press, the green boxes were transformed.  A black sticker with the revived paper's emblem now covers the familiar bright yellow New York Press logo on many of them downtown.

Gerry Gavin, Our Town Downtown and Manhattan Media publisher, explained the decision to repurpose the boxes made sense since writers from New York Press still contribute to the new paper’s arts and entertainment coverage.

“In this way readers of the NY Press would be easily able to find the new downtown publication,” Mr. Gavin said in an email. It's also more environmentally sound than throwing them all out.

Although alt-weeklies may never feel the same again, Manhattan Media will immortalize some of New York Press’ artsy spirit on the boxes.

In addition to recycling the green boxes, Mr. Gavin explained Manhattan Media intends to hold a newspaper box decorating contest which allowing downtown artists, schools and community groups to submit designs to paint each individual box. The boxes, Mr. Gavin said, will display each groups’ vision of what they love about downtown.

“This will make the boxes individualized art installations throughout downtown from 14th Street to Battery Park,” he said.

If you live overseas, and read more than five satirical articles a month – time to get out your credit card.

Unless, of course, you are overseas serving the US, in which case read away.

The Onion explains: “It also won’t apply to areas where a lot of American troops are deployed in combat, as The Onion recognizes that it has a large fanbase in the armed forces, and it doesn’t wish to charge them for being overseas. They also have better stuff to worry about.”

While this is a good and noble idea, does it trouble anyone else that the armed forces is a “large fanbase” for the satirical news source? For example, an article earlier this summer ran with the headline: "U.S. Quietly Slips Out Of Afghanistan In Dead Of Night." Hopefully, the armed forces fanbase reads other papers, too.

The new system won't limit access to the homepage, individual sections or the non-fake culture pages (The A.V. Club). All of that content is still free, as is the print publication.

Overall, this new plan is fairly unobjectionable. It also doesn’t sound like a moneymaker. But maybe fake news fans, who are overseas, who aren’t in the armed forces and read English are a big enough demographic to make a dent in the production costs.

What would Alistair Cooke say?

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 also have their print editions of The Guardian ironed for them in the morning by manservants. We hope they will be okay.

The distribution of Guardian Weekly, a weekly digest that aggregates material from The Guardian, Le Monde and The Washington Post, will continue, as will The Daily Mail's online coverage of Prince Harry's new girlfriend.

[The Guardian]

Meet The Fleet. (Illustration: Joe Wilson.)

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 was the easiest to monetize,” said the publisher and editor of the paper’s website, MailOnline, “but we found we’d ended up with a big American audience without really trying.”

They came for Demi Moore’s “incredibly toned biceps” and Gisele’s “perfectly toned pins,” but this growing U.S. audience has convinced the paper that an augmented digital presence here will pay off in Internet advertising revenue. “The way the web works,” said Mr. Clarke, “is that it only makes sense to be free if you’re big.” The untapped potential of 300 million Americans who speak roughly the same language and pay attention to mostly the same celebrities proved too much to resist. So The Daily Mail has set up shop in America: may the sun never set on Pippa Middleton’s derriere.

Media types stateside have so far welcomed their new competitor.

Bonnie Fuller, former editor of US Weekly and current president of Mail competitor HollywoodLife.com, professed her love for the publication, but warned, “It’s a mistake to think you can import people and think they can understand this market. Look at what happened to Cheryl Cole on X-Factor!”

Arthur Sulzberger, for his part, has commented that British newspapers fail to speak to the “American experience.”

“All I can do is point to the numbers,” said Mr. Clarke in response. “Clearly we do or we wouldn’t have a bigger audience than most newspapers in America.”

The paper quietly opened a New York office in Soho in February, filling it with six or so young staffers jetted over from England. The New York branch followed the opening of a showbiz office in Los Angeles last fall, and signaled that the web site was expanding its American coverage from the celebrity gossip to hard news as well. The local media were wary: the Mail has a reputation for poaching news without attribution, for one thing. In January, they were caught lifting sections of a New York Times article almost verbatim. And while a Mail executive claimed that was before they had staff in-country, another pattern has emerged: “For Edwards’s Adult Daughter, a Recurring Role: Family Glue,” was the headline on a New York Times article one morning. “Her mother’s girl: How John Edwards’ daughter Cate became the glue holding family together,” was on MailOnline only a few hours later, albeit with a credit to the Times for most of the quotes. And there’s another local custom MailOnline has chosen to ignore.

“They don’t physically link to websites from which they lift material,” wrote Tony Metcalf, the editor-in-chief of NY Metro, in an email to The Observer. “We’ve asked them to do this because we think it’s fair and right and when Metro refers to the work of others, we link as a matter of course.”

“They don’t link to anybody!” echoed Ms. Fuller.

“We link out to people where appropriate,” said the Mail executive.

Then there’s the reputation of Mr. Clarke, who splits his time between London and New York. According to profiles written about him in the U.K., Mr. Clarke is famous for profane rants and reportedly once yelled at an employee with such vigor that he gave himself a nosebleed. “We’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome here,” an employee of his at a previous job told London’s Independent. “He’s so focused, he can force people to do things they don’t want to, the least of them being working a 12-hour day.”

“We’ll hire people who want to work here,” said a MailOnline manager, when asked if Mr. Clarke’s style might not translate to accommodate needier American sensibilities (they are actively recruiting American reporters).

MailOnline has done well so far, with the most recent statistics from comScore placing it fourth in unique page views for news sites, beating out the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Whether that translates to brand recognition is unclear, however. Will headlines like “Jackass star Ryan Dunn dies in horror crash as $100,000 Porsche flies off road and explodes in fireball after night out drinking in bar” foment a loyal readership beyond search-engine hits and random Tweets?

“What they’ve done, which is clever, is to get a lot of traffic without spending very much money,” said an editor in the web business who has worked in both markets. “Whether or not they could become a respected right-wing populist news site is possible, but it’s not easy.”

But it’s not immediately apparent that the MailOnline will maintain its ties with the favorite paper of conservative middle-aged U.K. women. (“My mother-in-law and all the rest of it love The Daily Mail,” said Gillian Tett, U.S. managing editor of The Financial Times.)

“It’s really quite different from the print version in the U.K.,” said John Gapper, a British business columnist at The Financial Times. “I don’t think they intend to bring over The Daily Mail, I think they intend to compete with TMZ, Gawker, and Huffington Post and just try to get more and more traffic.”

They will also face a more familiar foe: The Guardian has announced its own American expansion, with a vanguard editorial colony led by Janine Gibson, its most senior digital editor, and several reporters. The two papers might even bring their famous culture war stateside. “They spend a lot of time egging on their own readers to hate the other’s readers,” said Mr. Gapper.

But those worried about a resurgent British hegemony will feel encouraged to know that the Huffington Post—one of our own country’s most catch-all media concerns—is opening an office in London this summer.

ewitt@observer.com