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Tuesday morning, courtesy of the CBS Morning Show, Phelps-a-mania came to an amazing crescendo. The smart money would have wagered that the Phelpsian epic would have hit its high mark somewhere in NBC's maudlin coverage of the Games— most likely during the Today Show, which has insisted on bringing groggy, bleary eyed America every second of every breath currently happening in Beijing. But no! CBS decided to follow coverage of a potentially devastating hurricane currently brewing in Southern Florida with an interview of Phelps, offering the immediate and unfortunate segue: "And now to a man who's like a hurricane…in the pool, Michael Phelps!"
Full article » | by Max Lakin
When the world champion Spanish national basketball team was massacred by Team USA by a score of 119 to 82, many suspected that something was amiss. Like the Virginian rodent of yore, Team Spain was, the rumor went, "playing possum."
If you thought reporters at the Beijing Olympics were there simply to cover Michael Phelps, or China's human-rights abuses and pollution problems, you were wrong. There's all kinds of side stories, including biking the streets of Beijing with Olympians, and chronicling the confusion of a cab ride in the Chinese capital. But the most common kind of fluff story is served up with a side of scorpions on a stick.
Popular Culture is the subject of this month's Non-Motivational Speaker Series event, returning to the Lower East Side on Thursday, August 28, at 8 p.m. Providing expert commentary on this topic are Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker, the A.V. Club's Amelie Gillette, and New York Reality TV School founder Robert Galinsky.
Full article » | by Adam Rosen
The newspaper business here in Chicago—like that of the rest of the country—has fallen on hard times. The broadsheet Chicago Tribune apparently wants to turn into USA Today (or Maxim), though thankfully we haven't yet seen any evidence of a redesign. Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times, the local tabloid, is solving its problems by rehashing old Mike Royko columns.
The Montauk Monster, that bloated, seemingly decomposing corpse of some creature that washed up on a Montauk, Long Island, beach last month, has been getting a lot of attention recently—perhaps too much attention when there are decidedly more important things going on, like simultaneous wars and the return of $2 Starbucks after 2 p.m. So why is a certain part of the online world abuzz about "Monty"? It's the pageviews, stupid.
Full article » | by Max Lakin
In the August 4 issue of the New Yorker, Ben McGrath tells the story of Alan Rogers, a talented and thoughtful Army lifer who died in Iraq. McGrath's article explores whether the military and media intentionally covered up Rogers's identity as "the first known gay casualty of the Iraq war," and it makes for fascinating reading. But I was underwhelmed by several lively paragraphs in the middle where McGrath describes the "edit war" over Rogers's Wikipedia entry—a war fought over the inclusion of phrases like "he was gay and worked to end 'Don't Ask Don't Tell.' " I'll admit that this conflict forms an arresting journalistic image, but in choosing to focus on it, McGrath follows an easy, misleading path in the coverage of Wikipedia.
The Brett Favre-Packers saga appears to have been ended by a trade of the unretired quarterback to the New York Jets. Though ESPN's Rachel Nichols can probably stop stalking Favre now, another, higher-profile, reporter is likely to continue to cover the story, which has now moved to within a couple dozen miles from his home: Sports Illustrated's Peter King, who looks to have acted as something of a go-between for Favre and his former team.
The upcoming Beijing Olympics will see a major investment from any number of media outlets. While the Olympics are undoubtedly big news, and the China angle makes them all the bigger, Gelf couldn't help but wonder how cash-strapped newspapers are using the resources being poured into coverage of the 2008 Summer Games. A brief look at coverage from three such papers indicates that some are using the money wisely. Others, not so much.
When a big trend story in a major newspaper about the presidential election strikes many people as laughable, at least one person as racist, and reminds still others of a satirical news segment, there's a problem. But the biggest problem is that trend stories based on offhand anecdotes are still published in the first place.
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