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Media
November 16, 2007
Who Deserves Anonymity?
A few days ago, the St. Charles Journal, a small newspaper in Missouri, published an article about Megan Meier, a 13-year-old who committed suicide after receiving hurtful messages from her MySpace crush. The story was particularly explosive because it turns out that the crush was a horrible hoax conjured up by adults—including the mother of one of Megan's former friends.
Media
November 6, 2007
Hurting for Material
By mid-football season, most of the great editorial fodder about a team has already been used up. Instead, sports journalists on deadline must scrape together whatever scraps they've got left over into something resembling a column for their readers. Sometimes, they can pull it off; other times, their efforts turn into monstrosities containing the stilted prose of high-school valedictories, out-of-context references to current events, and cloying references to long-past family tragedies. Here are three of our favorite column openings from this week:
Media
October 31, 2007
'Vampire Electronics' Articles Suck
If you work for a company looking to generate some good PR, take notes from Direct Energy. In order to get their energy consultancy's name out in front of millions of eyeballs, all the folks there had to do was dubiously link an old trend story to an upcoming holiday in the form of a cheesy press release headlined, "This Halloween, Protect Your Home From Vampire Electronics."
Media
October 30, 2007
The Guardian Comes to America (Sort Of)
Earlier this week, the Guardian entered the US market by introducing the Guardian America website, the latest in a string of online efforts from the liberal UK paper. Because of the paper's previous successes with internet content like Comment Is Free (which contains a number of blogs from its columnists and editors), its arts blog (which is well-regarded by critics), and its comprehensive media site (which makes deft use of video and podcasts), American readers could understandably be thrilled that the Guardian has a site dedicated to them. But some English journalists don't think the new Guardian America is all it claims to be.
Media
October 18, 2007
Dealing with Colbert '08
Like President Bush at last year's White House Correspondents Dinner, the press seems unsure of what to make of Stephen Colbert (or whether he's speaking truth to power). Last night on his show, Colbert announced he would seek the office of the Presidency (of South Carolina). Though Colbert's persona is a fictional construct, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reports that Colbert will actually file the papers to run in each party's South Carolina primary. Still, there is some understandable confusion in determining just how to cover the announcement of a candidate whose fictional alter ego is running for president under his real name. Here's how some media outlets tried:
Media
October 16, 2007
Getting Ready for Prime Time
Now that the New York Times has gotten rid of its pay-per-view service TimesSelect, readers are free to check out the musings of the Gray Lady's opinion writers. It should be great for them; after two years of being blocked from the majority of their potential readership, columnists like Maureen Dowd are once again at the top of the Times's most emailed list. There's one unintended effect, though: Writers who were able to skate by when they had limited readership now have their drivel exposed to the masses.
Sports
October 8, 2007
At Least They Weren't Playing the Nats
Because a baseball season is so long, covering the games can become an exercise in repetition. So when something truly extraordinary happens, many sportswriters and headline editors just can't stop themselves from making excited puns and metaphors. When New York Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain was swarmed by a freak infestation of insects and allowed the tying run against the Cleveland Indians, the sports press rushed to their keyboards like moths to a flame in order to record with the best bug line they could find. Here's what they came up with:
Media
October 4, 2007
Bullet-Pointing Satire at CNN
A couple of weeks ago, Gelf noted that CNN.com seems to have decided that some of its readers are too busy to deal with its already pared-down articles. So they've started to provide bullet-point summaries at the top of their stories. If that seems like a ridiculous measure to take for a 100-word story about a bear mauling, it's even sillier when applied to stories from The Onion.
Media
October 3, 2007
Doing the Math
Of the many clichéd phrases that repeatedly pop up in articles, the saying "You do the math" is one of the lamest. That's because telling readers to "do the math" is often a lazy way for journalists to pretend that something's obvious—even if the numbers don't mean much. Even if they did, the writer often leaves out essential parts of whatever equation you're supposed to be setting up and solving. In the following recent examples, Gelf will attempt to solve for x:
Media
October 2, 2007
"SLUT." Commence Chuckling.
For all of their supposed high-minded devotion to the important stuff, reporters sure like their jollies cheap. Consider the national media coverage surrounding the unveiling of the South Lake Union Streetcar, a modestly important nostalgia project in downtown Seattle. At a price of $55 million dollars (by comparison, a recent upgrade on a NYC subway line cost $288 million), this otherwise not-extraordinary municipal work should hardly be of significance to the Oregonian newspaper in Portland, much less the Associated Press.
Full article » | by Adam Rosen
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