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Media
May 6, 2008
Colbert Baiting
TV persona Stephen Colbert famously urges his viewers to vote for him in polls of influential people, or in Hungarian bridge-naming contests. We're not sure, though, if anybody has ever urged him to urge his viewers to vote for him—until now. In an open letter to Colbert, Foreign Policy web editor Blake Hounshell essentially attempts to bait the satirical talk show host into mentioning his magazine's poll on the world's top public intellectual. In inviting Colbert to "make his case" for inclusion on the list, it's pretty clear that the letter's main purpose is to garner some publicity for the poll, the blog, and the magazine.
Media
May 5, 2008
We Can't All Be Seabiscuit
As Wonkette aptly noted over the weekend, Hillary Clinton's pick in the Kentucky Derby, Eight Belles, finished in second. She was also the only female horse in the race, and she lost to Big Brown, for what it's worth. Oh, and then she broke both ankles and had to be put to death on the track.
Politics
May 5, 2008
Meta-Polling the Rev. Wright Controversy
According to a New York Times/CBS NEWS poll released today, only 24% of voters care "a lot" or "some" about Barack Obama's relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That's good news for the Obama campaign, right? Sort of.
Media
May 2, 2008
Toilet Bowls are Super Clean
The BBC today reported that toilet bowls carry one-fifth the amount of germs of "some" keyboards. Last year, the same news organization covered a University of Arizona study which found that toilet bowls contain one-400th as many microbes as the average keyboard. In 2004, that BBC number was around one-67th.
Media
May 2, 2008
Topless? Bottomless? Or Just Revealing?
The New York Times this week joined the ranks of porn sites throughout the world in running a headline about a topless photo that, as Gawker pointed out, was, in fact, topped. This led to what has to be one of the more interesting Times' corrections around, in which the paper of record admitted that the piece "left the incorrect impression that she was bare breasted." [In case you haven't figured it out, 'she' is Miley 'Hannah Montana' Cyrus.] The article's current, corrected, version uses the word "revealing."
Media
May 1, 2008
Faux-Nudity in the Times Travel Section
Readers of the New York Times Travel section probably had trouble holding down their cappuccinos this past Sunday when they were greeted with a half-page color spread of volley-balling nudists. The photo accompanied an article titled "No Shoes, No Shirts, No Worries" about the growing popularity of nudist luxury hotels. Being the venerated institution that it is, the Times would never show indecency its pages, so the photo playfully engages in a game of what Slate calls "Hide the Salami."
Media
April 28, 2008
The Times Undermines Its Own Columnist
What do you do when your star guest op-ed contributor writes a piece decrying the very tendencies that your star op-ed columnist exhibits all over her column, which is set to the run the same day? Well, if you're the New York Times Week in Review Op-Ed section, you run the pieces side-by-side, so everyone can see the hypocrisy.
Media
April 22, 2008
Watch Your Keywords
As more newspapers migrate their content to the internet, a lot of research has gone into optimizing articles for processing by search engine robots. Google's spiders pay particular attention to titles, which means that clever headlines like "Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo" are dropped for more easily indexed titles like, "World High Wire Championships in Korea." But the spiders also look to other things for direction, like tags and keywords that are inputted by computers or human editors once the piece is ready for publication.
Media
April 10, 2008
The Knicks' Hulking, Sinking Ship
The performance of the New York Knicks has been so mind-bogglingly bad in the last few years that sportswriters have been digging to find appropriate metaphors for the degree of ineptitude Isiah Thomas and his team bring to the court on a regular basis. A recent New York magazine piece titled "Absolutely, Positively the Worst Team in the History of Professional Sports" calls them "a Kurtzian horror of bloated contracts and hyped ne'er-do-wells"—among many other things.
Politics
April 10, 2008
Politicalliteration
When there are no new results to report in the race for the Democratic nomination, some media outlets seem to get a little punchy with their political coverage. Or should I say, a paucity of party primaries perhaps pushes publications to pen puerile pages. Nowhere was this playful tone more apparent than in the assonance featured in a recent New York Times story about the resignation of Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn: "Ouster Opens Opportunity for Obama."
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