CNN ran a typo (about as bad as that German tourist's) on The Situation Room last night, accidentally asking where the hell that junior Illinois senator could be if he wasn't onscreen with his al-Qaeda buddies. Obama has said no harm no foul, and Wolf Blitzer apologized this morning.
Wonkette offers a solution to Barack Hussein Obama's problem: "Just go with BARACK, like Madonna or Prince or Beck. If this 'rock star' crap is going to persist for the next 23 months, might as well go all the way."
Here you go, some more random 2006 Media Winner Honorable Mentions, even though it's 2007. We make the rules around here, punk. See Part I here.
Celebrity Babylon
Why bother suing bloggers when you can exploit them for personal profit? In a classic display of winning more flies with honey etc., celebrity photo company Sunset Photo and News is, according to FishbowlLA, declining to join the lawsuit fray against bloggers like famed photo-poacher Perez Hilton, and has instead decided to open its gates to the web hordes. A few weeks ago, the company launched Celebrity Babylon, an online magazine featuring gossip and photos taken by Sunset's paparazzi photographers but not yet sold to other media outlets. Bloggers are free to visit the site and use the pics (though at present, the site has a copyright protector on its images, to disallow lifting directly from the website), and magazines are still free to buy them. The idea makes perfect sense; bloggers like Hilton represent an ever-growing horde of web hunters who thrive on lifting photos from paparazzi services before they're sold. Their numbers are too great, their tactics too devious and their payoff too enticing to suppress. Sunset's strategy is simple: if they're going to lift and post your photos anyway, may as well post them yourself and eliminate the middle step. The assumption of sue-happy paparazzi services like X17 Inc. (the plaintiff in the case against Hilton) has been that photos stolen by bloggers are less or not at all valuable for resell to magazines such as Star or In Touch. But, so far anyway, Celebrity Babylon seems to be a test case for the opposite conclusion; FishbowlLA reports that Sunset's photo sales are higher than ever following the site's launch, despite receiving around 2 million hits a day since early December.
Granted, this gutsy move looks a tad less ingenious when the project's founder has been linked to FBI investigations for theft of insider information from her former employer. Jossip reported in June that Sunset partner and Celebrity Babylon creator Jill Ishkanian was the former Us Weekly staffer fingered in an ongoing FBI inquiry to determine the identity of a hacker who lifted materials from the celebrity weekly's computer system. Still, we have to applaud Ishkanian for not leaping on the lawsuit bandwagon and instead electing to do what any successful business does in the face of a changing industry: adapt. Though it could just be that her defense attorney fees were already too high to get involved in any more legal tangles. You know what they say about necessity breeding invention.
This post has been corrected. It originally stated that bloggers could lift photos directly from the Celebrity Babylon website. In fact, the photos are copyright protected on the website, but doled out to individual blogs for use.
Reuters
With the dawn of the new year came news that the 3,000th American soldier had died in Iraq since the U.S. first invaded in 2003. While Huffpo contributors wasted no time sounding off on the tragic milestone, mainstream media outlets took a slightly less emphatic approach, focusing on personal anecdotes and emotional recounts to convey the story's gravity. The New York Times ran a stirring New Years Day tribute by Times writer Dana Canedy to her fiance, an army sergeant who was killed in Baghdad a few months after the birth of their son. It shot quickly to number one at MEL and currently holds steady at number three. Meanwhile, the AP offered a lengthy list of grim details and statistics surrounding the death toll, including the number of 18-year-olds included (over two dozen) as well as the number of women (62), plus an account of the Grandmothers Against the War gathering on New Years Day, in which grandmothers of fallen soldiers from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut read the names of fallen loved ones aloud in in Rockefeller Center. Time featured a personal essay by staffer Mark Kukis about the car bombing death of the public affairs officer who had arranged his trip to Camp Ramadi. And ABC and the UK Times offered personal profiles of the 3,000th casualty, 22-year-old Dustin Donica of the 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, including details like his passion for soccer and ham-and-pineapple pizza.
Local papers also put their stamp on the coverage, running stories of regional vigils and protests prompted by the death toll landmark. One particularly interesting take was the Louisville Courier-Journal's roundup of submissions from readers, ranging from a former army specialist to a Lutheran pastor to Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher, opining on the state of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the definition of a U.S. victory.
The McClatchy company is selling the Minneapolis Star Tribune at a hefty discount because no one -- including his family at breakfast -- reads the paper, says David Carr in a New York Times piece. The numbers support him: The Star Tribune lost 26,000 daily readers since McClatchy bought it in 1998, and ad sales dropped 6.1 percent in the past year. While the sale of this prominent (if not Pulitzer-winning) paper was less expected than McClatchy's earlier sale of 12 Knight Ridder papers, there was a willing buyer and the $160 million tax benefit, says McClatchy's CEO, helped offset the capital gains from the Knight Ridder sales.
Things don't look great for the paper. Carr points to the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer, also recently purchased by private investors, as a warning. The new owners last month forced unionized staffers into an insultingly harsh contract. There's an offchance the Star Tribune buyer sees this as a good deal and a chance to grow a property -- but they could just as easily be prepping to flip the paper to someone else.
news.bbc.co.uk
WaPo's Richard Cohen makes some very good points in his defense-of-Monica article today — she was young; she had the misfortune to have her dirty laundry aired in public (cue blue Gap dress joke); she's always been remarkably dignified in the face of public scandal; she's just received her Master's from the London School of Economics; and as if you haven't messed around with skankier than a sitting President, for God's sake. Cohen was reacting to this WaPo article by Libby Copeland, which poked fun at Lewinsky for graduating from LSE, which she rather snottily said made one "question your fundamental assumptions about the world," but really just made me question where Libby Copeland was a year and a half ago when the news broke that Lewinsky would be entering that program.
Cohen offers a fair and chivalrous defense of someone who has probably about served her debt to society by now, hmm? (For God's sake, even Nixon got a pardon!), and I would have cheered it had he not felt the need to wander into Lewinsky's private life:
But she is now a woman with a master's degree from a prestigious school and is going to be 34 come July. Her clock ticks, her life ebbs. Where is the man for her?
OH MY GOD SHE IS GOING TO BE 34 COME JULY!!! WHERE IS THE MAN FOR HER? HER CLOCK TICKS! HER LIFE EBBS! Cohen says "It would be nice, too, and fair, also, if Lewinsky were treated by the media as it would treat a man... Where, pray tell, is the man who is remembered just for sex?" I would add, where, pray tell, is the 34-year old man whose sad prospects of singledom are bemoaned in a national newspaper? Practice what you preach, Richard; but as for the rest of it, I and my wasting, shriveling 34-year old ovaries couldn't agree with you more.
Fairness For Lewinsky [WaPo]
From Thongs To Thesis: Lewinsky Flashes Her Intellect [WaPo]
Even with that paragraph I'd still take Cohen over Copeland. Clueless and well-intentioned beats claws-out cheap-shot nastiness every time.
— ETP Staff
cctv.com
The execution happened, the coverage began, and the inevitable question arose: would the networks air full video clips of Saddam Hussein's hanging? Those thirsting for gory details that potentially squeamish networks wouldn't provide needed to look no further than YouTube, which held versions aplenty of the now infamous camera phone video within hours of the execution (an occurrence that surprised just about no one). Meanwhile, networks wrung their hands over whether the value of the context and authenticity of the video outweighed the material's gruesome nature. Even Fox, which teased viewers with early footage that stopped just short of the moment of death, balked at showing the dictator's neck breaking on air (though, as Gawker pointed out, they wasted no time in ponying up the full video on the Fox website). Blogs and independent news sites nabbed and posted the unofficial video (which was reportedly more graphic and detailed than the brief clip released by the Iraqi government) in droves, and soon the question of whether or not to run it became somewhat moot. Now the new issue for scrutiny and speculation is, who shot the video?
by Nicole Bengiveno via NYTimes.com
I scratched my head many times reading Metro reporter Alan Feuer's 2006-year-in-
wacky-stories retrospective, "Headlines 2006: A Trapped Cat, a Fleeing Bull and a Few Human Tragedies, Too," beginning with his 217 word lede, which likened the news to all of "a heavy coastal rain, blustering through with eternal thunder one day and swept off by a shifting wind the next," "an ungainly diesel engine, driven on by a relentless forward motion" and "a six-course dinner of the peculiar and absurd," but additionally asked the following:
Who among us still remembers why we should remember Vado Diomande or Nicholas Bartha or Parviz Benhuri or Jared Paul Stern? What about Rebekah Johnson? Or Runaway the bull?These were only some of this year's one-, two-, or three-day wonders in the news: They flash, then disappeared -- often with unanswered questions -- briskly hooked off-stage.
It is the nature of these things to plague us with their incompletion, but then again that's what the New Year is about.
I can't believe it takes so few words to hurt my head this way. First of all, the only 'incomplete' story he goes on to tell is that of Rebekah Johnson, who remains at large, and anyway it's sort of his employer's mandate to leave stories, you know, complete. But that's not the point: The point is that his lede is totally disingenuous for about a zillion reasons, beginning with the fact that he references minor characters in otherwise memorable stories and ending with the fact that these some of these stories were individual dramas and some were city-wide events that were extensively covered by the media in general and the New York Times in particular, though probably never with a 217-word lede.
What, you don't remember Parviz Benhuri? How about Cory Lidle? Oh, that name rings a bell, seeing as he was the Yankee pitcher whose plane flew into a building. Hmm, how do these two go together? "Remarkably, when the Cirrus SR20 flew into Parviz Benhuri's window, his wife, Ilana, managed to survive." To claim that the story was forgettable and minor based on the obscurity of this dude's name is completely misleading. Or Jared Paul Stern — this so-called flash-in-the-pan story had no less than six photos of him on the front page above the fold, a handy flow chart of players, and numerous follow-up articles (26 in total, compared to 2 about Rebekah Johnson, 2 about Parvez Benhuri, and, actually, 27 about Vado Diomande, so I guess anthrax wasn't so minor and forgettable, either). Also, Feuer states that "investigators say that Mr. Stern tried to blackmail Ronald W. Burkle, the supermarket magnate," but actually, the only person who has alleged that thus far has been Ronald W. Burkle; Stern has not be charged or indicted, and authorities have not confirmed the existence of an investigation. Yet Feuer asserts it, unattributed. As I wrote the last time the last time the NYT mischaracterized the case, "It is, of course, entirely proper to mention the circumstances of Stern's recent notoriety, but it is also entirely proper to get it right."
All that aside, the article is redeemed by this quote:
"I miss the rock," said Susan Raskin. "Because I like rocks. And stones."
To refresh your memories, Alan Feuer is the NYT former Baghdad correspondent, now back on the Metro beat, whose memoir included references to fudging facts in his stories. It's probably unfair to mention this here, but it's no less unfair than saying someone is under investigation by federal authorities without making damn well sure that it's right. I know it's just a year-end wrap-up, but still, one expects more from the NYT.
NB: The picture above is of Molly, that cat who got stuck in an alley. No picture of the rock was available.
Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz
Sony BMG got wise and licensed music to two sponsored shows in a deal that the Wall Street Journal sees as the beginning of a new age of podcast licensing. Under the deal, Rock River Communications can use four to eight BMG-licensed songs per episode of audio shows produced for clients Ford and Chrysler. (The series for Chrysler uses music by Miles Davis (pictured), Tony Bennett, and Gloria Estefan.)
Music companies, as the Journal notes, have been wary of licensing music free of digital rights management (DRM), fearing that giving customers free content with no copy protection will encourage them to strip out the songs and spread them. But the Journal cites BMG exec Adam Block, who says that since the songs are embedded in a show, it's unlikely that listeners will extract the music (instead of buying it -- or stealing it some easier way). That's the healthy perspective that many copyright freedom activists have hoped for.
It's still far from what many smaller podcasters would love: An open library of podcast-licensed mainstream music that they can cheaply and legally embed in their shows. While the amount Rock River paid BMG was not disclosed, it was certainly more than small broadcasters can afford.
Britannica.com
Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans. The New York Times reports that the Wall Street Journal, which officially began its new redesigned layout today, has hit a snag that no amount of careful planning and promotional avidity could have foreseen: the grand unveiling will fall on a day when Wall Street is shut down. Both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq are following a 122-year-old tradition of honoring the death of a U.S. president (in this instance it's Gerald Ford, just in case you hadn't heard) by halting all trading for the day. The WSJ redesign, which was first announced in detail on December 4 and has since received heavy media coverage, was to be unveiled with plenty of fanfare, culminating in Dow Jones chairman Peter R. Kann, whose company owns the Journal, ringing the closing bell of the New York Stock exchange. Still, the paper is reportedly keeping its chin up, and will continue plans to give away 500,000 free copies at 40,000 newsstands nationwide. If you're looking for one, we suggest you try the 2,3 stop at Fulton or Wall; chances are they'll have plenty to spare.
Update: More bad news on the WSJ's big day as staffers take out a 3/4 page ad in the Times questioning Dow Jones' commitment to journalism and encouraging readers to e-mail the employees' union demanding that the paper "preserv[e] its quality workforce."
