Review: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour
Deepwater Horizon Suits Hit Courts Across the Gulf States
Prince "Adam Ant!" Charming Returns!
Twitter's @BreakingNews Has Killed the Meaning of "Breaking News"
Category Archives: Media
“Collateral Murder” – Wikileaks Unleashes a Bombshell on the U.S. Military
Collateral Murder, from Wikileaks Wikileaks has released a video that may either blow up in the whistleblowing site’s face or make a ton of people in the Army very uncomfortable. Likely both. With “Collateral Murder,” Wikileaks reveals what it says is “a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people [...]
The balcony is closed for good: At The Movies canceled
Disney-ABC announced today that it’s canceling syndicated film review chat show At The Movies, with the last episode scheduled to air August 14. At The Movies, which originated in 1975 as Sneak Previews with prolific hosts Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, has gone through several different hosts and incarnations over the years, but has always, [...]
Snakes chase out St. Patrick (McCarthy)
The news that Patrick McCarthy, editorial director of the Fairchild Fashion Group (W, WWD) for Conde Nast is on the way out at the end of the year is making me a little wistful (yes, again) about the fate of magazines. I spent four years as an editor at W, despite knowing next to nothing [...]
Digital mags redefined!
Digital magazines are having an identity crisis. With less than three weeks to go until the Apple iPad officially becomes available, the definition of a digital magazine has changed. The Audit Bureau of Circulations announced today it had redefined digital magazines “to accommodate new reading devices such as the Apple iPad.” The new definition states [...]
US Paramilitaries* Ordered to Principal’s Office to Get Slap on Wrist
[*UPDATE 7/26/10: When I first posted the article below, some took issue with my use of the word paramilitary to describe US Special Forces in Afghanistan. Well, just 4 months later the infamous Afghanistan archive has been leaked by Wiki-leaks, and lo and behold, the summary of its contents according to the New York Times includes [...]
Twitter introduces @anywhere platform, and Twitter wants you!
Twitter finally decided to generate some moolah this afternoon with the unveiling of @anywhere. CEO Evan Williams revealed the newest platform in social networking at the South by Southwest conference (SxSW if you’re limited to 140 characters). The details are relatively fuzzy, but it sounds like Twitter is planning to charge participating sites for access [...]
NY Post Smears Principal, Sways Entire Education Dept
Unfavorable newspaper coverage has long prompted resignations and embarrassed apologies from shamed public figures, but we’re surprised at how much clout the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission is giving the raggedy New York Post. In findings released in a letter last Tuesday, the federal anti-discrimination commission blamed a Post article for spurring the 2007 resignation of [...]
Rachel Corrie’s Ghost Gets Her Day in Court
Theatre changes nothing, but at least it changes that. The BBC reports that the Rachel Corrie murder trial is finally underway in Israel. Well, okay, it’s a civil suit but still. Never heard of her? Seven years ago, idealistic human rights activist Rachel Corrie, a Seattle native, was killed by an Israeli bulldozer on the [...]
ASME shut-out for Rolling Stone
We’re going to go out on a limb and say the offices of Rolling Stone are not a cheerful place to be right now. The mag was conspicuously absent from the National Magazine Award nominations, released today. Worse, Paste, informally known as “the magazine your mom might subscribe you to if she’d ever heard of [...]
Micropayments are as quick and easy as a shot to the solarplexus
Bank of America hasn’t gotten the memo that micropayments will save paid journalism from the ash heap of history. Last Saturday, doing some research on a story, I ponied up $3.95 for a 1963 article about that year’s disastrous newspaper strike. The 2,000 word-plus piece, filled with rigorous reporting and hard data about changing reading [...]
Roll Over, Fat Albert, Tell Charlie Brown the News. ’70s R&B meets kids’ animation
So I’m on the 3 train yesterday morning creeping towards Brooklyn when a guy comes on around Chambers Street with, “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen…” which I would have immediately tuned out except he was right in front of me. Turns out he’s not soliciting donations nor is he part of a haggard, hat-passing do-wop [...]
Gawker Gets Pwned
This doesn’t seem like all that big a deal, but it is fun. The Village Voice performed a blogospheric kind of kung fu against Gawker, using information posted by Gawker’s own commenters to more or less rat out the location of the place Gawker defined as “The Newest Hotspot in NY.” The story so far…
J.D. Salinger and Clark Rockefeller: Vaguely Connected Mysterious Men
A slender German grifter of the first order (seriously, they don’t get much more griftastic than this guy) has presented one of the weirder excuses for a few folks to write some sort of think-y piece that doesn’t actually go anywhere about recently-deceased author and recluse J.D. Salinger. The grifter in question was born Christian [...]
Pundit Mark Halperin’s true confession
Yon liberal blogosphere is chortling quite energetically over Time‘s inert-political-platitude correspondent Mark Halperin’s response to last night’s State of the Union address. Professing to have a list of 20–or maybe 25–serious challenges for the Obama White House to surmount, Halperin announced he was “baffled” by the speech’s thoroughly inadequate use of the “Way to Win” [...]
Twitter’s @BreakingNews Has Killed the Meaning of “Breaking News”