Fox News is a Pitiful Excuse For a Journalistic Organization Whose Sole Purpose is to Trick the American Public
Late Thursday morning, Fox News attempted to trick its readers for the 86,230th time by incorrectly reporting that billionaire Donald Trump had endorsed GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich instead of Mitt Romney.
How to win The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest
Unless you write like Malcolm Gladwell or Susan Orlean, your best chance at appearing in The New Yorker is probably on its last page, the Cartoon Caption Contest. But even that’s improbable. It took Roger Ebert 107 tries. Yes, that Roger Ebert, the famed film critic, journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner, screenwriter and all-around ass kicker.
Tumblr Back Online, Balance in Universe Restored
The Tumblr crisis of 2010 has finally ended. For the past 24 hours, the microblogging service was down because of a database failure.
James Franco Graces Cover of The Atlantic… From 1952
The other day I was browsing through old magazines, as I often do, when I discovered this gem of a cover, from a January 1952 issue of The Atlantic, depicting a mustached James Franco chilling on a rock next to a drove of deer.
A Glimpse at Newspaper Fate, if Controlled by The Masses
When The New York Times announced its plan, beginning next year, to charge visitors a fee to access its website, many questioned the viability of that paywall strategy — or any paywall strategy, for that matter. This week, Clay Shirky, who teaches new media at NYU, writes: “General-interest papers struggle to make paywalls work because it’s hard to raise prices in a commodity market. … Any given newspaper competes with a few other newspapers, but any newspaper website compete[s] with all other websites.”
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The responses are in…
Online subscribers to The New Yorker woke up this morning to find a friendly email reminding them that their passwords have been updated. Thus far, the responses on Twitter range from mildly annoyed:
A few words from Lewis H. Lapham
In this month’s issue of Harper’s (the Magazine, not the Bazaar), Lewis H. Lapham pens the last entry to Notebook, a column he introduced in 1984 as then-editor of the magazine. The seventy-five-year-old Lapham looks forward by looking backward:
“What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart. Acknowledgement of the fact lightens the burden of mournful prophecy currently making the rounds of the media trade fairs.”
Read the full essay at Harper’s.
The Curious Case of The Wall Street Journal and Google
It’s widely known among news junkies — and probably some non-news junkies — that to read anything on The Wall Street Journal‘s website, you simply Google the headline or URL, thereby skipping past the paywall to the full article. See for yourself: paywall vs. no paywall. This method only works when you use Google, so no dice if you’re on Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine.
But wait? Isn’t The Journal owned by News Corporation, whose chief famously accused Google of stealing content and then threatened to pull his websites from their index? And what ever happened to those talks with Microsoft about adding News Corp. content exclusively to Bing? Given the bad blood created over the past year, this arrangement between The Journal and Google feels rather odd.
The New Yorker, or How Not to Set Up a Paywall, Part 1
On the topic of paywalls, The New Yorker is clearly in favor of monetizing their content. In June, editor David Remnick said, “I was going to be damned if I was going to train 18-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds, that this is like water that comes out of the sink.” On the magazine’s website, protected behind a paywall, sits every issue ofRead More →
The Pain of Choosing a CMS
When we started Flood Magazine in July, I made the conscious decision to do as little coding as possible, with the reason being that it’s 2010, after all, and putting content online should be easy with the tools already available.