You Go To See “The Descendants”
You go to see a film about a Hawaiian named Matt King, who is played by George Clooney.
This movie has been directed by Alexander Payne, a director whom you quite like, particularly his “14e Arrondissement,” so you don’t much mind that Clooney strikes you as anything but Hawaiian. And you like Clooney, who has been in — and even has directed — a few of your favorite films, including “Syriana” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.” And, anyways, it’s just a movie and someone has to star in it.
The Rev., The Nurse and The Director
Late last summer, on the secluded tip of Conanicut Island, in Rhode Island, an Episcopal reverend and his wife, a nurse, were watching Wes Anderson shoot his new movie, Moonrise Kingdom.
The Rev. and the Nurse, who live just a few houses away, were drinking frozen daiquiris and had been corralled, along with the rest of the neighborhood folks, a little way up the road, so they didn’t disrupt the filming.
“You know, we talked to Wes for a while yesterday,” the Rev. said, hushing his tone, because someone already had called for quiet on the set. “And he’s very nice. Very, very nice.”
“Yes, a very, very nice young man,” the Nurse agreed.
Foxy Knoxy Found Not Guilty, but The Mail Convicts Anyway
Yesterday, as the media fervor over Foxy Knoxy’s Perugia, Italy, murder appeal reached its peak, everyone — everyone — geared up to break the news. While most on-the-scene reporters were getting ready to tweet and file copy — doing groundwork, gauging the crowd, etc. — at least one outlet had already written its story — the wrong one, coincidentally.
Nick Pisa, a reporter with London’s The Daily Mail, already had pre-written two stories: Amanda Knox was both guilty and not guilty. Then, at 9:50 Perugia time, as the verdict was read, the “guilty” story landed on MailOnline.
OK, you say, so what? Anyone who has ever been in a newsroom knows that hedging time constraints with prepped copy is standard fair. Both the stories were loaded into the paper’s CMS, but someone published the wrong one.
But what made Pisa’s story egregious wasn’t simply that it was pre-prepared. Instead, Pisa’s “guilty” story pretended to shine a light on what had happened in court as the verdict landed. Read More →
A Kelleriana for Bill Keller
In 1928, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. published Menckeniana: A Schimpflexikon, a book compiling assaults, slurs and rants against H.L. Mencken.
Its pages insulted Mencken, the critic and reporter whose viewpoints were seldom secret, in every way.
Our Holiday
A few weeks ago, while I was typing away in a newspaper office in South Africa, one of my co-workers stumbled out of the lunchroom with half a sheep’s head on a plate. The head had been boiled and cut lengthwise between the eyes. “It’s skobo,” she said, picking meat from between the bones. “It’s good. Want some?” And that’sRead More →
It Builds Character
Twenty-five years ago yesterday, a stuffed tiger and a kid — eponymous of philosophers — began a decade of newspaper syndication. You remember them: They hung around in the woods. In the winter, they carried a sled. In the summer, time always grew short. Read More →
In Which David Carr Teaches You about Reporter Branding
David Carr, a former crackhead and current columnist for The New York Times, his voice its usual rasp, says he loves to swear.
It seems true; the discerning listener could tell by the lack of hesitation when he says “fucking” in his next sentence. If you read at least a few pages of his book, a tome tracking his descent into drugs and, eventually, a gun or two, you might be able to guess about the relish with which he sometimes uses the word. You might think, actually, that he invented it. Maybe that he has it copyrighted and is hoping that it will catch on – that you’ll owe him a nickel each time you say it. That said, you’ll never see him use it on Twitter.
The New Yorker Updates its Password System
If you’re a subscriber to The New Yorker‘s website, this morning there should be an email from the magazine in your inbox. It seems that if you hadn’t changed your password — the default was your email address, as we reported last week — the magazine went ahead and changed it for you.
The New Yorker has a Paywall Problem, Part 2
Eleven years ago, when Jon Lech Johansen was a 15-year-old kid in Norway, he sat at his computer and banged out code that would become known worldwide as DeCSS, the base for a program allowing people to copy encrypted DVDs.
News Scouts
When Michael C. Dumler joined Foursquare and started checking in around the country, the badges at first came rolling in. They came quickly — the “Newbie” badge, a badge for your first ten check-ins, and a few others.
“However,” Dumler told me in an email from California, where he’s the business director at Breaking Development, “once you get the first handful of badges they become harder to obtain.”
It was inevitable that the media, seeing the popularity of social badges, would want to try it. CNN’s iReport program has a brand new badge system for contributors. MTV has one on Foursquare. The Wall Street Journal created a bunch — as of this morning, the paper had 39,326 followers on Foursquare.
So how will badging help the media?