A few fun and weird things to ponder about today's Sunday paper...
1. First and most importantly, CONGRATS to my "Petcast" co-host Emily Richmond, crowned Outstanding Journalist of the Year by the Nevada Press Association for her consistent excellence in covering the education system. Incredibly well deserved!
2. The R-J ran the above photo from John Locher run with its Sunday recap of the week's news. That's a protester flipping the bird at Dick Cheney during the veep's visit. It is incredibly weird that a family newspaper would publish a picture of someone making an obscene gesture. In fact, I've never seen such a thing before. If this were TV news, my partner tells me, the FCC would prosecute/persecute.
3. Am I the only one creeped out by this well-meaning cartoon (below) from Jim Borgman which ran on page 3D in the R-J today?
4. Terrific piece by Benjamin Spillman in today's business section about people buying fractional ownership in private jets. It's excessive, even with Spillman's anecdotal lead about the sad-sack case of a Vegas woman with a hip replacement who simply couldn't handle commercial flights anymore to fly to her second home on the Monterey Peninsula, but it did give me some story ideas nonetheless.5. The Review-Journal's Thomas Mitchell, in touting his own staff's award-winning efforts in the same competition in which Emily won big, claims he got more than 3.3 million hits by Googling "newspapers are dead." Odd, since I just did it and I got about 9,700 hits. See my results here. Or, even better, if you Google "newspapers-are-dead" your choices plummet to 2,900. See? A search of "newspapers are dead" without the quotes around it or the hyphens does bring in more than 4 million hits, but it's an irrelevant search because Google drops the word "are" and you're getting any page that has the words newspapers and dead in any context. Seeing how newspapers write about the dead all the time, it's surprising the hit count is so low.
7 comments:
I thought that jet article was just ridiculously stupid, a commercial for the fractional ownership industry.
I've flown with NetJets and a couple of privately owned jets and it truly is an amazing experience - still, it's so expensive, you don't need a newspaper article to fill you in on the details - if you have the cash, you're already familiar with your options.
way to go emily!
Yay, Emily! Congratulations.
An editor in chief who doesn't know how to use Google properly. Sad. Very very sad. And yes, Steve, the cartoon is really icky. Can't figure out how the cartoonist didn't know that it would evoke molestation.
guess you never saw the photo in the RJ of Monique Maestes flipping off the camera. That ran top fold of the NV section...
And your partner is wrong. The FCC only fines after complaints and those fines are far from common.
Um, steve didn't write how the fcc might come to investigate, and one of the reasons why fcc fines are so uncommon is that everyone in tv is so afraid of them that they play it safe to a fault.
Um, Steve wrote that the FCC will "prosecute/persecute", or investigate... And they only will do that after complaints.
And accidents happen. Stations here have had several and never been fines. Hell, for the same story, KLAS ran video of a guy wearing a t-shirt that said "Fuck off and die".
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