Tag: George Salamon

Journalism for the perpetually busy and easily distracted

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On June 6, Farhad Manjoo wrote a column headlined “You Won’t Finish This Article. Why people online don’t read to the end” for the online magazine Slate. To find out why they don’t, you must read to the end and learn that “we live in an age of skimming. I want to finish the whole thing, I really do. I wish you would, too. Really – stop quitting. But who am I kidding? I’m busy. You’re busy. There’s always something else to read, watch, play, or eat.” How does Slate, founded in 1996, attract about 3 million monthly Internet visitors in the United States alone (about 5 million worldwide) if Manjoo is right about current reading habits?

Spray-paint artists in America’s most expensive neighborhood: Terrorist threat or teenage prank?

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They struck in the early evening hours of Feb. 16, spray-painting “F*** the 1%” several times and “Kill People” once on walls of houses, garage doors, fences and a car in Atherton, Calif. On Feb. 25 the CBS television outlet in San Francisco (KPIX) and CNBC reported their “threatening” and “offensive” graffiti, and CNBC coined the term “anti-wealth phrases” to capture the heinous nature of the threat the graffiti posed. On the following day, a story in the San Jose Mercury News followed with a less-agitated account of what had occurred and who might be responsible. None of the stories confronted the key issue raised by the response to this act of vandalism. While no one questioned that personal property was defaced and destroyed, and that therefore felonies were likely committed, the real question of whether or not the FBI should have been involved in the investigation of the spray-painting was not explored by the media.

As TIME goes by: On the passing of an American institution

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When Wolcott Gibbs parodied TIME magazine’s famous style (“TIMEstyle” or “TIMEspeak”) in the New Yorker in 1936, he penned the now-famous line: “Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind.” But TIME was much more than a collection of inverted sentences, cheeky puns (“Esther Williams’ pictures are so much water over the dame”) and double-jointed adjectives. TIME was America’s first and best news weekly, read by more than 20 million worldwide, and it may well have “invented mass media.”

Civil war at the New York Times: Newsroom attacks editorial page!

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It promised to be a lulu of a story: “The Tyranny and Lethargy of the Times Editorial Page,” in the New York Observer on Feb. 4 by the paper’s editor, Ken Kurson. The subhead hinted at the juiciness of it all: “Reporters in ‘semi-open revolt’ against Andrew Rosenthal.” Rosenthal, the New York Times’ editorial page editor, gets skewered by more than two dozen current and former Times staffers, as do his assistants who write the paper’s editorials, the columnists on the op-ed page, and the “Sunday Review” he’s in charge of. The attack, from all but two named sources among the Times staffers interviewed, proceeded on four fronts.

Jamie Dimon’s $20 million payday: Good business or bad joke?

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JPMorgan Chase announced Jan. 24 that Jamie Dimon, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, will earn $20 million for 2013, amounting to 74 percent more than he earned the year before. This was done even though the investment bank paid out more than $ 20 billion in regulatory fines last year and laid off 4,000 employees. The story in the New York Times posted on the day of the announcement called 2013 a year of “bruising legal setbacks” for JPMorgan and concluded with a quote from Boston University professor of law Cornelius Hurley: “It doesn’t reconcile for JPMorgan to be paying out billions in fines while its CEO’s compensation is nearly doubled. You usually get fired for that, not rewarded.”