Poor Bastards Have to Lunch With Roger Ailes in Exchange for Job

In your cooling Thursday media column: Roger Ailes has apprentices, newspaper websites are popular, the AP gets rid of its writers, and Jack Shafer defends Joe Nocera.

• Here is a terrifying thing that exists: The Ailes Apprentice Program at Fox News, which promotes "diversity" even though it's named after Roger Ailes, the evil poison-spewing toad that lived in a tree in Pan's Labyrinth. Winners get a job, and a free lunch with Roger Ailes! It's not worth it, people.
• The Newspaper Association of America says that 61% of adult internet users in the US visited a newspaper website last month. That's especially good since 21% of US adults are functionally illiterate. The only downside: most of those visitors were just reading Andy Capp.
• The Associated Press will no longer call its journalists "writers." Instead it will call them nothing.
• Jack Shafer doesn't think that the NYT's Joe Nocera should avoid writing about companies just because his fiancee is the PR person for the company's lawyer. Okay, fine. Just disclose it. Such a contrarian, Jack Shafer!