News Corp's Magical Board Meeting Will Make Everyone Forget This Scandal Thing
In your untraceable Monday media column: News Corp's board meeting approaches, Current TV gets a new president, the backlash to The New Yorker's Bin Laden story, the NYT's online beta testing site, and newspapers are stolen.
- News Corp's first board meeting since the rise of the phone hacking scandal is coming up, at which "the company will deliver its fiscal year-end results, which it hopes will defuse pressure relating to the scandal." Good luck. "Year end results: Closed News of the World... oh, shit. Wait. Rupert got hit with a pie... no, I mean.. fuck."
- The new head of Current TV is David Bohrman, formerly CNN's Washington bureau chief. He better work out, because Current must have spent all of their hiring budget by now.
- There is a certain amount of backlash to The New Yorker's recent blockbuster story on the Osama bin Laden killing, because author Nicholas Schmidle didn't actually interview any of the Navy SEALs who went on the raid, but that fact was not explicitly stated in the story. It's always a tricky act of journalistic tightrope walking to turn a trove of secondhand sourcing into a smooth narrative work. America's general reaction, however: "Fuck U Osama LOL."
- If you're a New York Times subscriber, you can now go on the paper's Beta site and test out new online features. Oh and also you should be a dork.
- The show "Extreme Couponing" is being blamed with causing a rash of newspaper thefts. Huh.
[Photo via AP]