Late last night, Huffington Post editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington announced that her company had hired 33-year-old Donté Stallworth, the former NFL wide receiver, to cover national security as a paid editorial fellow. One problem: Stallworth apparently believes that the September 11, 2001 attacks were an inside job.
Yesterday news came that David Chase had told someone that at the end of The Sopranos, Tony doesn't die. Said "news" was published by Vox, the internet's leading site for men who aspire to be Authoritative Men Who Explain Things. Late yesterday David Chase issued a statement insisting he'd been misunderstood.
Following up on its non-endorsement of New York governor Andrew Cuomo's challenger, Zephyr Teachout, the New York Times today endorsed Teachout's running mate, Tim Wu, for lieutenant governor. Because Cuomo is a terrible cynic with no identifiable values, his chosen lieutenant governor candidate, Kathy Hochul, is a right-wing creep added to the ticket to pander to upstate voters. (Or possibly, as the Times theorizes, she's a cynic herself, who pretends to be right-wing to pander to upstate voters.)
The New York Times editorial board, with great pride in its own high-mindedness, has refused to endorse Andrew Cuomo's campaign for renomination as governor of New York in the upcoming Democratic primary. As the Times' reporters have amply documented, Andrew Cuomo is, in his role as a self-appointed champion of clean politics, a gutless fraud at best, and at worst a crook. Having sworn to rid Albany of its toxic and comical culture of gross corruption, he promptly and comically corrupted his own reform effort. The Times editorial board says so—that Cuomo "broke his most important promise."
Neighborhood curmudgeon Jack Shafer, now the last valuable property at Reuters, wondered yesterday whether anonymous sources at the New York Times were worse than the internet's top location for anxious teens, Yahoo! Answers, which felled one BuzzFeeD Benny (now just Benny). But obviously there's only one place to go to get an answer to that question.
"In a market of brands hungry for content they can own, why not opt for words written by real journalists?" writes Matt Van Hoven of "brand journalism," the latest buzzword for human-sounding ads. "Certainly it could go a long way to convince readers that what they're getting is truth, or some form of it."
Do you read Bustle, the website best known in "the culture" as the place whose founder, Bryan Goldberg, uses his female employees' legs as typing desks? No, me neither. Nonetheless, according to recent reporting by Amanda Hess at Slate, the thing is going gangbusters. It has 15 million unique visitors! It has over $11 million in venture capital!
Because journalism has to be objective, the New York Times' Campbell Robertson intrepidly went to a white area of St. Louis to get white peoples' opinions of Ferguson, as they have been so egregiously missing from the boiling national debate about race relations in America since Michael Brown's death two weeks ago.
If you follow the inner workings of the media industry, you’ve probably read journalist Ryan L. Schuessler’s fairly devastating rant about the scrum of reporters and photographers in Ferguson, Mo. currently covering the August 9 killing of Michael Brown. In the course of stringing for Al Jazeera America, Schuessler witnessed:
Today The Huffington Post announced that it had chosen Mariah Stewart, a journalist based in St. Louis, as its inaugural "Ferguson Fellow" to investigate the August 9 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. over the next twelve months. One problem: Neither HuffPost nor its multi-millionaire namesake Arianna Huffington want to cough up the mere $40,000 for Stewart’s salary.
Whenever an unarmed young black man is shot dead by the police, white conservatives determined not to feel guilty flock to one news source for their absolution: National Review.
In the writing world, there is a hierarchy. The writers are on the bottom. Above them are editors, who tell the writers what to change. This is backwards. How many good writers has Big Edit destroyed?
Time Inc. has fallen on hard times. Would you believe that this once-proud magazine publishing empire is now explicitly rating its editorial employees based on how friendly their writing is to advertisers?
On Tuesday, Gawker reported that BuzzFeed had quietly removed from its site nearly 5,000 posts in April, a discovery the viral news conglomerate’s editor-in-chief refused to address before publication. Now BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti is explaining—or trying to explain—why his site disappeared those articles.
