Imagine you just started at a new job. You work remotely and have never met your boss in person. Nonetheless, on your first day of work, she asks you questions generally reserved for close friends: What was your family like growing up? Do you smoke weed? Do drugs? Enjoy casual sex? Have you ever had a threesome? Have you ever had group sex (more than three)? Have you been sexually assaulted? Have you ever had an abortion?

Late last year, the conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson acquired the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the largest newspaper in Nevada. The immediate effects of Adelson’s ownership on the paper’s editorial autonomy were initially minor; its reporters managed to cover the sale, and the bizarre lengths to which their employer courted their future owner, like any other story. But now the Review-Journal’s newly installed publisher, a former Gannett executive named Craig Moon, is making sure his staff fall in line with their new leader’s wishes.

In corporate America, the most persistent refuge of outright charlatanism is “branding.” The only thing more offensive to honesty than a “rebranding” campaign is a breathless feature story about a rebranding campaign.

A sampling of headlines analyzing the results of last night’s Democratic caucus in Iowa:

Jim VandeHei, co-founder of The Politico, will leave the Washington-based news operation after the 2016 election. He will take with him Mike Allen, The Politico’s reporter-mascot, who says today that the two plan to start “a new venture that will change the world one more time.”

Daily Intelligencer has a great compendium of Weekly Standard editor and conservative pundit Bill Kristol’s preternaturally wrong predictions about Donald Trump’s rise (which is merely one of the things Kristol has been very wrong about).

On January 28, 1986, America watched on television as the space shuttle Challenger—carrying six astronauts and one schoolteacher—disappeared in a twisting cloud of smoke, nine miles above the launch pad it had just left. To a stunned nation, it appeared that seven lives had instantly been lost.

The state of New York wants to make PR people register with the state as lobbyists if they want to try to get a journalist to write an editorial in favor of a client.

Jane Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has a new book out this month about the political power of America’s wealthiest citizens, including the billionaire libertarian activists Charles and David Koch. Among Dark Money’s myriad revelations—we haven’t finished it yet!—is that one or both of the Koch brothers apparently paid a P.I. firm run by Howard Safir, the police commissioner under New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, to dig up dirt on Mayer to retaliate against her watershed New Yorker profile of the brothers from 2010:

You may remember State Rep. Mike Pitts of South Carolina from his defeated efforts to keep the Confederate flag flying at the South Carolina State House last year. The intense media scrutiny of those efforts seem to have inspired a fairly cowardly response: According to the text of a bill he verbally introduced at the State House in Columbia today, Pitts wants to establish a government-run “responsible journalism registry” to screen, approve, and credential reporters and journalists in the Palmetto State—or else. The text of the bill’s summary reads (bolding ours):

According to NPR, Univision just acquired a controlling stake in The Onion, the parent site of the only worthwhile website on the entire internet.

Above is the headline accompanying Billboard magazine’s review of David Bowie’s Blackstar, which was released just days before he passed away from cancer. You can understand why the headline is different online but, honestly, they nailed it the first time.

After presenting to the world his ethically dubious and tediously written exclusive interview with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and after being implicated in the drug lord’s capture, Sean Penn is ready for his mea culpa, which he will deliver this Sunday on 60 Minutes. CBS has put up a teaser for the interview, in which Penn says he has “a terrible regret” about his article.

Why can’t you find The Greatest Publication Ever Made on any newsstand or web browser or TV network? Because people don’t want it.

In response to the news Monday that Chris Hughes, the owner of the New Republic since 2012, no longer wished to own the magazine, the writer Jonathan Chait supplied an entertaining quote to the New York Times:

When the chips are down, and the transistors are shrinking, and the deadline hour is nigh, Thomas Friedman—a professional—can whip up a newspaper column faster than you can say “It is a shame that you are not writing for Highlights for Kids, sir.”

Daily Telegraph staffers arrived at work today to a fun, new surprise: A black box attached to their desks that’s tracking their every movement. Since the news broke this morning, HR reps have been, per BuzzFeed, “frantically rowing back on it,” and the paper’s union is apparently trying to intervene.

Some journalists, in the course of their professional lives, will come upon people who, before, during, or after an interview, will ask if they can read the forthcoming piece, once it is written, in order to approve its contents. Most often, they are simply concerned with making sure that they don’t sound like idiots. Understandable! Still, this is a frustrating thing to be asked, because it makes one wonder where these people have gotten this idea—that this is a thing that is done. Now, we know that Jann Wenner, founder and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, is at least partly to blame, as, in response to criticism over allowing El Chapo final approval over Sean Penn’s 10,000-word article on him, he told the New York Times, “I don’t think it was a meaningful thing in the first place. We have let people in the past approve their quotes in interviews.”

Racist territorialist Cliven Bundy has done crazy shit, but here is one crazy thing, contrary to a story broken today by Buzzfeed, that he hasn’t done: filed a federal lawsuit claiming, among other things, that Barack Obama threatened Donald Trump.

Here you will find dozens of predictions about what 2016 will bring for journalism, from “Local News Gets Smarter on Mobile” to “Distributed Platforms Will Be Your New Homepage.” The only journalism prediction worth a shit in any year is “I Hope I Keep My Job.”