R.I.P. blogs, we hardly knew ye.

Vice President Joe Biden announced in a speech in the White House’s Rose Garden today that he is not running for president. This is a real bummer for the American public, which deserves, if nothing else, more election entertainment. It’s an even bigger bummer for all the pundits and political journalists who confidently reported—with sources and everything—that Biden was going to run.

Journalism’s poster boy for making-things-up is on a whirlwind spree to throw money over the affair, and he’s starting with $10,000.

A little secret of political journalism is that the vast majority of it is just some jerk’s opinion, which has a scientific value roughly equal to your own idiot opinion.

Pitchfork Media, the twenty-year-old music criticism site known for mainstreaming decent musical taste and worshipping the band Radiohead, has been acquired by media empire Condé Nast, which is excited to be the new owner of “a very passionate audience of millennial males.”

Last week, news leaked that writers at The Huffington Post had formed a committee to unionize. This morning, the campaign began in earnest. Get excited, Arianna!

Al-Jazeera America staffers have formally voted to unionize, after the company refused to voluntarily recognize their union request. Now the company is challenging the right of some employees to be in the union. Liberal media at work!

Veteran Washington Post journalist Al Kamen today announced via Twitter that after 35 years at the paper, he’ll be writing his final column next week. His announcement has fewer than 50 RTs so far.

Imagine this: a burst of tweets show a bus explosion on the interstate, sending up a tremendous mushroom cloud, visible from miles away. How many people are hurt? Or dead? What caused the explosion? No one knows, because all the reporters decided to give the victims and bystanders space, and respected everyone’s need to process the trauma before answering questions about it.

A new Gallup poll finds that only 40% of Americans have even a “fair amount” of trust in the media—an all-time low since polling began in the 1990s. Well, guess what?

It’s nice to have a job in an economy where not everyone does, and in a field—journalism—where the economic prospects are uncertain. Many publishers are looking with concern at a world where Facebook and Apple are using their power to steer readers to proprietary platforms, as innovations in ad blocking threaten the whole existing business model, which was already sort of provisional. Then again, Re/Code reported this morning that Axel Springer, the publisher of Bild and Die Welt, is going to buy the website Business Insider in a deal that “values Business Insider at $442 million.”

Al-Jazeera America is holding a union election today, giving it the dubious distinction of being the first company in the new wave of media organizing not to voluntarily recognize its employees’ request for a union. Womp womp.

Some people read the New York Times Book Review section for the book reviews. Other, smarter people read the New York Times Book Review just for the descriptions of the self-published books.

Editorial staffers at the liberal news site ThinkProgress have voted to unionize, marking a half-dozen media unions announced this year.

Leftfield Entertainment is the reality TV production company behind shows like “Real Housewives of New Jersey” and “Pawn Stars.” Leftield’s bosses really, really do not want their employees to unionize—as the lengthy email below will attest.

As all New Yorkers know, the best section in the New York Times bar none is the “Sunday Routine.” So far this year, 38 people have been featured in the “Sunday Routine.” What is their Sunday routine?

The publisher of the LA Times, Austin Beutner, has been fired by Tribune Co., which was reportedly unhappy with his performance. Beutner’s goodbye note can be read here. If you know any behind-the-scenes dirt, email us.

Stop what you are doing right this minute and prepare yourself for the arrival of thoroughly shocking news: John McPhee has written a ponderous New Yorker story about the process of writing itself.

“A rhythmic monologue to a musical accompaniment.” Ratter has a compilation of the ways in which baffled newspapers of the early 1980s described “rap music,” a hot new urban youth trend that was just beginning to gain national attention. Thirty years later, the New York Times has gotten just a little bit better at it.

If there is anyone able to understand the vast and ever-changing cultural diversity of this sprawling nation of ours, it is elderly white Reaganite Peggy Noonan, who once met a Mexican. Now, mi amigos, she has met a Dominican as well.