Get ready New York…
Brilliant. Such a show of quiet resiliency. Their best cover since this one.
We put these skeletons together to make it look like they’re dancing.
In the “ideas we wish we’d thought of” department: This blog is devoted to taking New Yorker cartoons, stripping out the captions, and replacing them with dialogue that describes, in the most literal fashion possible, what is happening. This is our favorite thing since Garfield Minus Garfield.
It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong.New Yorker blogger and author Jonah Lehrer • Apologizing for duplicating his material on his New Yorker blog from multiple other sources, including a post called “Why Smart People Are Stupid,” a recent post of his that went viral, which discussed why otherwise intelligent people make stupid mistakes. Spot the irony, folks.
(Source: The New York Times)
Newspapers are kind of dreary, depressed places. I would go the penniless Web route to get practice. You can enter the mainstream so much quicker there.New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell • Suggesting, during a lecture at Yale, that writers should work for free online to get practice, rather than at newspapers. Gladwell, who once worked at the Washington Post, said that while he had good experiences there, he ultimately felt that newspapers’ lack of profitability makes them less desirable in this regard. How many writers or journalists out there would be willing to take this advice — or are at this very moment? (ht Poynter)
Mail Online, with its parade of celebrities in their bathing suits, gained six million viewers between December and January alone. American traffic was up sixty-two per cent last year. Its home page has become furtively prevalent in Manhattan cubicles. In January, when Mail Online surpassed the Times, a spokeswoman for the latter said, “A quick review of our site versus the Daily Mail should indicate quite clearly that they are not in our competitive set.” The Mail’s contention is that American newspapers have become too effete to prosper. Its ambitions transcend Pulitzers. “They’re not in our competitive set, to be honest,” Martin Clarke, the editor of Mail Online, said when I asked him about the Times. “I did think they were spectacularly sore losers, but I could not care less if we overtake the Times. What matters to me is: Are we bigger than MSN? Are we bigger than Yahoo?”
Basically, The Mail doesn’t think in terms of other newspapers, but in terms of itself, which has worked to its benefit.
Just about says it all. (The New Yorker)
Classic and timely all at once. Striking for the exact opposite reasons this particular cover drew our fancy two days ago.
… in the blink of an eye my worry changes from ‘will there still be this hype when I get back’ to ‘Oh shit I just inspired a widespread movement of people who are dedicated to the downfall of my mom.’Odd Future rapper Thebe “Earl Sweatshirt” Kgositsile • Indirectly asking the world to lay off his mom, who has been blamed for the rapper’s diminished role in the group just as they’ve become the year’s biggest musical hype monster. The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh wrote a huge piece on the 16-year-old rapper which isn’t available online (unless you have an iPad with a New Yorker app). But suffice it to say from the sample given here shows that things aren’t what they seem in Internetville. His departure wasn’t involuntary, and there is no need to “Free Earl.” “The only thing I need as of right now is space,” he writes. “I’ve still got work to do and don’t need the additional stress of fearing for my family’s physical well-being.” source (via • follow)
OK, some more research on this AOL thang. Partly spurred by the fact that someone on Reddit claimed that the article said “profits” instead of “revenue,” we’ve been doing some more on the exact phrasing used in the article and elsewhere. We grabbed a copy from The New Yorker’s iPad app (we even paid money for it!) for comparison’s sake with the abstract. Here’s what we found:
» What this could mean: Our money is on the “profits” one possibly being correct, but the “revenue” one being wrong. Why’s this? Well, AOL’s hiring 40 journalists a week right now, but the dial-up service probably costs them very little to keep up. They’ve laid off a lot of old-guarders who used to work on the dial-up product and they’re not really expanding it. Instead, they’re paying tons of people to work on Patch, Spinner, AOL News, Fanhouse The Sporting News, etc. They may be making more in revenues from the advertising side, but most of that is being spent on this massive content monster they’ve created. The New Yorker has at least one fact wrong here. Possibly two if the “profits” one is also wrong. (Disclosure for disclosure’s sake: I’ve freelanced for AOL News before but haven’t written anything for them in about five months.)
Prepare to eat your words, New Yorker article about AOL’s subscriber base. 43 percent what!? (SEC via Reddit)
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