Watergate: The Video Game
Journalists: It’s the game you’ve always wanted to play. Forget finding Carmen Sandiego. In Watergate: The Video Game, you’re on the hunt to expose Richard Nixon’s corruption. Here, the real sleuthing happens through interviews, document acquisition and hard-hitting reporting. This is the best way to celebrate the Pulitzer Prize that the Washington Post received 40 years ago today for its coverage of the Watergate scandal.
FJP: I like the 8-bit glory of it all. — Michael
If we’re a little bleary-eyed tomorrow, it’s because we’ve spent all night investigating Watergate.
If you hit “no”, you’re resigned to listening to the police scanner for the rest of your life.
Unlike the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, The Post has traditionally been a local business, pulling in large amounts of local advertising from merchants eager to reach the print audience. By contrast, 90 percent of The Post’s online audience is outside the Washington area.Why The Washington Post is going to start charging frequent readers of its site. Meanwhile, their building’s still for sale.
As a former Post guy, this is so depressing. This is where Watergate became a thing. I mean, this building is two blocks away from the White House and moving it away from there means it’s not going to have that kind of significance anymore. The worst possible thing the Post could do right now is move to Arlington. It’s an old building and getting around it was like a maze, but it has its charms.
In case you haven’t been keeping a close eye on the Mali conflict, The Washington Post’s Max Fisher has an extremely useful guide to what’s going on. “Mali, after all, has long been an obscure country to most Americans, little-known or -discussed even after its crisis began last year,” he explains. “But now that crisis is becoming more important. Some very bad people have taken over the entire northern half of a very big country. This weekend, the French military sent in troops and made bombing runs to halt the rebels’ advance. More countries are talking about getting involved.”
It’s our 135th birthday. Here’s the first edition of The Washington Post from December 6, 1877.
That’s exactly what it looked like then, too, down to the photocopying.
As much as I have enjoyed my prestige among religious conservatives, I fear it will be short-lived. This is because I plan to use my newfound bona fides to criticize Perkins and the Family Research Council.Liberal-leaning Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank • Responding to surprisingly positive comments made about him by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. While noting that he stands behind a prior column where he criticized liberal organizations that called the FRC a “hate group,” he points out that Perkins missed part of his argument. “I also argued that Perkins should cease the false propaganda his group has put out about gay people,” he says. “Perkins hasn’t followed that advice.”
One year ago, journalist Jose Antonio Vargas revealed to the world that he was an undocumented immigrant — building his entire career, which included time at The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, on a lie. Vargas looks back at the past year in an interview with BuzzFeed, where he considers the weirdness of becoming an activist, his friends lost (many in the news industry), and his friends gained (Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron Sorkin). Great piece.
The Washington Post’s Jon Cohen notes that exit polls show the split between conservatives and liberals is roughly the same in Wisconsin between the 2010 election and tonight. (click for more)
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“Hello, this is Chen Guangcheng,” came a matter-of-fact, almost cheerful voice.
I introduced myself in halting Chinese, using my Chinese name and the Chinese name for The Washington Post. I asked how Chen was, and where. I asked him to speak slowly, to make sure I could understand.
“Washington Post?” Chen repeated, his voice sounding generally happy. Chen said he was fine and was in the car headed to the hospital, Chaoyang Hospital. He repeated the name slowly, three times.
And that was it. Chen handed the phone back to the ambassador, who said they were stuck in traffic, but promised a full briefing later.
The Post had a prior relationship with Chen Guangcheng, as they wrote an article on the dissident in 2005.
In this week’s Newsweek, a little...
Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
#@#$%!.tumblr.com
Here’s a hidden feature that shipped in...
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
Wrote a thing.
Hat tip to this headline writer.
While not confirmed by the Post, which has no comment, The Next Web has multiple sources telling them about the news, with TechCrunch reporting from a source or two of its own. If this was the case, it’d likely dovetail nicely into the Post’s recent push into social readers. Whatever happens, it probably won’t be as exciting as the company’s 2008 near-acquisition by Google, which fell through during the due diligence process but had a rumored valuation as high as $200 million. The company, long-associated with its TV host founder Kevin Rose, had a high-profile failure in 2010 when many of the site’s users left for Reddit after scorning a major redesign. (Disclosure: I work for the Washington Post Company, but not at the Post proper; I’d have no idea if this was actually happening. — Ernie @ SFB)
Katharine Zaleski, the Post’s executive director of digital news, told me today that Pexton’s description of an online operation focused on churning out content is inaccurate.
“We have incredibly high standards to the point where this idea [of Pexton’s] that we’re pumping things out is ridiculous when you compare us to some of the other news organizations that have people publish immediately [without editing],” she said.
Zaleski said BlogPost has copy editors that read over posts prior to publication, and work with writers. (She would not speak about Flock, citing Post policy to not comment on personnel matters.)
The blogger in question, Elizabeth Flock, left the paper last week after an article of hers was singled out by in an editor’s note for a “significant ethical lapse.” While some saw Pexton’s column as shining light on the pressure aggregators face (we offered a brief take here), others felt that Pexton was being sympathetic to someone who plagiarized. Zaleski also took issue with Pexton’s presentation of the issue as one of neglected younger employees, whose grievances he cited anonymously: “I have no idea what he’s talking about. I don’t know who he’s talking about. I’m young, so what does that mean?”
(Disclosure: I work for the Washington Post Company, but not at the Post proper. — Ernie @ SFB)
They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing. Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.The Post fails a young blogger (via frontofbook)
I think most people in Washington believe voters would make better decisions if they spent more time following politics. But I spend a lot of time following politics, and quite often, I couldn’t be happier that voters are tuning out the inanities that obsess this town. Better that they worry about real mountains rather than hyped-up molehills.
The Washington Post columnist has it right. Sure, these stories are fun, but they’re distractions that conveniently fill air during dead periods of the news cycle.
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