Wisconsin governor Scott Walker made his name with a coldblooded campaign to destroy public sector unions. Pro-union Wisconsinites tried to recall Walker; they failed. This has led to some gloating and speculation from the usual suspects (Rich Lowry, nice blazer, hair boy) that the death knell has formally sounded for unions in America.
Documents released last night show that not only did the CIA and Department of Defense offer extremely cozy access to filmmakers Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow for their forthcoming thriller about the operation to kill Osama bin Laden—they seemed to give up previously unreleased details about the raid's origins.
Here is a story on the New York Post's website about a jury ruling that Americo Lopes, a New Jersey man who hit a $77 million lottery jackpot, must share his winnings with his coworkers, who were in a lottery pool with him. The details of this story are unimportant. It is fascinating because, like a petri dish freshly set with agar gel, it has attracted every variety of Awful Internet Commenter. Behold:
Greg Kelly, NYC Fox News anchor and son of police commissioner Ray Kelly, is off the hook on rape charges after police decided that his accuser actually had a consensual encounter with him, then changed her story when her boyfriend found out. Fine. Only Kelly and the woman really know what happened. But why is the New York Post such an extremely gleeful Greg Kelly defender?
We take a backseat to no one when it comes to spewing forth venom at the public relations industry. But we feel compelled to stand up and make this point: PR people doing research on what reporters have written and making a file on that topic is not a scandal. It is the same thing that reporters do, okay?
Maybe you haven't seen Bloomberg BusinessWeek's very edgy and risque new cover? With two airplanes having sex to symbolize airline mergers (-"cockpit" joke here-) ? Well if you haven't it's after the jump, along with an in-depth look at the creative process behind this artwork.
LAS VEGAS — It only took 24 hours for the Stockholm Syndrome to set in. It was after the huge, boomerang-sized crab legs had been cleared away and the Wagyu beef had been consumed and all the after-dinner whiskeys had been drained and they'd ushered us past the hundreds of ordinary suckers and through the VIP entrance of the Caesar's Palace nightclub and set us up with a private table and bottle service so we could recline on a couch and watch all the drunk bachelorette party girls shake their asses at the bar in front of us, and the doorman smiled warmly at us and the attractive waitress smiled warmly at us and the PR people smiled warmly at us and we, the journalists, all smiled warmly at each other and took it all in, and I thought to myself, "Vegas, baby!" Vegas, baby. It likes me. And I like it.
How did Silicon Valleys bigwigs react when their favorite trade publication adopted strict new conflicts of interest policies? They banded together to pay someone else to cover them.
There's a power change at aspiring investigative powerhouse the Huffington Post: Managing editor Nico Pitney is out, and Arianna Huffington's assistant — sorry, "chief of staff" — Jimmy Soni is in. He's 26, a swing dancer, barefoot runner, trilingual, and new to this whole editing and reporting thing.
Public relations is about "relationships." Flacks develop "relationships" with reporters by calling them and yelling at them until the reporters start to realize, before they write something, that an unpleasant conversation might ensue. So they start to be...more careful. We recently came across an internal email written by Daniel Senor, the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, that summed up the dynamic in crystalline fashion.
In the cutthroat market for Trend Stories Centered in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, it pays to be the early bird. Not only does the neighborhood, populated by desperately trend-hungry fauxhemians, constantly cycle through the very latest microtrends; but its status as America's prototypical "hip neighborhood" means that even the merest hint of a new Williamsburg microtrend is almost immediately packaged and distributed by the equally trend-hungry media, to be feasted upon by the voyeuristic, trend-hungry public.
It's an awful thing to say about human nature, but plainly true: we're fascinated by crime, the more awful the better. And when those awful crimes happen to beautiful people, well, humanity can't get enough.
The trend of fashionable young Brooklynites either A) leaving Brooklyn to go work/ live on/ start a farm or B) participating in unlikely farming-related activities right here in the city (including, but not limited to: keeping of livestock, harvesting of chicken products, planting of gardens, or sociopathic devotion to neighborhood farmer's markets and their accoutrements) is so old, in trend years, that it's already been dissected from every possible angle by the New York Times, which is, itself, always several light years behind, in trend years. The trend has now moved to a post-trend media outlet unconcerned with being judged by those who define themselves by their participation in trends: the New York Post.
Ophadell Williams was the driver of the Chinatown bus that crashed on its way back to New York from Mohegan Sun Casino last weekend, killing 15 people. Any one of us could be Ophadell Williams.
