As Editor &
Publisher put it, "Zimmerman’s uncanny ability to pluck out content he
knew would be popular with readers allowed him to garner over 30 million page
views a month, as much as five times more page views than his next highest
colleague. That led the Wall Street Journal to dub him 'the most popular
blogger working on the web today' and New York Magazine called him a
'one-man viral treasure chest.'"
And one piece of
advice he's got for local newspapers, even if small, "is to get away from
wire stories and have someone on staff aggregate national content. In
resource-starved newsrooms, it’s easy to simply drop in a wire story when
national news breaks, but it’s certainly not helping your brand stand out in
the sea of content swimming around on the internet." Whatever, here's a
revealing piece on him with the latest Twitter numbers only underscoring
his success at an unlikely locale, an insider paper on Capitol Hill.
Globally, the most
retweeted tweets the past year were:
And
the top three most liked tweets were:
As
you can see, of the most retweeted and the most liked, one by Obama, made both
lists: his response to the Charlottesville, Virginia, violence in August.
There, a photo taken
by White House photographer Pete Souza in June 2011 —
Obama with pre-school children in Bethesda, Maryland, who were peering out of a
window at their child care facility — was twinned with a Nelson Mandela
quote: "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his
skin or his background or his religion ..."
Within 72 hours it
generated 3.3 million likes and 1.3 million retweets. It now has more than 4.5
million Likes. Obama has third place with his acknowledgment of Sen. John
McCain's diagnosis of cancer.
Digital ad
spending passes TV by
"We’ve been
headed here for a while. But this was the year it actually happened:
Advertisers spent more on digital than traditional TV," writes
Recode.
"To be specific:
Digital ad spending reached $209 billion worldwide — 41 percent of the market —
in 2017, while TV brought in $178 billion — 35 percent of the market — in 2017.
That’s according to Magna, the research arm of media buying firm IPG
Mediabrands."
Oprah makes
$70 million and retains OWN control
"Discovery
Communications Inc. is taking majority control of OWN, the cable network it
co-owns with Oprah Winfrey."
"Under
the terms of the deal, Discovery said it has purchased 24.5% of OWN for $70
million from Ms. Winfrey’s company, Harpo Inc. Ms. Winfrey’s Harpo will still
hold a 25.5% stake in OWN, which had previously been a 50/50 joint venture, and
Ms. Winfrey will continue as chief executive of the network."
Manafort's
favorite (not) blogger at it again
Last month I profiled
Katia Kelly, a German-born former aspiring fashion
designer who started a neighborhood blog in Brooklyn and stumbled upon the
curious and incriminating purchase history of a brownstone that's now evidence
in the money laundering case against former Trump campaign manager Paul
Manafort.
Well, she's at it
again in her Pardon Me for Asking blog:
"Over the
week-end, PMFA received an email from a local resident pointing out that Paul
J. Manafort's brownstone building at 377 Union Street between Smith and Hoyt
Streets had received a Stop Work order from the NYC Department of
Buildings."
"The order
was prominently displayed to the front door of the property on Sunday
afternoon, when we walked by with our camera to check ourselves."
"That however,
does not seem to have stopped work. According to the resident, construction
workers 'have been working at night. The Sheriff drove up and they shut lights
off. Sheriff drove away, they resumed work. Lights on at night for weeks.
Sadly, this charade goes on every weekend. And at night.'"
"In effect
several 311 calls about after-hours work have been logged on the D.O.B. website
for this address since October." Here's
the whole tale.
A union move
in Los Angeles
Editorial staff of
the Los Angeles Times filed for a union election Monday with the National Labor
Relations Board. They've cast their bargaining lot with The NewsGuild, whose
members include editorial staff at The New York Times, Reuters, The Wall
Street Journal, The Washington Post and the AP. They've formally requested
what's known as voluntary recognition by what amounts to new management, as
opposed to going through a formal election process overseen by the NLRB.
"This vote marks
a historic moment in the life of the Los Angeles Times," says Jim
O'Shea, former editor of the paper. "The Newspaper Guild has
attempted to organize the newsroom on other occasions but has never succeeded
until this successful vote to get recognition. The longtime owners the Chandler
family were bitterly anti-union. Unions scared the bejesus out of the Tribune
Company and Sam Zell, also former owners."
"So now we'll
see how Tronc responds. I don't blame the staff. Journalists are notoriously
independent and not philosophically warm to unions. But journalists face a
daunting economic future that makes a compelling case for banding together to
fight for the one thing that really unites them — quality journalism. I
hope the company sees the value of working with their employees, whether in a
union or not, to give the great city of Los Angeles the kind of news it and its
citizens deserve." Management had no comment on the union
effort.
A big First
Amendment argument today
There's a big oral
argument today at the Supreme Court as it hears the seemingly landmark
case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which
involves the constitutionality of the Colorado Anti-discrimination Act. That
act makes it unlawful for any business in Colorado to deny to any person,
because of race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation or national origin, the
full and equal enjoyment of the business’ goods, services or facilities.
As the University of
Chicago Law School's Geoffrey Stone makes clear in The
Huffington Post, Jack Phillips, who owns the shop in Lakewood,
Colorado, declined to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple, making the
legal argument that he can't be forced to do so since doing so
would violate both his freedom of speech and freedom of religion rights
under the First Amendment.
"On both of
these claims, Phillips is wrong," Stone explains. Here's his
critique of the freedom of speech claim.
In search of
transparency
"At the Poynter
Institute’s inaugural Journalism Ethics Summit, held at NPR headquarters in
Washington, D.C., journalists, advocates and scholars emphasized
the need for trust and transparency in reporting. The gathering was funded
by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, which provides funding to Poynter."
“'I think there’s
mystery about how we go about our work,' Marty Baron, executive editor of
the Washington Post, told Poynter’s Indira Lakshmanan. 'Lets
just be more transparent about how we pursued the story.'”
Ben Bradlee,
'The Newspaperman'
Tom Hanks plays the late Washington Post editor in the soon to
arrive movie, "The Post," but you'd best also find HBO's new
"The Newspaperman." It's a terrific and inventive job that makes
skillful use of his 1996 autobiography, "A Good Life;" in fact,
heavily relying on his voicing the audiobook version.
It's a tale of a man
who loved the newsroom and helped to inspire a mythological sense of The Post
with nerve and panache. It was a place that even intimidated the likes of David
Maraniss, the reporter-historian, when he arrived because Bradley had
lured so much talent, Maraniss concedes.
It's got his highs
(Watergate) and lows (unsparing on the Janet Cooke fabrication
debacle, as was Bradlee in printing an 18,000-word post-mortem on the
institutional failure). And much more (including a
post-retirement interview by Charlie Rose that,
unavoidably, looks awkward due to recent events). And it's got its ethical
ambiguities, notably revealing (apparently new) video of him and his second
wife palling around with President John Kennedy and Jaqueline
Kennedy while the Post was obviously covering them.
Ultimately, it's
about a guy who adored a great story and explained his essence in a response to
a high school senior and editor of her high school paper. His response
comprises the film's finale and is alternately read by a group
including son Quinn, Norman Lear, Tina
Brown, Tom Brokaw, Robert Kaiser, David
Remick and Jim Lehrer. It ends, "I believe in
compassion."
The latest
Brian Ross error
At the same Ethics
Summit gathering, the blunder by ABC's Brian Ross was an unavoidable topic.
“The damage that Brian
Ross did by getting that story wrong I think is significant,” said National
Review’s Jonah Goldberg. "Getting it wrong, even for
understandable reasons, is really, really damaging.”
“I think there’s
something about television,” said CNN reporter Brian Stelter. "Ross’
authority came through on camera. All of that backfired on him.”
A very neat
graphic
Axios had one on
how white men have dominated the "Album of the Year" category at the
Grammy awards since the awards' inception in 1959 — until this year, with no
male artists nominated. Check
this out.
The moral and
ethical ambiguity of sketch comedy
Chris Jones, theater critic for the Chicago Tribune, crafted a very
provocative piece on the
untidiness of improvisational comedy, in particular the arguable sex
harassment that coursed through even its highest levels at Chicago's
path-breaking Compass Players and Second City, the latter the training ground
for a who's who for decades, including Tina Fey and Stephen
Colbert.
A lot of his piece
turns on "the sacred creative notion of not denying your own impulse —
something that comes up often in the history of American actor training,
especially the method created by the great Sanford Meisner." But it's a
notion that "has, we now know, provided the cover to allow a lot of men to
engage in various levels of harassment."
For example, he notes
how he was watching “Second to None,” a full-length, fly-on-the-wall
documentary made by HMS Media that was about a a 1997 Second City show called
“Paradigm Lost,” one of its best ever. It was directed by Mick Napier,
and starred Fey, Rachel Dratch, Scott Adsit, Jenna
Jolovitz, Kevin Dorff and Jim Zulevic.
"It was a show I
never will forget. If the 1990s were the Florence of Chicago improv, 'Paradigm
Lost' has long felt to me as Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel."
"But as I
watched Dratch don improvised headgear and become a Middle Eastern woman in one
now-famous sketch, I was struck by how little of the material in 'Paradigm
Lost' would pass muster today. Much of it would be viewed as cultural
appropriation and a manifestation of white privilege. And, indeed, there were
no people of color in the cast. There’s another famous sketch in 'Paradigm
Lost' featuring a woman in fear for her life. Since these performers are so brilliant,
and since we now know so much we did not know then, it is difficult to watch
now. I once thought it among the greatest sketches I had ever seen. Out of
thousands. I am no longer so sure."
Lechery in fashion
Amid allegations of
sexual harassment against a famous fashion photographer, the Business of
Fashion raises
several questions, including one that "cuts to the quick of fashion’s
main mission, namely, selling sex."
"Fashion
photographers are grand architects and auteurs of our cultural gaze, famed, at
least in part, for the erotic frisson of their pictures, frisson which has been
counted on to turn into a desire on the part of the beholder, desire to be like
their subjects in some way, to be with them, to be where they are, to be who we
think they are, to dress like them, to interact with them in our own, personal
fantasy lives. This alchemical reaction, from allure to point of sale, is
fundamental to the very existence of the fashion industry. How to reckon with
this? And how now to deal with the imagery — some of it beloved, iconic —
created by alleged abusers?"
The morning
Babel
"Trump &
Friends" predictably heralded the Supreme Court upholding Trump's travel
ban. Meanwhile, both "Morning Joe" on MSNBC and CNN's "New
Day" rolled its eyes over Trump personal attorney John Dowd's claim
and obvious legal strategy that the president cannot obstruct justice, a matter
broached again during a Trump weekend tweet about Michael Flynn.
