Hans Eisenbeis I was wrong. Well, I certainly stepped in it last Friday when I wrote that the Strib had been scooped by Salon in announcing Al Franken’s return to Minnesota. It turns out that Salon was guilty of the follow-on, and the Star Tribune deserves the credit for the earlier story. Deborah Caulfield Rybak had the … Read more
It is certainly true that music magazines remain committed to music criticism without a lot of strong evidence that anyone is all that interested anymore. But I couldn’t let Pete Carbonara’s dismissive comments about our mutual former employer go unanswered. Someone needs to defend Spin’s honor, I think. First, no one expects Spin to be … Read more
You know it’s a slow week in news when the journalists are arguing amongst themselves about the cheekiness of interns. But that should not distract us from slightly less yawn-inducing progress of the Ship of State in its inexorable approach to the iceberg of international irrelevance. The good senator and Viagra spokesman Bob Dole writes … Read more
One of our favorite media writers is Stephanie Zecharek over at Salon. Years ago, she impressed us by seeing the future. In 1999, she griped about the sorry state of American music magazines—particularly Rolling Stone and Spin and similar titles—and predicted a successful English colonization of same. In the years since then, that is precisely … Read more
Some readers have written to ask whether it is ethical to take a published story and write your own version of it. In the news business this is called the “follow on,” and we’ve written about it at length before. The short answer is that it is perfectly ethical; the long answer is that it … Read more
See now some people are just willful about not getting it. Matt Taibbi—the man who is now best known as the author of the world’ most tasteless dead pope jokes—is not happy until he has found a pile of his own shit to goosestep through. In yesterday’s New York Press, he offers his long and … Read more
If you’re interested in hearing more inside dope on this month’s cover story about the man who caught Zacarias Moussaoui, we encourage you to tune in to CNN tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. Our writer, Dean Staley, will be interviewed about the story—just in time for the rumored acceptance of Moussaoui’s guilty plea, also scheduled for … Read more
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, they say, so we’re not all that upset that one of our esteemed competitors has appropriated an idea of ours (which we ourselves had appropriated). This kind of thing happens periodically—it is one of the conventions of publishing a periodical. Depending on your frequency, the institutional memory is … Read more
It’s hard to understand the hubris that allows Tom DeLay to more or less demand all-encompassing power over every living being. We guess it comes from having a strong sense of one’s own innate divinity. Why is it so difficult for Delay and his supporters to understand the concept of checks and balances? In a … Read more
Well, we’ve been following Kiefer Sutherland’s “24” each week, and last night they really stepped in it. The usual disclaimer at the beginning of the show might have warned not only that the show would be too violent for viewers without discretion, but that it would depict Americans committing odious, unamerican acts. See, here’s the … Read more