Thursdays. Better than Wednesdays. Not quite Fridays.
Give it this, if I go down a flight of stairs from my office on a Thursday afternoon, you’d think all of the world has been called home for salvation. There is something about a Thursday afternoon that empties out the central building on campus. It is peaceful, in a bewildering sort of way.
I was all prepared to be dreary about the entire day. It has been cold this week, clear, but cold. So I have been cold. And that gets a little less fun every time. But the sun has been out at times. And now it is getting warmer. And we’re looking at around 70 for the weekend. So that makes things better.
Also, Jean-Claude Van Damme:
It was, as you might imagine, a tough sell, even to a movie hero:
What this commercial really says, you might think, is “I’m ready for my comeback, world.” But JCVD never really left. He’s in a new movie due out next year, which will be his 13 this decade.
Things to read …
‘Gloves come off’ as journalists debunk each other’s Obamacare horror stories. When you are down to the “fact checkers fact checking the fact checkers” story you know you’re getting somewhere:
In the not-so-distant past, mainstream news organizations generally avoided direct criticism of their competitors’ journalism. While it wasn’t unusual for newspapers and broadcasters to follow up on other organizations’ reporting – and sometimes find errors in those earlier stories — such matters traditionally were handled relatively politely.
“Sometimes we would say, ‘Contrary to reports published elsewhere,’ ” recalled Hiltzik, a 40-year newspaper veteran.
But Hiltzik no longer sees the need for such restraint when calling out competing news organizations. As he sees it, the media now promote their stories more loudly, and some organizations tinge them with partisan politics.
“That’s an invitation for the gloves to come off,” he said. “If CNBC is crowing about discovering something and we know they haven’t discovered anything, we should say so.”
Mainstream news organizations’ newfound aggression in fact-checking their fellow journalists may also be a reaction to the rise of websites that offer critiques of the media’s political coverage. Sites such as the liberal Media Matters for America and the conservative Newsbusters helped carve out a new type of media analysis that’s constantly rebutting and fact-checking individual news stories, talk-show interviews, and other political-related content.
Traditional news organizations that delve into media commentary often find it’s popular with readers.
And there it is. The other guy is biased, and my audience likes when I point that out.
For the record, I’m all for peer review and fact checking in general.
Remember when Boston stood for something? Blogger threatened with 10-year prison sentence for posting public official’s phone number. A journalism student recorded and published a portion of a phone call with a police department PIO. That individual — filed a criminal complaint. The details of which would seem to refute her complaint under Massachusetts law. A blogger caught the story and published this … ahem … public servant’s public phone number on his site. Now she’s pressing charges against him:
An outraged Miller blogged about the incident. “Maybe we can call or e-mail Richardson to persuade her to drop the charges against Hardy considering she should assume all her conversations with reporters are on the record unless otherwise stated,” Miller wrote, providing readers with Richardson’s work phone number.
That produced still more calls to Richardson’s work phone. Apparently, the calls alarmed Richardson, because last week Miller received notice about another application for a criminal complaint. This one accused Miller of witness intimidation, a crime that carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
“I’ve never spoken once to Angeline Richardson, who I’m supposedly intimidating,” Miller says. “I’ve never sent her an e-mail, never made a phone call.” And he says that there’s been no allegations that his readers have threatened Richardson.
People are being threatened by police for sharing already publicly available information. And this is in modern Boston, the incubator of freedom, making all of this even dumber than it should be on its own merits.
(UPDATE: The complaints have rightly been dropped.)
This is a good story and a brilliant design by the folks at New York Times Magazine. Read it on a computer, not a phone or tablet: A Game of Shark and Minnow. This may be one of those pieces you can refer to in layout sessions, or at cocktail parties when you need to one up the new guy.
This family has had 34 foster kids in their home. And now they’re holding a 5K awareness event. Some kind of story.
And then there’s this quote, “It’s a hard thing for your heart when they go home, but it’s an incredible blessing for your family and to a community that will open their homes and hearts to do that. We’re honored to be a part of it.”
But the quote of the day award, if there was such a thing, goes to this nice lady on Humans of New York.
Curiously, that’s the same thing Jean-Claude Van Damme said before that video.
