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William B. Dennis

Adding some tasty beauty to this site

I heard this woman on NPR the other day. I thought: “Wow, what A sexy accent. I wonder what she looks like?”

Nigella Lawson

Yeah. pretty much what I imagined.

Politics: A memo about talking points

As noted in IlliniPundit and Capitol Fax Blog, the McCain campaign web site is posting talking points and is asking supporters to get the word out. Many are taking this as instructions to copy and paste the talking points into blogs, either as posts or comments.

This is nothing new, albeit a but more blunt than how it’s usually done. Rush Limbaugh has spent years teaching his listeners how to use humor and ridicule to result arguments from the left (a task that is sometimes not all that hard). Democrats do the same.

Both IP and CapFax are on a suggested list of blogs to target. Both ask readers to not do that, with Mr. Miller going as far as to threaten banning.

I’m half-tempted to issue the same warning. This sort of fake grass-roots stuff drives me nuts. I didn’t hesitate to toss letters to the editor that appeared in other publications.

But I have an endless supply of space on this blog, while empty space on an editorial page is limited. I’m not likely to delete as much as I am to ridicule.

So be warned.

Media: Philly newspaper decides speed up its demise

The Philadelphia Inquirer has issued orders that no news articles be placed on the newspaper’s Website until AFTER the story appears in print. This includes “signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts.” Some breaking news might make it to their site, but that’s it. Sounds sort of like the way PJStar.com used to be. Now, many routine stories, features, columns and editorials appear hours before deadline and the day’s edition is sent to the printer.

Blogger/online news advocate Jeff Jarvis offered this advice to Inquirer staffers:

Get the hell out now! Get away from these fools or you’ll get it on you. Let’s hold a new Norg meeting right now and organize a competitor to the ailing Inquirer. It won’t take much to kill it now. Let’s put it out of its misery.

To which I responded:

Jeff, you are missing the big picture. This is actually GOOD news for the future of online journalism. Print journalism is dead. The body just hasn’t stopped moving. By tossing all their news onto the Web for free, newspapers are freezing out online start-ups that would probably need to charge a small subscription fee to survive. Much smaller, in fact, than the cost of home delivery.

In other words, by offering for free what their would-be competitors would have to offer for a fee, newspapers’ free Web sites are an anti-competitive act.

By insisting that their news must appear on paper first, the Inquirer is actually opening the door for an online start up. I’m sure that there are forward-thinking entrepreneurs who are thinking that Philly is now a target rich environment.

The best thing that could happen for the news gathering industry would be for a newspaper like the Inquirer to vanish off the face of the earth and be replaced with an online-only norg (love that term, BTW). It would scare the rest into evolving, at last.

Jarvis makes a ton of good points in this post and in the one referenced in the quote.

Seriously, people. Delivering news by newspaper during the digital age is sorta like traveling cross country by covered wagon right after construction of the Interstate Highway System.

Media: Damn liberal media …

I am continually sickened at how the liberal media protects Barack Obama. Case in point:

Officials of the U.S. Secret Service say there is nothing they could have done to avoid an incident yesterday in which Barack Obama was heckled by a strangely behaving man in the press section during an appearance at an Ohio college.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was beginning a town-hall style meeting at Baldwin-Wallace College when John Quinn, a freelance photographer on assignment for Bloomberg News, interrupted him by calling on him to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Senator Obama went along and led the crowd through the pledge.

Mr. Quinn subsequently refused to give his name to other journalists in the press pen. A video of the incident shows Mr. Quinn shoving his hand into camera lenses, shouting at other reporters, and responding to requests for his name and press affiliation by saying, “I was speaking as John Q. Public.”

“Nobody wants to honor the flag,” Mr. Quinn says in the video. “I had to speak up.”

And:

Judith Czelusniak, a spokeswoman for Bloomberg News, confirmed today that Mr. Quinn was on assignment for her company. “He was hired for that assignment, and there are no more assignments scheduled,” she said.

You see how the liberal media works? They FIRED the guy … just for stating an opinion. Outrageous!

Media: PJS columnist a ‘caveman?’ No, just observant (UPDATED)

I’m not much of a fan of sports columnist Mike Nadel. So I didn’t read the column in question when it first appeared. I’m not surprised there would be a reaction:

Earlier this week, Peoria Journal Star columnist Mike Nadel wrote that ESPN sideline reporter Erin Andrews dressed and acted like a “sexpot” in the Chicago Cubs clubhouse, and the world — sports fans, journalists, the blogosphere and beyond — has responded in force.

The ensuing firestorm has spurred columns calling Nadel “reckless, in search of cheap fame, a caveman, resentful of women, crusty and out of touch.”

It has also elicited columns backing Nadel, like one from Chicago Tribune sports columnist Teddy Greenstein that quotes FSN Wisconsin’s Trenni Kusnierek as saying Andrews’ dress and conduct damaged “an entire gender.”

First, Nadel technically isn’t a columnist for the Peoria Journal Star. He writes for GateHouse News Service, and the Journal Star picks up his column about Chicago sports teams.

Among Nadel’s critics is Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti, who is himself almost universally loathed by athletes and sports reporters alike for being lazy, a blowhard and refusal to face criticism. Mariotti wrote that Nadel’s column was, among other things, an example of an anti-ESPN attitude among sports media.

Feh. Mariotti is a paid contributor to ESPN. And it’s hardly a secret that ESPN and other cable sports outlets make a habit of hiring young, attractive women. It just might have something to do with the fact that their audience tends to be young a male.

What Nadel observed isn’t just that Erin Andrews is an attractive woman. The fact that television reporters — male and female — are very often attractive people is an observation not unique to Nadel.

What he observed was that she dressed a bit more provocatively than one should inside a locker room. He observed that she flirted with the athletes. He observed that the players were ogling her and making comments among themselves.

Her later statement that she thinks the athletes treat her like a sister is naive.

If Erin Andrews wants to be taken seriously, she needs to act like it. Male sports reporters aren’t taken seriously when they act like fanboys. Female reporters who act like giggly groupies also aren’t respected. The problem with Andrews isn’t that she’s an attractive female who isn’t being taken seriously. The problem is that she needs to grow up. THEN she will be taken seriously.

UPDATE: Never let it be said that I will allow the quality of this blog to slip. Here is the a photograph of Erin Andrews taken at the ballpark on the day Nadel writes about:

Short skirt? Check. Low-cut neckline? Check. Inappropriate? That is up to her bosses. Her behavior? Nadel says one thing. She says another.

My take is this: Nadel didn’t sound like a caveman, or a prude. He was writing about what he perceived. A  journalist — whose skills he never questioned — was behaving in a way he didn’t think was appropriate nor necessary for her to do her job. He wasn’t criticizing her for being too atractive, but for behavior and dress that were entirely under her control.