From Harry Shearer‘s channel on My Own Damn Channel. Gosh, TV would be SO much more interesting if everyone on it thought the camera was off, like, all the time.
QUESTION THE PARKING AUTHORITY: Inky Finds PPA Worker Comp Claims Are Astonishingly High
INQUIRER: Battling fires and fighting crime is risky work, to be sure, but those jobs have nothing on writing parking tickets. Or so it would seem, if workers’ compensation claims are any indication. Over the last four years, employees at the Philadelphia Parking Authority have reported being hurt on the job more than twice as often as city firefighters or police officers. As a result, the Parking Authority spends far more on settling workplace-injury claims: $1,558 per employee, compared with the firefighters’ average of $1,084 and the Police Department figure of $833, according to an Inquirer analysis of city and […]
THIS JUST IN: Terry Gross On The Simpsons
This Sunday! Check local listings…
NEWS CLUES: It’s Like Adderall For Your Eyeballs
WHEN ANCHORBABES ATTACK: Alycia Lane Set Free “I just want to say I’m so glad this is over,” said former CBS anchor Alycia Lane, as she left a New York City courthouse this morning. “And I want to thank all of those who supported me and believed in me. And I just look forward to moving on with my life now.” At the hearing (and as we reported would happen) Lane’s attorney David Smith and Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Michael Greenman agreed to an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, or ACD. It’s essentially a six-month-long slow dismissal of her case. […]
WORTH REPEATING: It’s The Incompetence, Stupid!
FRANK RICH: Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work. But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean […]
SOLD: Four Hundred North Broad
INQUIRER: Patriot Equities LP of Wayne says it has agreed to buy the Inquirer and Daily News headquarters in Center City and will seek to rezone and refurbish part of the underused complex for retail services. Philadelphia Media Holdings, which owns the building along with the two newspapers, the Philly.com Web site and other publications, will not comment on terms of the sale or plans for the site until a definitive agreement is signed, said Bill Luff, managing director at the Philadelphia office of Jones Lang LaSalle, the real estate firm advising Philadelphia Media Holdings. Philadelphia Media says it plans […]
BREAKING: NYT Drops Blonde Bombshell On McCain
WASHINGTON — Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers. A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity. When news organizations reported that […]
MEDIA: Goodbye Norma Jean
Actress Lindsay Lohan appears as she’s never been seen before in an exclusive photo portfolio by Bert Stern, restaging the photographer’s famous series of photos of Marilyn Monroe that came to be known as “The Last Sitting,” in the Spring Fashion issue of New York magazine, on sale today. Shot at the Hotel Bel-Air on February 5, the photos of Lohan as Monroe duplicate the 1962 originals down to the lighting, the shellacked blonde wig Lohan wears, and her willingness to appear in little more than a chiffon scarf. MORE
MEDIA: Morale Shits The Bed At Courier-Post?
The Gannett Newspapers chain has a miserly rep in the biz for buying up papers, sending in the bean counters and subjecting staff and management to brutal belt-tightening: freezing wages, killing bonuses and slashing newsroom jobs. This just came in over the transom from something called the Gannett Blog, which appears to be a gathering place for the disgruntled: I couldn’t make this up if I tried. A reliable Gannett Blog tipster says Corporate sent a human resources representative to the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J., yesterday after the Big Cheeses in McLean, Va., got a letter describing a serious […]
PAPERBOY EXTRA: Dead Man Whining
BY AMY Z. QUINN Courtesy our friends at the Washington (D.C.) City Paper, a cautionary tale about how to make make your newspaper’s online and print operations hate each other with only the contempt that bitter mid-career journalists can muster (hint: moving them to a different building might dilute the whole ‘we’re on the same team’ thing). Many people in the Post newsroom would prefer that their peers at washingtonpost.com restrict themselves to technical stuff. Post the brilliant news stories that come from 15th and L, put together slide shows, edit the videos, and go home. But it doesn’t work […]
PAPERBOY: ‘Duane’s Last Stand’ Edition
BY AMY Z. QUINN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and […]
PAPERBOY: ‘10,000 Men Missing In Action’ Edition
BY AMY Z. QUINN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and […]
MEDIA: Dumb & Dumber
BY AMY Z. QUINN For reasons that continue to elude us — newsroom cutbacks, perhaps — The Ottawa Herald, in the great state of Kansas, invited one of their pressmen (the guys that actually operate the giant presses that print the paper) to write a guest Op-Ed about Barack Obama. In the process, all involved manage to perpetuate every bullshit scary Obama The Islamo-Fascist Manchurian Candidate Internet meme in one giant, paranoid, journalistically-retarded swoop. From Wonkette: Well, now comes another bad idea … maybe even worse. The Democratic Party actually intends to put a Muslim fundamentalist in the White House. […]