While reviewing the best online coverage of election day, CNN’s press office dropped us a line about the ‘magic board’ - a map of the states which will be used by presenter John King to show the results and forecasts as they come in.
For anyone who loves/loathes a good swing-o-meter, here’s Saturday Night Live’s take on it:
A CNN report from outside collapsed investment bank Lehman Brothers was on the receiving end of a prank from the Howard Stern show yesterday.
In an unlikely segue, the channel’s anchor said the two men kissing in the background of the live report were ‘obviously trying to make light of a bad situation, pretending to “console each other” out there’.
According to the New York Observer, the pair ‘making out’ were in fact Stern Show employees Richard Christy and Sal Governale.
Tags: CNN, funny, Howard Stern, Lehman Brothers, Richard Christy, Sal Governale, the Howard Stern show, the New York ObserverThe death of Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs was prematurely announced yesterday afternoon by Bloomberg.
A pre-prepared stock obituary was accidentally posted to Bloomberg’s corporate client wire service, even through the story was marked ‘Hold for release – Do not use’.
It was quickly spotted by a user, and sent to Gawker.com, where the obituary can still be read in full.
Bloomberg was quick to retract the story, and yesterday published a message on its wire saying: “An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m.New York time today.”
At Telegraph.co.uk Matthew Moore reports: “The stock obituary was published ‘momentarily’ after a routine update by a reporter, and was ‘immediately deleted’, Bloomberg said.”
According to Moore, ‘Jobs has been reluctant to publicly discuss his health, but recently denied claims that his cancer [from which he has previously suffered] had returned’.
Tags: apple, Apple Inc., Bloomberg, cancer, funny, Matthew Moore, New York, Steve Jobs, Telegraph.co.uk, USASky News’ online section ‘Georgia In Depth’ is an aggregation of pictures, articles and info about the eastern European country, which borders with Russia, as part of coverage of the current conflict in the region
So that’s the Georgia between sandwiched between Europe and Asia and not the US state then?
If you’re going to use Wikipedia, at least get the right entry. Thank goodness for the disclaimer… it’s no one’s fault!
(Also, why does the site publish Wikipedia excerpts at all if, as the disclaimer suggests, Sky News has little faith in their accuracy?)
Tags: funny, Georgia, Sky, Sky NewsTwo new aggregation sites have been set up: Kiyoshi Martinez’s Journalism.me and Darren Stuart’s CrowdStatus.com.
Martinez, who is also responsible for Angy Journalist, is using the site to aggregate feeds from a host of bloggers, news sources, journalism job sites and training centres.
CrowdStatus.com lets a user specify a group or ‘crowd’ of Twitter users and then aggregates their updates on one page. It only works with Twitter at the moment, but Stuart plans to add Facebook updates and Seesmic vids.
On a completely different note (boom,boom!) for anyone who hasn’t come across JournalRhythm, it needs no more explanation than - it’s news to a beat…
Tags: aggregation, Darren Stuart, funny, Kiyoshi MartinezFirst it was fellow reviewer Feargus O’Sullivan, then it was The Times’ subbing team that felt the wrath of food critic Giles Coren (thanks to MediaMonkey for the links).
Now someone doing a good impression of the writer has popped up on Twitter to bring Coren’s unique brand of swearing to the microblogging masses.
(For those of you who don’t like bad language, look away now)
Following the surge of comments generated by Charlie Brooker’s Comment is Free article, he’s asking this week what impact search engine optimisation could have on the quality of journalism online.
To take his point to the extreme Brooker gives us a fully SEO-ready article complete with celebrity names, certain pharmaceutical brands and political links (I’d mention them by name but that would start a kind of SEO vicious circle for this post).
As one commenter points out, Brooker’s got it spot on - at the time of writing his article occupies the top five slots when you Google the key SEO terms shown below:
Jokes aside - Telegraph.co.uk’s Shane Richmond has given us some insight into the site’s SEO strategy, would be good to hear what might be going on with the Guardian.
Tags: Charlie Brooker, funny, google, search engine, Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk, The GuardianI’m late coming to this posting on Regret the Error (which I found through Dave Lee’s blog), but it’s too good not to post.
Site OneNewsNow - part of the American Family News network - has a filter set up that automatically substitutes the word ‘gay’ in copy for ‘homosexual’.
When some Associated Press copy came in about US Olympic hopeful Tyson Gay it was all a bit much:
Tags: funny“Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday. . . Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: ‘A little fatigued’.”
USA Today’s OnDeadline blog has picked up on a secret message from outgoing Washington Post journalist Linton Weeks.
Weeks is one of over 100 staff who have accepted buyouts at the paper.
(Need a clue: look at the opening of each par)
Tags: funny, USA Today, Washington PostAll journalists have had days when none of your calls are returned and multiple voicemail messages bear no fruit. On occasion I’ve wished someone would just tell me they weren’t going to answer.
Still there’s no need for the reaction given to Folio’s senior editor, digital, Dylan Stableford by another B2B publisher, as he followed up a legitimate tip on job cuts at US B2B publisher Edgell.
“I left messages for Edgell’s chairman and CEO Gabriele Edgell, COO Dan Ligorner and president Gerry Ryerson late last week seeking comment, as well as sent e-mails to a bunch of staffers listed on their contact page,” writes Stableford.
His inquiries finally received an email response - though perhaps not what he was after:
From: Gerry Ryerson
Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 5:11 PM
To: Dylan Stableford
Cc: Tony Silber; Dan Ligorner; Gabriele Edgell
Subject: RE: folio: inquiryDylan,
We don’t have any information we’d like to share about our company right now. If we had a comment Gabriele, Dan or I would have returned your calls. I’d also appreciate you not continuing to contact everyone on our mastheads as its just a distraction to our business.
GerryGerald C. Ryerson
President
You’d think he’d know better…
Tags: business to business, Dan Ligorner, Dylan Stableford, Edgell, Folio, funny, Gabriele Edgell, Gerry Ryerson, media, Tony Silber
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