From this week’s episode of Canadian Idol, where 70s songbird Anne Murray was the featured performer. Host Ben Mulroney really set up the punchline:

” … The first out-of-the-box moment came when Mulroney turned to judge Sass Jordan and asked her about “four dudes doin’ Anne Murray.”

Of course he was referring to the four remaining male contestants performing covers of Murray’s songs …”

We all know what Lawrence would do with $1 million, let alone $2 million.

John McEnroe. Older, still passionate about tennis and opinionated. A wonderful profile in the NY Times magazine.

McEnroe is also the first to admit that “I’m not mellow, I’m mellower,” which means, says his wife, “he’s an affectionate guy, a happy guy and man can he get freaking angry.” This is to say that McEnroe’s encounters with meter maids and state troopers take more out of him than they do most people. “He never goes off on meter maids,” Smyth says. “He just ices them. It’s the worst. You don’t want that wind blowing your way.” When can’t he hold back? “Traffic jams,” she says thinly.

From the New York Times:

• “When writing songs, he said, he keeps copious notes on yellow legal pads and lugs the paperwork around in dozens of shopping bags.”
• He has played the XL Center in Hartford sixteen times.

Shopping bags? Really? Publix? Can you date and geolocate his songs based on the bags?

Earlier today, a truck overturned on the Trans-Canada Highway. There was a slight hiccup, though. The truck was carrying 12 million bees used to pollinate crops. The media, of course, showed up in force to cover the story.

After all, who’s going to miss a potential swarming death?

” … [RCMP Sargeant Dan] Strong said there were no serious injuries although a reporter trying to get a clip of the bees buzzing, suffered 15 stings.

“It’s all about the clip,” he laughed. (Canwest News)

For amusing footage of reporters waving their hands in the air, check out this .mov clip from the CBC.

Never a lesson in media analysis - that’s me. Never a class in evaluating media sources, identifying themes or performing content analysis. My only teacher? George Carlin.

Seriously. For a period in the mid-Sixties, George Carlin disguised his growing irritation with mainstream culture with highly effective satire. Social commentary that was still palatable to the folks who tuned into Johnny Carson or Ed Sullivan.

This was before he grew a beard, started swearing during his act and began getting kicked out of his Vegas shows.

Instead, Carlin cut right into contemporary attitudes towards sensitive topics like the war in Vietnam, increasing recreational drug use, and the Cold War - with a hilarious fake radio newscasts.

“Now I imagine that some of you were surprised by the weather over the weekend … especially if you watched my show Friday night, man ….”

And that was how I learned to question the authenticity of news reports, evaluate their underlying assumptions, and infer their greater impact on society.

Thanks, George!

Technorati Tags: George Carlin, media analysis, Al Sleet

Mark Kingwell, a Professor at the University of Toronto, and Malcolm Gladwell, you know him, sat down to discuss social change at the University of Toronto last week.

Eye Weekly had some biting remarks about their exchange:

“… Gladwell cautioned any exchange between him and Kingwell was bound to turn into “an incredibly boring love-in” – punctured only by the fact that Kingwell’s review of The Tipping Point called him “a shallow and unconvincing thinker”. Yet, a retaliation of sorts took shape, and it involved antagonizing the philosophy professor with talking points straight out of Alex P. Keaton’s precocious playbook.

Seat belt use, chemical company compliance and same-sex marriage legalization were raised by Gladwell as three examples where “awareness and engagement” had nothing to do with their adoption. “We have come to fetishize the knowing part when we should pay more attention to the mechanics of doing.”

And which figure does Gladwell consider the biggest hypocrite in that regard? Al Gore, who did nothing to raise environmental awareness during eight years as vice-president. Not long after he’s no longer able to affect policy, he makes a movie. “Then we put him up on a pedestal,” sneers Gladwell. “And that represents everything that’s wrong with the way we view social change.”

Kingwell went for a more intense response that drew on his recovering Catholic theological background, suggesting that everything you need to know about social change can apparently be seen in Conversion on the Way to Damascus, a painting by Caravaggio. And how the Corinthians quote about “Faith, Hope, Love” is not about romance, but the responsibility to be charitable: “It’s not enough to comfort the afflicted,” he said. “We also must afflict the comfortable.” …”

Technorati Tags: Gladwell, Kingwell, social theory, social change

I think we’ve all noticed a rush to Facebook as a source for journalists, especially when someone under the age of 25 suffers an untimely death.

In Europe, sites like Bebo are providing similar information.

Which is why the British Press Complaints Commission is looking into how journos use social networks and content found online in their reporting. The essential question is: when can information and media posted online be repurposed by journalists (and others)?

More information can be found in an interview between BBC reporter Chris Vallance and the head of the PCC.

The indicators of Facebook addiction are easy to spot. The first article reporting the tragedy usually includes:

• a candid low-res photos of the victim, bylined “Facebook”
• quotes from several of the victim’s friend
• some mention of the victim’s aspirations
• a reference to a recent trip, party or getaway with friends

Subsequent updates often mention group and school affiliations, reference to rememberance sites on Facebook, and favourite bands. Oh - and speculation from “friends” about the role of substance abuse, inappropriate or ill-considered behaviour, or school group dynamics in the death.

In short, all the personal detail and reaction that reporters have always found hard to get - and mainly by doorstopping a grieving family minutes after they learned of the death.

h/t to Chris Vallance via Robin Hamman

Come on. Give me a break.

“… a Grande Latte provides you with half the dairy you need for the day …”

That was part of the copy in a full page got milk? ad in this weekend’s New York Times magazine.

Sure. Half the dairy you need, at triple the price.

Have you noticed how A&E is no longer all about frilly dresses, powdered wigs and hoity toity accents? That’s called channel drift - the gradual shift in identity that signals a channel’s concentration on a new demographic (or, more frequently, grasping onto a fleeting viewer trend).

(Not to be confused with channel creep, where your once favourite channels creep up the “dial” - with PBS suddenly finding itself at channel 64. We’re back to the 1970s, where you had to dial high into the UHF band to find some of the less popular television channels. “No, you have to tweak the knob, or else you can’t lock in the horizontal hold. The station’s antenna isn’t that tall. Is it raining between here and Massena?”)

TV Squad has a lengthy, but funny, discussion of what has happened to that first generation of cable channels - A&E, Bravo, TMC, AMC and the like. Here’s one comment:

“…It is worse in Canada. In one week our Western channel (Lonestar) had The Matrix movies, Demolition Man, and Tango and Cash as its evening movies…

CollegeHumor has weighed in with its own interpretations of cable network logos - with predictable results.

I suspect that Angelo Bepp is an everyman, hiding in plain view although ostensibly disguised as a long-term resident of the state detention facility at Attica, New York.

Angelo is a regular comment contributor to the New York Times online edition. And his comments are funny. Consistently funny. I present a selection:

What have you done to make yourself more attractive on the Web?
I post a picture only showing me from the neck up. That way my prison fatigues & number can’t be seen. I thought it was my car, I really did. How many powder blue 1971 Pintos can there be in New York?

January 3rd, 2008 Link

Executive Who Moved ‘Dem Bums’ Out of Brooklyn Is Hall of Famer

Get over it Brooklyn, its been 50 years. When I lost my dog Blinky, I got over it. Man, I loved Blinky.

December 3rd, 2007 Link

What has been your most memorable culinary experience while on vacation?

Best meal I ever had was in Tibet, a yak burger. Tastes a bit like cheetah.

November 21st, 2007 Link

Where is your favorite place to stay in a national park?

Any where that doesn’t have padded cells or bars is fine by me. I didn’t do anything to that mannequin, it fell on me.

December 21st, 2007 Link

What is your favorite easy-to-make holiday starter?

When I was allowed to indulge myself, I always enjoyed a hot dog with Worcestershire sauce & cottage cheese. Then wash it down with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue. Man, Angelo was living the life back then, before the legal thing.

December 19th, 2007 Link

Which band would you like to see reunited?

The Archies. Still listen to their albums every night. I’m 54 years old.

December 11th, 2007 Link

Shootings Test Limits of New Self-Defense Law: What do you think of Mr. Horn’s actions?

Over reacted. My house was broken into 2 years ago. I confronted the 2 misguided young men. I told them what they were doing was wrong. They still took everything of value that I owned, but they know they did wrong.

December 13th, Link

Technorati Tags: comment policy, commenter, New York Times

Okay. I understand that, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the Presidential primaries are almost as important and somewhat as interesting as college sports.

I also understand that the major Presidential contenders spend years visiting the states - over and over again.

And I also understand that many of the political activities in the early primary states (Iowa in particular) emphasize a voter’s ability to “take the measure of a man” through personal contact. (Like the Ames Straw Poll)

I can’t quite understand, however, why 35% of likely voters would choose to listen to pre-recorded campaign calls. Is their dinner-time conversation REALLY that boring?

Stats from Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Technorati Tags: robocalls, direct marketing, political campaign

When I’m sitting on the bus, I sometimes think about my fellow travellers. You may have noticed that. I suspect we’ve all had thoughts like these:

“Passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus, please accept they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers.”

“Passengers should note that the bearded man’s rucksack contains the following items only: some sandwiches, a library card, and a picture of a bare ankle, and is no cause for concern.”

“Passengers are reminded, like mosts voice-over artists, I probably look nothing like you imagine, and may turn out to be somewhat of a disappointment.”

That’s the work of Emma Clarke, the voice over artist who used to record the announcements for the London Underground. She was recently fired for comments she made to a London newspaper - and not for her gently mocking spoofs, the Underground says.

“Some of the spoof announcements are very funny, but Emma is a bit silly to go round slagging off her client’s services. London Underground is sorry to have to announce that further contracts for Ms Clarke are experiencing severe delays.” (London Times)

Technorati Tags: London Underground, voice over, satire

David Letterman, on his contract with CBS being extended to 2010:

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“”I’m thrilled to be continuing on at CBS,” Letterman, 59, said in a statement. “At my age you really don’t want to have to learn a new commute.”

Turns out the editors at Maxim were certain their ribald sexuality and explicit come-ons would succeed, because the dowager queen of women’s magazines, Helen Gurley Brown, had already blazed the trail. From Maureen Dowd’s NYT magazine article, “What’s a modern girl to do?“:

“Oddly enough, Felix Dennis, who created the top-selling Maxim, said he stole his “us against the world” lad-magazine attitude from women’s magazines like Cosmo. Just as women didn’t mind losing Cosmo’s prestigious fiction as the magazine got raunchier, plenty of guys were happy to lose the literary pretensions of venerable men’s magazines and embrace simple-minded gender stereotypes, like the Maxim manifesto instructing women, “If we see you in the morning and night, why call us at work?”

Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria move seamlessly from showing their curves on the covers of Cosmo and Glamour to Maxim, which dubbed Simpson “America’s favorite ball and chain!” In the summer of 2005, both British GQ and FHM featured Pamela Anderson busting out of their covers. (”I think of my breasts as props,” she told FHM.)

A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim babes. So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it. “I have been surprised,” Maxim’s editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, “to find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that they’d like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary.”

The luscious babes on the cover of Maxim were supposed to be men’s fantasy guilty pleasures, after all, not their real life-affirming girlfriends.”

Fellow men, may I just refer you to this best-of post from Craigslist: A letter from the Porn Stars of America.

Looks like some newpaper salespeople may be underestimating - or overestimating - their reader per copy number. By relying on an national average RPC* of 2.3, they may be overlooking much more favourable local readership numbers:

“… ABC and NSA … found a wide range in individual newspapers from 1.8 to 4.4 RPC. From this base, 38 daily newspapers confirm around 2.3 RPC — the national average — but 46 papers report a lower RPC and 153 papers show a higher RPC than the national average.

In other words, using 2.3 RPC to arrive at readership is only accurate 16% of the time. In the majority of these cases (65%), using the national RPC “underestimates daily individual newspaper readership by as much as 91%,” according to the report.”(Editor & Publisher)

These numbers might be a source of inspiration for some salespeople and publishers - if Goldman wasn’t forecasting a weak year ahead for the industry:

“The weak ad environment for newspapers has caused Goldman to scale back its 2006 growth forecast to 3.5 percent from 4.0 percent. … national ad growth would once again be weakest at 1.0 percent, followed by retail, 2.5 percent, and classifieds at 3.6 percent. The bright spot continues to be online newspaper revenues, which are projected to grow an impressive 25 percent in 2006. Despite this, online will still represent 5.0 percent of total newspaper revenues.(MediaPost)

Well, at least things are looking up for online and classifieds. Or should I say Craigslist?

*”newspaper specific readership estimate divided by paid circulation equals newspaper specific RPC”

“I Love Your Work” is the latest indie movie from writer/director Adam Goldberg - otherwise known as Eddie, the crazy roommate from Friends. On KCRW’s The Business, Goldberg describes the nervewracking two year fight for the ownership and release of his film after one of his original backers goes bankrupt.

He’s witty and insightful while agonizing over the “faustian deal” that resulted in his independent work falling under the control of Canadian media conglomerate CanWest. Lord knows most of my media diet is under their control, what with their nation-wide print and television holdings.

It took a year of “autodidactic entertainment law school” for Goldberg to finally identify an “out” of the deal (spoiler: it involves Christina Ricci threatening to keep her name off the film).

A blogging angle can be found in this tale: some of the initial financing came from a company called Cyan Pictures, who apparently negotiated the right to have a blogger write from on set.

As Goldberg told the Hollywood Reporter:

“…but I had to let this blogger come to the set and basically blog, which I nixed the second I saw the first blog go up, which just focused so much about how much Giovanni (and I) smoked that I was just like, ‘You know, this is silly.’”

An added feature to the KCRW adiostream/podcast: a lengthy piece on the trials and tribulations of the entertainment reporters exiled to shouting inane questions from behind the velvet rope on LA’s many red carpets.

Excerpted from a company-wide memo from Edward Greenspon, the Globe and Mail’s editor, on the paper’s efforts to “reimagineer” itself:

“The Web is Next
… Earlier in the year, we discussed the fact that more people were coming into web sites not through the home page but from aggregators like Google News. We made adjustments to our story pages to turn them from end points into jumping off points to other globeandmail.com offerings. Overnight, our page views jumped from about 2.2-million a day to about 2.8-million a day. Last fall, we put our columnists and some other material behind a pay wall and called it Insider Edition. To date, it has about 11,000 subscribers. The potential to grow through editorial improvements, marketing muscle and understanding our users is enormous.

Also, we began a pilot project at web-newspaper integration in Report on Business. We regularly beat Bloomberg and Dow in breaking stories on the web, thus attracting increased visits to our sites and enhancing our reputation as the place to go for business news and analysis.

As well, the web team has introduced Project Dialogue, which takes greater advantage both of the interactivity potential of the web and the apparently growing desire of many users to “join the conversation” rather than serving merely as passive recipients of news. A host of new web initiatives are underway: from a new design to the introduction of a real estate site and major upgrading of our auto site. The web is critical to our strategy: the easy growth days flowing from new high-speed connections are over; now we must convert users of other sites and intensify our relationships with existing users.”

“Web/Newspaper Integration

As stated in a note at the first announcement of Reimagination, it is no longer web versus paper but web and paper. But what distinguishes the web from the paper and, perhaps more critically, the paper from the web? What are the unique attributes of each and how can we best take advantage of these?

The various Globe web sites attract more than 3-million unique visitors a month. Last month, globeandmail.com attracted 2.3-million unique visitors, some of them coming several times a day, others far less frequently. Year by year, the web accounts for increased company revenues, although it is still small by comparison with the newspaper.

The New York Times plans to fully integrate its newsrooms between now and 2007. Its editors speak of approaching stories from the point of view of “platform neutrality.” But does platform neutrality begin to capture the appropriate relationship between paper and web? Should we be thinking of the web and paper as a continuum, with members of the Globe audience going
back and forth depending on their particular needs at a given time?

Are there certain areas of coverage that should integrate completely? Should Sports, for example, be a web-based section with a secondary newspaper role? Once again, where do we draw the lines and take advantage of the strengths if we view the paper and web as a continuum?

How do we move beyond the issue of posting newspaper stories on the web to exploiting the opportunities to tell stories that exploit the particular attributes of the web, as was done with Stephanie Nolen’s AIDS package, which has been nominated for a multi-media award by the Online Journalism Association? How do we translate a successful newspaper feature like Monday Morning Manager into a value-added web feature? How do we better use our archives and turn them into active tools?

Should our assigning editors be responsible for paper and web? What is the answer to the perennial question of where we should break stories and is that even the question anymore? And how do we really engage the knowledge base of our audiences and tap into the desire of many to participate fully in The Globe and Mail, not just as consumers of information but also as producers?”

Thanks to Paul Wells for posting the full G&M memo.

What does it take to be a television weatherman? Other than good teeth, good hair, and the ability to use “overnight” as a noun? Daniel Engber at Slate can tell you. More importantly, he also points to a nerve-grating list of catchy phrases for meterologists:

- Protect the 3 P’s: pets, plants and pipes
- This cold front is packing a powerful punch; this is a Bob Barker “come on down” cold front.
- Wet conditions continue overnight.. Perfect for all ducks.
- Air you can wear… but hair you can’t wear
- In reference to Anomalous Precipitation on radar, call it “Doppler Garbage”

It just conjures up unsettling memories of Willard Scott, dressed up in a costume for Thanskgiving (or as Ronald McDonald, above)

They’re certainly a poor comparison toAl Sleet, your hippy dippy weatherman.

Little Steven tried to tear a strip out of the new “be everything to everyone” radio formats (like Jack) at July’s Radio & Records Convention. Speaking to 250-odd radio program directors, he railed that:

“Replacing 33 year old New York oldies institution CBS-FM with JACK is like replacing the Statue of Liberty with a blow-up doll.”

His argument, boiled down to its bones, is that the music industry, and radio in particular, is ignoring the heritage of the 50s and 60s in pursuit of younger demographics with better-paying advertisers.

“What appeals more to kids, Gene Vincent’s black leather attitude, Eddie Cochran’s teenage frustration, Little Richard’s cry of liberation, and Dion’s total Soprano’s coolness - or the Eagles?

You want wild? Put together the Sex Pistols, Audioslave, and the Wu-Tang Clan - they aren’t as wild as Jerry Lee Lewis in his prime.”

That’s historically accurate. Realistically, though, anyone under the age of 45 has only seen Gene Vincent, Little Richard or Dion on B&W filmreels. You can’t sell their work as cool and innovative to the kids, because their albums are sitting in the $6.99 bin at the front of HMV - if there at all.

The key, he argues, is to weave old and new into a narrative, a story that informs new listeners of rock’s musical heritage.

“As long as you’re making your decisions based on musical experience, good taste, and an effective, coherent emotional communication.

As opposed to your Ipod on shuffle.

(laughter, applause)”

Still, Little Steven’s diatribe loses some of its independent garage rock cred when posted up on his site - beside ads for Dunkin’ Donuts and Pepsi.

Thanks to WFMU for the pointer.

While I’m in the neighbourhood of radio programmers: John Moore took a light swing at A/C radio while making some suggestions about how to liven up public radio pledge drives in 2004.

This week marks the return of baseball to small town parks across the Southern U.S. While most of us will concentrate on the big leaguers, it’s the minor leagues that offer the value-laden consumer experience: cheap hot dogs, beer, t-shirt cannons and 7th inning concerts by REO Speedwagon.

Oh, and questionable editorial decisions by SIDs, like this in-house interview featured on the New Orleans Zephyrs website:

Zephyrsbaseball.com: Best thing about attending Xavier University?

Marc Allen, Director of Community Relations: “My Spanish teacher was A) extremely hot and B) Hank Aaron’s daughter.”

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy the Guardian’s minute-by-minute accounts of European football? A regular group of Guardian staffers sitting in the news room, watching BBC or Sky coverage of the match on a 14 inch TV - then relaying their acerbic and/or witty comments to dozens of readers around the globe through a continually updated page on the Guardian website.

Key to the accounts, however, are the constant interruptions from readers with their own opinion of the match, the staffer, or the weather in Milan. It’s football coverage like you would find in a pub.

And many of the observations are knee-bucklingly funny, like these two from Georgina Turner’s coverage of last week’s Man U - Italy match:

24 mins: “How does the crowd sound,” Eleanor Giles wants to know. Intoxicated, in a word: there’s a pretty good atmosphere. Things are just starting to settle down for United, but their forward play bears a vague resemblance to pigeons flying into glass buildings, at times.

54 mins: Has there been some kind of mass release-into-the-community today? It seems the entire sex offenders register is logged onto this game tonight. Huge Bridget Jones pants, no picture, now bugger off.

Or how about these from Barry Glendenning’s report on the Barcelona - Chelsea game:

6 mins: Jose Mourinho is looking very agitated on the bench and is scribbling away in his little blue notebook. Perhaps he’s writing a song, or has just thought of another superlative with which to describe himself in his post-match press conference.

15 mins: … It’s worth bearing in mind that perma-tanned bottle-blond Anders Frisk is reffing, so he likes to flash the cards around in order to get himself on the television.

18 mins: … I think the only thing Jose could do that would surprise anyone in England at this stage is to loudly declare that he’s not quite as competent a manager as Peter Reid or Gerard Houllier while walking around dressed in sackcloth and ashes and ringing a big bell.

And here’s Barry commenting on the quality of feedback flooding his in-box:

Most of what I’ve seen of Liverpool this season has been as unsightly as what’s left of Hunter S Thompson’s head, but any time I suggest that they’re anything less than wonderful I get hordes of angry Scousers sending in emails accusing me of being a Manchester United fan or a “cockney loving football newbie prick” (thanks for that Stephen Horner).

Now - just imagine if you could entertain a conversation like that with your local paper? Immediate praise, logical reinforcement or criticism as they publish - that’s what frightens the old guard hacks.

A rule to remember, even if you’re hopping mad about your coverage in the press: always keep your communications professional, well-considered and well-presented.

Take, for instance, a recent letter to the editor of Marketing:

“In a recent letter to Marketing, Nestle Rowntree managing director Chris White pointed out that sales of Kit Kat are, in fact, doing rather well.

I say ‘letter’, but in truth it was a three-line felt-tip scrawl, faxed to us, asking why ‘you guys never report the good news’, accompanied by an equally hastily clipped regional newspaper article about the brand’s bounce back.” (sub. req.)

There’s a backstory to the Marketing-Nestle relationship, and the rest of the Marketing piece is quite well-balanced.

In my drawer, I still have a news release that was faxed back to an old office with the words “TAKE ME OFF YOUR STUPID MAILING LIST!!!” written in black marker across the page.

Well, another local newscaster from my youth is dead. Bob McAdorey, a Southern Ontario broadcaster for nearly forty years, passed away this weekend.

Of course, I only I remember his later career as entertainment editor on Global News - with his giant [irish] afro, tweed jackets and outsized glasses.

But in the 1960s, working the afternoon drive time slot, McAdorey helped set the agenda for popular music in Toronto - meeting the Beatles and the Stones along the way.

“We kept it all clean up here. There was no payola as in the U.S. and we deliberately helped a lot of Canadians. It was personality radio. We were promoted like crazy back then. And the pressures were unbelievable. We dictated what records were going to go. And what kids would eat, drink.” (Toronto Star, r.r.)

Correction (17/02): I originally referred to Bob’s scottish afro.

“Denim demand shows no sign of fading” - Reuters.

The scary takeaway? “White denim will be the hot new look.”

Ben Dutton, an account manager in New Zealand, has made a strong argument for the value of PR in an open and democratic society.

An open democracy operates in a free marketplace of ideas and information. A good analogy is the foreign exchange market …

Through partaking in public relations, companies, governments, organisations and individuals are all adding to the richness and diversity of the information available …

Public relations practitioners are the currency speculators of the information market, helping create an equilibrium of ideas in our society. This is an outcome that ultimately benefits everyone.

Of course, it doesn’t seem like an open and democratic society is the priority of the Disney corporation. (NYT, reg. req.) They’ve effectively blocked Miramax from exercising their North American distribution rights to a new Michael Moore film critical of President Bush.

Now, this may have something to do with Zenia Mucha, a former high-level aide to Governor Pataki of NY, being the head of comm for Disney. But it also has a lot to do with Disney being a stodgy and conservative company.

The White House Correspondents corps is a large and vicious organism, demanding information, anecdotes and a minute-by-minute accounting of the working of the US government. In many cases, not all the reporters accredited to the White House can fit into a banquet room, helicopter, diner, train, or Texas ranch to follow the President’s every move.

Because of limited space in the presidential motorcade, on Air Force One and in the Oval Office, the White House organizes a rotation of “pool” reporters, who send write-ups to colleagues who were not allowed inside but must cover the event. Often, however, the pool reporter is not allowed to observe the president, either, leading to creative — if uninformative — reports.

The Bush White House has expanded the audience for the pool reports by e-mailing them also to more than a thousand government officials and Republican operatives. This gives the dispatches — part travelogue, part gripe and occasionally part news — a disproportionately large following.

As the Washington Post tells us,

nobody delighted this following more than [the Chicago Tribune's Bob] Kemper ….

Then there are all the routine motorcades that must be faithfully recounted. In Fresno, Kemper wrote: “The motorcade from the burrito plant to the fundraiser, though it lasted 18 months and covered about 6,000 miles, was uneventful.” And in Chicago: “Uneventful does not even begin to cover just how sensory-deprived that trip was.”

On the plus side, the pool report provides a venue for lines that might not have a home elsewhere. Kemper called Bush adviser Karl Rove “that little leprechaun from the West Wing” and noted Bush’s difficulty with certain words, writing: “Highlight was POTUS working Nuke-leer-or and Pen-in-su-lar into the same sentence.”

Still, despair often overwhelms the pooler, and Kemper was no exception. In California, he wrote: “You heard the speech. If not today, then 10,000 times before.” Over the Pacific, he lamented: “Thirteen hours into pool duty, and still no news in sight.” And after a visit to Westminster Abbey, he began: “No news. Little color. Frankly, you have better things to do.”

Of course, others have taken advantage of the medium - like the WP’s own Dana Milbank:

Time Marine One pulled up at Andrews: 8:47. Wheels up for Air Force One: 8:57. Numbers of engines on Air Force One: four. Time aloft: 1:16. Having your pool report distributed to the White House staff and a thousand strangers, priceless.

And here’s another Milbank report.

And Wonkette digs into the WH pool reports on a regular basis.

The Association of Alternative Newspapers has a quick look at the range of talents drawn upon by local alt-weeklies to fill their pages:

Freelancers fill anywhere from 15 to 75 percent of a particular paper or one of its sections (usually the arts) each week. “They contribute to every single section in the paper, and help to diversify our voice along age, gender, racial, aesthetic and ideological lines,” says Jim Poyser, managing editor of NUVO in Indianapolis …

Buried in this piece on rock journalism in the Tucson Weekly is an assuredly realistic description of the hurdles thrown in front of alt-weekly journalists and freelancers.

On the other hand, if you are a freelance writer for an alternative publication such as this one, you may have to squeeze endless phone calls and e-mails around your day job simply to justify to a publicist’s lackey that you are, in fact, a legitimate journalist with a bona fide assignment to interview one of the members of Queens of the Stone Age.

After going through the artist’s manager and various record company functionaries, you reach the lackey. She requires an e-mail–or, worse, a letter on the publication’s letterhead–explaining who you are, your publication’s name and circulation, whether this will be a cover story and the phone numbers at which you can be reached day or night.

One day out of the blue, the lackey calls your home phone–despite the fact that you have given her a cell phone number to call while you are at work–leaving a message: The band has time for interviews that afternoon, and can you be ready in a few hours? When you get home from work, you discover this message a few hours after the interviews were scheduled to take place.

Heh. This all seems very familiar to me.

Some interesting demographics on fortune cookie fanciers, and their possibilities as a marketing channel: … about 96 percent of people who eat Chinese food open their cookies and read the fortunes, and that 67 percent read them aloud so that everyone dining with them will hear.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution tells us, TBS added its own words of wisdom to the lame fortunes in 4 million cookies distributed in the New York metropolitan area. Chinese food lovers who cracked open the cookies — most containing bland cliches like “You display traits of charm and courtesy” — also got this advice: “Kung fu and car chases are in your future. A new hit action movie every weekend in December. Only on TBS.”

If you like fortune cookies you … are 29 percent more likely to spend over $75 a month for wireless, 42 percent more likely than the average Joe to have had vodka in the past month, 69 percent more likely to drink Corona beer, 32 percent more likely to drive a Volkswagen, 36 percent more likely to see a movie in the first two weeks of release, and more likely to have disposable dough.

… asked Henry Kissinger at a White House news conference sometime in the 70s. The Columbia Journalism Review does some gentle handwringing this month over the professional preparation of spokespersons - and how this is leading to increasingly boring interviews.

In the latest Newsweek, Jon Stewart makes a very canny observation about the instincts that appear to govern the behaviour and interests of media scrums:

“I’m actually far more interested in the media’s responsibility than the politicians’,” says Stewart. “To me, the most interesting shot in the documentary ‘Journeys With George’ is from behind the horde of reporters going to a staged event. You ever see 8-year-olds play soccer? It’s just this weird clump of legs, and then all of a sudden the ball will fly out and with no strategy or game, they just go ‘Ball!’ That’s what the media is.”