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The Bureau Of Labor Statistics Scoops The Press
April 5th, 2013The monthly job numbers always set off a media frenzy. But what happens when the government scoops the media?
For years, there has been ferocious competition between news services like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters to be the first to report the monthly job numbers, which are released at 8:30 AM on the first Friday of every month. These numbers heavily influence markets and, with the rise of high frequency trading, an advantage of seconds can mean millions of dollars. This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the government agency that releases the employment numbers, beat everyone and tweeted the job numbers at 8:30:01.
The result beat everyone—including Bloomberg, which was embarrassingly late coming in at 8:30:03 (although a Bloomberg spokesman insisted to Quartz that the company’s terminals had the numbers just milliseconds later than the BLS). Other news organizations followed over the next few seconds.
Cleveland Plain Dealer To Deliver Only Three Days A Week
April 5th, 2013Advance Publications is the Taliban of American journalism. The only difference is instead of desecrating Buddhas, the Newhouse family is destroying newspapers.
The latest casualty is the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Advance Publications announced on Friday that although the Plain Dealer will still be printed seven days a week, home delivery would only be available three of those days. It’s an improvement over what Advance Publications has done to some of its other properties like the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Harrisburg Patriot News and the Syracuse Post-Standard, where the entire paper is published three days a week but it’s a bad sign as the Newhouse family tries to slowly divest itself from the news business.
As Ryan Chittum describes in his feature for the Columbia Journalism Review on the Times-Picayune, this seems to be a concerted strategy to bleed as much profit as possible from the papers:
It’s hard to imagine a lucrative future for NOLA.com once the print edition inevitably slides into the red. But consider this: If they sold the paper right now, the Newhouses probably would get less than $40 million for it, based on the earnings multiples of recent newspaper sales. By radically slashing costs, as they have done—perhaps by as much as $25 million—the company can earn that amount in a couple of years thanks to higher profit margins. Anything beyond that is gravy.
WATCH: Jeremy Irons Worries Gay Marriage Will Lead To ‘Fathers Marrying Sons’
April 5th, 2013In an interview with Huff Post Live, Academy Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons said that he is concerned that gay marriage could somehow lead to incestuous relationships between fathers and sons. “It seems to me that now we’re fighting for the name, and I worry that it means somehow we debase, or we change, what marriage is,” Irons said. “I just worry about that. I mean tax-wise it’s an interesting one, because, you see, could a father not marry his son?”
Will Buzzfeed Save The Republican Party?
April 5th, 2013After looking to leaders ranging from Sarah Palin to Mitt Romney, the Republican Party has found a new savior, Ben Smith.
As Brian Fung from National Journal reported yesterday, the National Republican Congressional Committee is revamping its website to be more like Buzzfeed, the viral news website that Smith edits. This doesn’t mean that it’s adding more cat listicles, instead the NRCC is trying to create more viral content and keep visitors to its website engaged longer.
As Fung describes:
“BuzzFeed’s eating everyone’s lunch,” said NRCC spokesman Gerrit Lansing. “They’re making people want to read and be cognizant of politics in a different way.”
The committee spent hours poring over BuzzFeed’s site map and layout, studying how readers arrived at its landing pages and bounced from one article to the next. Unsurprisingly, a ton of traffic came from social media — but a lot of it also seemed to come from the site’s sidebar, said Lansing. So the NRCC’s redesign includes a list of recent and popular posts.
WATCH: Gun Rights Activist to Chris Matthews: ‘We Don’t Trust People Like You’
April 5th, 2013MSNBC host Chris Matthews battled back and forth over new federal gun control legislation in an explosive interview on Thursday with Larry Pratt, the executive director of the Gun Owners of America, a gun rights group that finds the NRA too moderate. Pratt said, “We think the country would be better off without any background check.” To which Matthews later replied, “There’s something really ideological about this, because it doesn’t make any sense to me.”
