The New York Times has published their other Gov. David Paterson 'bombshell' article today. It would be interesting to understand the NYT's thinking on all this. Many people assumed that Wednesday's splashy A-1 story on Paterson's shady aide David W. Johnson was the bombshell -- and rightly so considering the placement and the content. Meanwhile today's multi-bylined, multi-page bonanza is still A-1, but has been pushed down a bit and sans the impossible to miss picture. Was that the original plan? Or did all the national attention on Paterson split the story in two and make it double A-1 worthy in the eyes of the editors? Maybe Clark Hoyt will weigh in this weekend. Regardless the fact of the matter is that if the existence of the stories hadn't been scooped by all forms of new media a few weeks ago, they certainly would have been considered bombshell-esque by many. Just the mere fact the Times has run two huge, not flattering, A-1 stories on Paterson in and of itself is newsworthy and probably does not bode well for Paterson's political future. (more...)

Well, I guess this is a fitting end to an absurd newscycle. The big New York Times 'bombshell' story about David Paterson isn't actually about David Paterson. Ba dump! It's about his aid David W. Johnson (described by the New York Observer last Sept. as his "omnipresent 'body man,'"). Here's the part the rumor mill did get right: it's a big story. In the print version it takes up half the space above-the-fold including a large picture of Johnson with Paterson Damning by association? (more...)

Rex Sorgatz is Mediaite's site designer and an occasional columnist. This list originally appeared at Fimoculous.com. #main .slice .posts .d { border-top:1px dotted #CCCCCC; margin:0px; padding-top:10px; clear: both; } #main .slice .posts .post0 .i { float:left; border:2px solid #275f7d !important;; margin: 5px 5px 5px -7px; } #main .slice .posts .p { margin-top:0; margin-left: 70px; } While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?

Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson's death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous. Sigh.

This weekend, when the story of a police officer pulling out a gun at a snowball fight in DC erupted and spread online, the Washington Post was initially dismissive, despite having an eyewitness on the scene who said that the officer did indeed pull out a gun. They didn't get the story quite right until days later; to dispel all doubt, the officer admitted he pulled a gun. In a scathing blog post, the Washington City Paper surmised as to how the Post slipped up: a snooty attitude towards the Internet. (more...)

So the Washington Post has opted to run another Sarah Palin op-ed piece, this one about Climategate. The piece is a re-working of something Palin posted on her Facebook page last week and the Post is apparently drawing the ire of some readers for running it as noted by its own media reporter Howie Kurtz on Twitter. (more...)

This morning, TechCrunch stumbled across a time capsule: a brand-new video promoting Friendster, touting its upgrade that, it appears, makes it function like the MySpace of eight years ago. They miss, though, the Secret Hidden Message™ of the video. That being: Asians only, please. (more...)

We've noted a few times in passing on this blog that it sometimes feels like the Gawker websites are determining how media will look online going forward. But today it looks like Gawker is taking one step closer to the mainstream, or at least how the mainstream used to look. (more...)

case study When The Awl asked "What Were Black People Talking About Last Night?", which Mediaite's Robert Quigley called "lazy and, well, casually racist," one of the things that got lost was an actually interesting question - how do these seemingly random hashtagged trending topics get started? So we found out. (more...)

The Awl, the oddly named progeny of Choire Sicha and Alex Balk (who are the oddly named progeny of Gawker), hit the targeted marketing jackpot with an innocent post detailing much sought-after knowledge: how to draw Asian women.

Say what you will about Google Ads - they are right on point in this case.

column For those of you not 'in the know,' The Awl is a Gawker Alumni Blog/Pirate Ship run by former Gawkerers Choire Sicha and Alex Balk.  For the most part, I like the site, and read it every day. In particular, I think that contributors Natasha Vargas-Cooper and Abe Sauer should get medals for the thoughtful, long-form work that they frequently turn out. But I was offended -- unironically, actually offended -- by an Awl post this morning titled "What Were Black People Talking About On Twitter Last Night?" At the risk of getting randomly harshed on by Tumblr: it was kind of racist. (more...)

Over at The Awl, Choire Sicha has been doing a crackerjack, data-intensive job of sifting through one of the biggest, least sexy stories of our time: newspapers as we know them are going away. Yesterday, he put together this acclaimed chart of the circulations of six big papers over the past two decades. The takeaway: the Wall Street Journal is bigger than everybody else (but cheats a little by including paid online subscribers in their circ figures); the LA Times seems determined to drive itself into the ground, and the NYT and WashPo aren't looking too good themselves. Today, Sicha covers newspapers' coverage of their own decline:

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"Because the more we are sold to — and, believe it, we are being pitched every minute — the more immune we are to it all.

Was John McCain right when he said that Obama and Paris Hilton were basically the same person? No, but they do share a habit of looking alarmingly consistent across photographs. Eric Spiegelman has sped up 130 photographs of Obama meeting with foreign dignitaries, and 'Bam's expression is virtually the same in all of them, to creepy effect. Remind you of any heiresses you know? (more...)

If you haven't yet seen viral viral People of Wal-Mart, you can either click on that there hyperlink or envision this: a sky blue, bare-bones RSS stream of a blog that features strange-looking and/or poorly-dressed people in and around Wal-Mart across the country. In the lingo of the site, "Wal-Creatures." Unlike most out-of-nowhere web trends -- who could really get upset about Hot Chicks With Douchebags or Keyboard Cat? -- People of Wal-Mart seems to have really touched a nerve and offended many of its readers. And it's gotten even more traffic in the process. (more...)

•An amazing (and heartbreaking) piece of writing and storytelling via The Awl. Natasha Vargas-Cooper is a real talent. (RS) •Over at Salon, Dave Eggers discusses his new book Zeitoun (2009) about Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, and further cheers us up about the future of print. (ZT) • For Hemingway fans, and particularly those devoted to A Moveable Feast, this is a must read in light of the "bowdlerized version" that has just been published. "I recount this history of A Moveable Feast to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it, and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication. Ernest died before the publication of the book could go forward. When I visited him in the Mayo Clinic a few months before his dementia led to his suicide, he was very concerned about his Paris book, and worried that it needed a final sentence, which it did not." (GM) •Oddee.com has become a guilty pleasure. What other site gets 45,000 pageviews for an article called "10 Strangest Frogs?" Their listicles sure are addictive, though. (RQ). •Wired has a great media consumption charticle in their most recent issue, proving The Onion right. (RQ)