Ïîïóëÿðíûå ñîîáùåíèÿ

пятница

Update at 11:50 a.m. ET. Radio 1 Will Play A Snippet:

There's word from NPR's Philip Reeves in London that BBC's Radio 1 now says its weekend Official Chart show will play "a clip in a journalistic environment" of "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead," which critics of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pushed up the British charts this week after the Iron Lady's death.

The BBC has more:

Our original post — "Thatcher Critics Make 'Ding Dong' No 1; Should BBC Play It?":

The death this week of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has provoked may words of praise — and many celebrations by those who did not admire the Iron Lady.

Among the things her critics have done is push "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead," from The Wizard of Oz, into the No. 1 spot on the U.K. singles chart. That, as The Associated Press writes, has created an issue for BBC Radio 1:

Should Radio 1 play the song this weekend on its Official Chart show, which as the name implies rounds up the hottest songs each week.

The Guardian reports that "the new BBC director general, Tony Hall, will have the final say." And it adds that:

"Hall told staff on Thursday that he personally thought the song and the accompanying social media campaign launched following Margaret Thatcher's death on Monday by people protesting against the former Conservative prime minister's 1980s policies was 'tasteless,' but stressed that the editorial independence of the BBC was sacrosanct."

Pizza Hut has always been a leader in stuffing more cheese into your pizza. First there was the famous Stuffed Crust, then the P'Sauna, which elevated your body temperature so you could achieve full cheese supersaturation. Now it's the Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza, which replaces the crust with tiny little bowls of cheese.

Ian: Thanks, Pizza Hut! Before when I wanted to eat a bowl of cheese, I had to go through a bad breakup first!

Eva: It looks like a beautiful sunflower with a bad case of acne.

Miles: Italy just announced it's cutting off culinary ties with the United States.

Enlarge image i

SB Nation is owned by Vox Media, which also created The Verge, a site covering digital culture, and Polygon, a gamer review and news site.

"We looked around the Web and we realized there was a race to the bottom, if you will, with a lot of content," says Jim Bankoff, the Vox CEO who hired Stout.

Bankoff was an executive with AOL in the 1990s and helped advise Arianna Huffington as she was launching The Huffington Post. He says many online aggregators focus on lists and photo galleries to the exclusion of reported pieces.

"Part of why Web content became shorter and less substantive was that publishers believed in order to have a successful digital business model, they had to produce things as quickly and as cheaply as possible," Bankoff says.

Bankoff decided to dart in the opposite direction at SB Nation.

"What we've found at Vox is that long-form stories are incredibly attractive to advertisers," Bankoff says. "People are spending a lot of time with them. I think on average it's about 17 minutes in our case, and sometimes much longer than that.

"And such a glut — and such a sea of stuff on the Web that is often not substantive, often is quick 'listicles' or even worse, we find that advertisers are flocking to quality and trying to get it where they can."

Vox is by no means the only new-media publisher betting long. The viral website BuzzFeed, which posts adorable animal and baby pictures by the cartload, also published many lengthy pieces toward the end of last year's elections. One was a reflective article by the political reporter McKay Coppins about his experience as a Mormon covering the nation's first Mormon major-party presidential nominee.

Older news organizations are finding new ways to tell stories, too. The New York Times received widespread accolades for the sophisticated marriage of narrative writing, video, photographs, maps and graphics it deployed to tell the story of an avalanche in Washington state in February.

The Wall Street Journal has posted not just hours of daily video but lengthy video treatments — effectively documentaries — on complex issues such as corruption among elite Communist Party leaders in China.

Reuters and Bloomberg News have beefed up their enterprise reporting and hired many experienced newspaper reporters. Some not-for-profit news sites have surfaced as well.

None of this activity replaces the watchdog reporting that was lost at state capitals and city halls throughout the country because of the hollowing out of major metropolitan newspapers, though some not-for-profit news sites have surfaced to try to fill the gaps.

Last month, the Pew Research Center issued a report that, if it were a Dickens novel, would have carried the title Bleak House for its depiction of depleted newsrooms filled with exhausted, demoralized reporters and editors.

The report perceived few positive trends on either the journalistic or the revenue side of the equation, though it noted new income from metered pay walls that require repeat readers to pay for access to online content. But Slate's Matt Yglesias took issue with the underlying and largely despairing conclusions of a time of constricted ambitions.

The American news media, he wrote, have "never been in better shape. ... Almost everything you'd want to know about any subject is available at your fingertips. ...

"Best of all, today's media ecology lets you add depth and context to the news," Yglesias said. He wrote that the report mistook the desires of journalists for the appetite of online readers.

Yglesias' essay triggered a sharp response. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf said Yglesias had missed the central component of American journalism: accountability.

"How well does it provide citizens the information they need to govern themselves?" Friedersdorf wrote. "How effectively does it fulfill its role as a watchdog? Judged accordingly, the verdict is a lot murkier."

Banaszynski sees some hope, however, for the textured reporting and deep dives to which she has dedicated her career.

"When I go online, there's all of these little pockets of passion that have sprung up that are creating homes for it that never used to exist or at least were harder to find," Banaszynski says.

SB Nation's Stout says he doesn't care whether his bosses' motivation is commercial or journalistic. All he cares about, Stout says, is their willingness to let him publish the kind of writing he thinks is worth reading.

Victor (Patrick Bruel) is older, schlubbier, and has never seen a Woody Allen movie, but he also hides nothing, speaking his mind without affect and asking questions about Alice and her family that confound and challenge her — and send her back to that poster for guidance.

The choice between two men as different as Victor and Vincent at last prompts Alice to confront Allen's effect on her perspective — and how his movies fare as primers for navigating real-world relationships — but the movie doesn't want to go in that direction. (Perhaps because that would make too much sense.)

Instead, Paris-Manhattan ambles off on an extended detour through the brambles of Helene and Pierre's marital problems as Alice investigates whether the latter is having an affair. She enlists Victor, who works in private security, to break into her sister and brother-in-law's apartment, and that same night her parents do the same.

It's a setup with potential for classic comical misunderstanding, but the script plays so stultifyingly straight that no one's really surprised to see anyone else there, and they all go home. If you're wondering what the poster might have to say at a time like this, you're not the only one.

The plot lurches away from Alice on a couple more jaunts, one where Pierre and Helene wring their hands over all the time Laura is spending with the boyfriend they know so little about. He drives an SUV — is he a drug dealer? He gives her an expensive watch — is he older? What are his intentions? Who is he?

This newest problem is treated here as just another normal anxiety for the parents of a modern teenager, but, please — and this should perhaps be directed only to the parents of French teenagers who exist only in movies — just meet your adolescent daughter's boyfriend once, once, in the year they're seeing each other. It really will take some of that painful guesswork out.

Expanding the story into an ensemble piece balances some of Alice's self-absorption but also blunts her unique point of view. Woody Allen's movies have often explored an idea successfully through exaggeration, but Paris-Manhattan is a poor imitation, safely skimming the surface when a deep dive into a warped perspective would be far more interesting.

When Alice comes back into focus, it's clear that the central flaw of Paris-Manhattan is in its underwritten heroine. Alice hasn't made the mistake of seeing her life as a Woody Allen movie — it's just that she thinks life should play by those movies' off-kilter rules. The script doesn't make a judgment as to whether that's a bad thing or not, and it's unclear whether the reason Alice is single is her oversaturation with Woody Allen or that she just hasn't met the right guy yet.

The film's refusal to take a side on these questions — or even to make a statement about Allen himself — robs it of specificity. And on the topics of love, sex, life and the effect of art on how we live, Woody Allen has had a lot to say. Innocuous as it is, Paris-Manhattan does not.

Blog Archive