Writing, Media & Blogs: July 2008 Archives
I think Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton has misread his customer satisfaction surveys in a hilariously tragic way.
The Los Angeles Times plans to cut 250 positions, including 150 jobs in the print and online news departments, amid a continuing industrywide slump in ad sales, the paper's editor said Wednesday. ..."The number one reason that people cancel the L.A. Times is, they tell us, they don't have enough time to read the paper that we give them every day," Stanton said. "We're going to be more picky about the stories we choose to write long and a lot more picky about the ones we write shorter."
I can see the survey question in my head:
We're sorry to see you go! Please tell us the number one reason you are canceling your subscription to the Los Angeles Times: [check] Not enough time to read it.
And Stanton interprets that answers to mean that his readers think the paper is too long! Seems pretty obvious to me that what the ex-subscribers really mean is that they don't have time to read the Los Angeles Times because they're too busy surfing the internet.
Slowly but surely the Iraqi government is meeting the benchmarks set for it by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Even though the Democrats intended to use the benchmarks as leverage for forcing an American retreat from Iraq, what some thought was impossible is actually happening, and we're winning. Naturally the Associated Press spins this optimistic step into a negative.
No matter who is elected president in November, his foreign policy team will have to deal with one of the most frustrating realities in Iraq: the slow pace with which the government in Baghdad operates.Iraq's political and military success is considered vital to U.S. interests, whether troops stay or go. And while the Iraqi government has made measurable progress in recent months, the pace at which it's done so has been achingly slow.
The White House sees the progress in a particularly positive light, declaring in a new assessment to Congress that Iraq's efforts on 15 of 18 benchmarks are "satisfactory"—almost twice of what it determined to be the case a year ago. The May 2008 report card, obtained by the Associated Press, determines that only two of the benchmarks—enacting and implementing laws to disarm militias and distribute oil revenues—are unsatisfactory.
The White House sees, but of course we all know better. Can't they just report good news without hedging and qualification?
Lifehacker has a list of books that changed your lives, as voted on by its readers. Overall, the list is pretty good; in order:
- The Bible
- The Works of Ayn Rand
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig
- The Stranger, by Albert Camus
- The Works of George Orwell
- The Works of Richard Dawkins
- The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
- Dune, by Frank Herbert
But wait, you say, one of these things is not like the others! The works of Richard Dawkins don't belong on a list of life-changing books! Because they are insipid and vacuous? No, but simply because they don't meet the fundamental criteria of the list: changing lives. Anyone who considers Dawkins' stunted philosophy to be profound was a bitter atheist long before reading The God Delusion.
(HT: RD.)
