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Media Organizations Inadvertently Pranking Themselves

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Carl Franzen of TPM’s IdeaLab reports that for several hours today News Corp. was erroneously corroborating that the Twitter handle of @wendi_deng was in Twitter-speak a ‘verified account’. Turns out they were wrong, as was Twitter. . . . I detest seeing errors in books I’ve published–I get sick to my stomach the first time I see an error in a book I’ve edited–so my outlook here is informed by that. And yet, I know that I am fallible, along with other people, and that we’re all probably more mistake-prone in our screen-dominated age than in eras past. Mistakes will continue to occur in communications. But what’s inexcusable is to make errors on top of errors. Both companies here failed as organizations to correctly assess the matter at hand. I guess you might say they’re simply too complex to be simple when they need to be. // more. . .

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Verizon’s Quick U-Turn a Sign of Anti-Corporate Energy

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I love how rapidly Verizon caved on their plan to charge subscribers a $2 fee for processing certain kinds of monthly payments. As reported in the New York Times, reactions from customers, communications industry watchdogs, and FCC officials ranged from outrage to threats of investigations. The recent campaign that made Bank of America drop its proposed $5 debit card fee took a few weeks to reach its goal, while this explosion of anger at Verizon was over in a scant 24 hours. This says something about the anti-corporate mood prevalent in the U.S. right now, thanks to the #OWS movement. Only at their peril do companies blithely try putting anti-consumerist policies into place. GoDaddy’s loss of subscribers over their support for SOPA, which I posted about last night, is another example of the same impulse in the consumer zeitgeist.

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Count Me Among the 8M NY Times Subscribers Receiving Screwy Email

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The Times hasn’t adequately explained how such an enormous screw-up could have occurred, and their attempts at damage control have been as insufficient as the original email was incorrect. Just as I noted the headline above was misleading, so too was the Times’ first report on the incident. On Twitter they reported, “If you received an e-mail today about canceling your New York Times subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.” A few hours later they had to admit this too was wrong; the message hadn’t been spam, it really had come from the newspaper. Reflexively blaming spam for the transmission of an email to 8,000,000 readers, when it was supposed to go to 300, is bad form. // more

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Cheers for Canadian Bands at Year’s End

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“Clearly, this has been years in the making. The Canadian indie scene has been in ascendance ever since Feist’s old band Broken Social Scene put ‘sprawling collective’ into the music-critic lexicon with 2002’s ‘You Forgot It in People’. . . . But Canada’s combined musical might this year is still a revelation.”–Joshua Ostroff in Spinner //more

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All the Romneys’ Horses

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In a weird and offensive article last Sunday that was headlined “Two Mitt Romneys–Wealthy Man, Thrifty Habits,” the New York Times reported on the Republican pol’s supposed ambivalence about his enormous wealth. I barely gave it a look at the time, quickly relegating it to the category of things I didn’t need to know about.

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The Henry Hudson Bridge–75 Years above the Sputyen Duyvil

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As odious a public official as I find Robert Moses to have been, I would vastly prefer someone like him to the visionless so-called leaders we have today. Yes, it’s a pity that Moses didn’t ultimately uphold the progressive ideals to which he subscribed early in his career, as shown by Robert Caro in The Power Broker, but at least he left something behind that remains useful to denizens of the region today. All that Gov. Christie is going to leave posterity is a lot of hot air.

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An 80th Birthday Makeover for The Great Gray Bridge

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From a favorite college professor long ago I heard that the French Catholic theologian and philosopher Jacques Maritain swore that the sight of the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan, as seen traveling south on the Henry Hudson Highway, was the most breathtaking view he ever experienced.

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Harvey Wang’s Portraits of a Vanished NY at the Tenement Museum

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Siegfried Liebman, mannequin maker; Eddie Day, brakeman on the Cyclone at Coney Island; Helen Giamanco, salad maker, Horn & Hardart Automat; Joe Baffir, boxing trainer; Julius Hans, tailor of rabbinical robes; Veronica Parker Johns, owner, Seashells Unlimited, a Third Avenue Manhattan store; and David Turnowsky, counterman at Katz’s Deli–these are just some of the New […]

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