Bloggasm

Have you ever watched a movie trailer and noticed a trend where one-word praises like “FANTASTIC!” and “EXTRAORDINARY” boom out in large letters that take up the entire screen? And then you see that the citations of where these reviews come from are so tiny that you can’t even read them?

That’s because those reviews were cherry-picked from unknown reviewers, likely from tiny websites or message boards which only have a few readers a day. It’s a way of making a badly-reviewed film look like it was loved by the critics.

Well, the book publish industry isn’t above such trickery. The New York Times published an article about the art of quote doctoring.

For instance, a book reviewer might write something like “This book is pure drivel, with all the brilliance drained out of it.”

The publisher then uses the clever tool of ellipsis in a blurb or advertisement like so: “pure…brilliance!” Notice the addition of the exclamation mark, which was previously non-existent.

From the article:

It happened to the Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman last October. Grossman says he was “quite taken aback” when he saw a full-page newspaper advertisement for Charles Frazier’s novel “Thirteen Moons” that included a one-word quotation — “Genius” — attributed to Time. Grossman was confused because his review “certainly didn’t have that word.” Eventually, he found it in a preview item he had written a few months earlier, which included the sentence “Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details.” As Grossman put it, “They plucked out the G-word.”

via galleycat

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A little while ago, I wrote about the history of amateur porn. In its early days, it was a vibrant business for early online sex enthusiasts who managed to make a load of money shooting in their bedrooms, doing things they’d normally be doing for free anyway.

Now that this trend has caught on, it has become a competitive business. Porn webmasters who have come late to the game doing generic mainstream porn are dying out quickly. Only the strongest survive — recruiting help from ivy league graduates and people who were laid off in the dot-com boom. Because credit card companies are wary of porn sites and will drop them at the first sign of trouble, the sites have to become extremely disciplined and make sure they have few customer complaints.

What’s more, the online industry is trying to change the face of porn and how it’s viewed in the public. More specifically, they’re trying to make people realize that BDSM is not a completely horrible thing, that it’s consensual, that it shouldn’t be outlawed for being obscene.

Read this long detailed article in the New York Times Magazine about the trials and tribulations of one such niche website: Kink.com

My favorite paragraph from the article:

Soon, with Wild Bill tied to his column again, Adams coiled leather twine around his testicles and cinched it tautly to the back of a wooden chair, some feet away. She crouched and flicked him with her finger, hard. I saw Cohen turn away, wrenching his face in what looked like the empathetic cringe men make. But it wasn’t. He was yawning.

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Well, this is very interesting. Due to the watch-dog nature of journalism, the New York Times has decided that it’s not right to become chummy with government officials. So they’re no longer participating at the WHCD:

Tucked inside Frank Rich’s Sunday column in the New York Times is indication that the newspaper will no longer play ball with the annual White House Correspondents Association dinners in Washington, which he calls “a crystallization of the press’s failures in the post-9/11 era.” He writes that the event “illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows….

“After last weekend’s correspondents’ dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events,” wrote Rich. “But even were the dinner to vanish altogether, it remains but a yearly televised snapshot of the overall syndrome. The current White House, weakened as it is, can still establish story lines as fake as ‘Mission Accomplished’ and get a free pass.”

This is pretty cool.

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A few days ago, I posted that newspaper circulation continues to fall, but I also noted that online readership for newspapers is going up. Well, it turns out that this growth is starting to slow:

Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani noted slowing online growth in a brief to investors regarding Q1 results.

She pointed to Yahoo’s difficulties over the past twelve months, The New York Times Co.’s About.com — where revenue advanced 26% in Q1 compared with 98% in Q1 2006 — and the revenue shortfall at E.W. Scripps’ Shopzilla as evidence of the slackening pace.

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Yeah, it’s about as vulgar as the title suggests. Sorta. It’s a play off a scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, which uses the asterik symbol — * — to represent the asshole.

In light of Vonnegut’s death, Eric Spitznagel has been asking authors to submit their own artistic versions of their assholes. The end result is pretty funny and mostly safe for work. Check it out over here.

via galleycat

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It’s always important to note in these instances that online traffic for newspapers is way up and continues to grow. But recent reports show that actual print circulation continues to decline:

According to industry sources, overall daily circulation for the six months ending March 2007 is expected to sink approximately 2.5% while Sunday will drop around 3.0%.

Yet again, major metro papers are bearing the brunt of the responsibility for the declines. Papers that are showing daily drops of 5% or more, according to circulation sources, include: The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Star Ledger in Newark, N.J., The Orange County (Calif.) Register, The Austin American-Statesman, the San Jose Mercury News, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Despite the growing web traffic, this is still a major problem for newspapers, since advertising dollars are not flowing online as quickly. Add to this the fact that Craigslist is stealing a lot of classified ad revenue, then you can see why many industry analysts are worried.

When I was in college, I took a poetry class taught by a guy of Indian descent named Kazim Ali. A few days ago, in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting, Kazim was reading some poetry manuscripts for a contest he was judging. After he was finished, he packed the manuscripts into a heavy box and brought it to the outside of Wright Hall and placed it besides the trashcan to be recycled– something he’s done dozens of times.

A member of the ROTC saw him place the box there. Or rather, what the person saw was a man who he thought to be an Arab placing a suspicious-looking box next to the building. He immediately called the police, reported that a man of “middle-eastern descent” had placed a box outside of Wright Hall, and within the hour the campus was shut down and a SWAT team was called in.

After it became apparent that the person who had left the box there was Kazim, he was called and put on the line with a police officer, who said that in the “current climate” he had to be careful what he did.

Since then, the university and the police have denied that this had anything to do with his dark skin. Kazim has been interviewed by several major news stations, and writes about his experience over here.

I heard from a friend who still attends the university that Kazim has already accepted a job to teach elsewhere. Thank god for that. What an embarrassment this must be for Shippensburg University.

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