Apparently, Monday was Chevron Day at Time.com.
In the endless quest for more ways to obliterate the line between advertising and editorial content, Time’s website started dropping Chevron logos willy-nilly into the body of news stories.
Here’s a screen grab from a piece as it appeared Monday morning . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
Yesterday the Missus and I trundled over to Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts to catch Sooni Taraporevala’s Parsis: The Zoroastrians of India at the Sert Gallery.
And it was good.
From the Sert Gallery’s website:
The result of a thirty-five year labor of love, Sooni Taraporevala’s Parsis, The Zoroastrians of India is the first visual documentation of India’s Parsi community, followers of the prophet Zarathustra. Taraporevala offers a rare insider’s view of how the Parsis, a people whose ancestors sailed from Iran to India citing religious persecution, survive today as a religious and ethnic minority of India . . .
Taraporevala’s photographs are a vivid window into Parsi life in all its vibrancy and diversity. Her lens takes us from public celebrations to private rituals, from fire-temples to living rooms, from the streets of Bombay to the villages of Gujarat. An intimate insider’s view, Parsis, The Zoroastrians of India is a stunning chronicle that brings to life a community of intense contradictions and endurance.
Representative sample:
The exhibit is there through December 20. And well worth the trip.
(Don’t just take our word for it. The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney really liked it too.)
The Wall Street Journal is so serious about covering the explosion in online data tracking, the paper has even outed itself.
From the WSJ’s Weekend Edition:
They Know What You’re Shopping For
‘You’re looking at the premium package, right?’ Companies today are increasingly tying people’s real-life identities to their online browsing habits.
Georgia resident Andy Morar is in the market for a BMW. So recently he sent a note to a showroom near Atlanta, using a form on the dealer’s website to provide his name and contact information.
His note went to the dealership—but it also went, without his knowledge, to a company that tracks car shoppers online. In a flash, an analysis of the auto websites Mr. Morar had anonymously visited could be paired with his real name and studied by his local car dealer.
When told that a salesman on the showroom floor could, in effect, peer into his computer activities at home, Mr. Morar said: “The less they know, the better.”
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
Pamela Geller is the the anti-Islamist jihada who launched the Ground Zero Mosque rumpus two years ago and this New York subway campaign (which also ran in Chicago and DC) three months ago:
Now she’s back with this doozie (via Buzzfeed):
The ad goes up December 17 in 50 NYC subway stations. Buzzfeed:
Geller’s previous subway posters, below, were all defaced (here’s some examples) the first day they went up, back in September.
In response, The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) will be adding the disclaimer seen on the above pre-press poster.
In anticipation of another round of defacements, Geller told the New York Observer that she printed twice as many ads this time. She added: “I refuse to abridge my free speech so as to appease savages.”
Only in America, eh?
As newspaper revenues continue to go down like the Hindenburg, more and more dailies are looking to erect paywalls to corral new cashflow.
Exhibit Umpteen: The Washington Post.
From David Carr’s post on the New York Times Media Decoder blog (via Politico’s Playbook) . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
The best thing about Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column is her lede, which references the breakout Gangnam video of budget-cutting bhagwan Alan Simpson (forever after to be known as AlSim):
The worst part of Ms. Peggy’s column is this criticism of Pres. Obama’s initial proposal for avoiding the fiscal cliff:
That offer, reduced to its essentials, appears to have been: Tax increases including rate hikes, more spending, permanent lifting of the debt ceiling—and we may talk entitlement reform down the road.
Mr. McConnell said he laughed. Mr. Boehner said he was “flabbergasted.” Some, including in this space, were startled and saddened. We’re in a debt and deficit crisis, the Republicans just got beat and need an agreement, and you offer a deal they couldn’t possibly back? With the clock ticking toward a sequester deadline that could upset major portions of the economy? During a weak recovery with high unemployment?
But a week’s reflection gives rise to other thoughts.
First, that was a real Michael Corleone move.
No – that was the first phase of negotiating.
Get a grip, GOP.
And think: Split the difference.
The Fiscal Cliff Bakeoff is officially underway, with TV spots flying from every quarter.
Over here, this ad from House of Bush consigliere Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS:
Over there, this ad from the AFSCME, SEIU, and NEA unions:
And over all, this startling concession from Grand Old Party Girl Ann Coulter (2:00- 2:32, via Politico’s Playbook):
To recap:
‘OK fine, let’s do that, but in the end, at some point, if the Bush tax cuts are repealed and everyone’s taxes go up, I promise you Republicans will get blamed for it,’ [Coulter] said. ‘It doesn’t mean you cave on everything, but there are some things Republicans do that feed into what the media is telling America about Republicans.’ … ‘You’re saying capitulate to Obama?’ Hannity stammered. … ‘We lost the election, Sean!’
Apparently, the election’s not all they lost.
Ever since we found out that Mrs. Tom Brady had a Bundchen in the oven, we knew there’d be a race in the news media to announce the arrival of the Littlest Ugg Model.
And on the local dailies front, we now have a winner.
The Namesniks at the Globe beat the Track Gals (without Megan!) at the Herald like a Boston traffic light.
The Globe item . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
The Big Town is the Big Top for Rupert Murdoch’s newly minted News Corporation, which owns umpteen newspapers across the globe.
Most notable here in the US: the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, the Goofus and Gallant of American journalism.
But they were kissin’ cousins on Wednesday, as this ad in the Journal indicated:
The Post advertising in the Journal.
These are indeed the end times.
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