Yesterday the hardworking staff at kissin’ cousin Campaign Outsider noted that the Boston Globe was having a difficult time distinguishing between the late Tip O’Neill and Ken Howard, who played Tip in a local stage production.
From yesterday’s boston.com homepage . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
UPDATE: Unbeknownst to us, Megan Johnson had left the Track before this item ran.
It’s no secret that newspapers are constantly looking for new ways to generate and increase ad revenues.
Today’s Boston Globe has a new one on the hardtracking staff:
Wholesale blogvertising in the paper’s G section.
The full-page blogvert . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
There are eight million stories in the Stripped-Naked-by-Sandy City.
This is one of them.
From Thursday’s New York Times (dead-tree headline):
Music Career’s Artifacts, Gathered Over Decades, Are Lost in One Storm
In the 38 years since Kenny Vance moved into his oceanfront home at the end of Beach 137th Street in the Rockaways, the house became a repository of his half-century musical career as a singer, songwriter and producer.
“It was my little museum,” said Mr. Vance, 68, an original member of Jay and the Americans, which was an opening act for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and the musical director behind many prominent films and television shows, including “Saturday Night Live.”
Over the years, he improved the modest beach house in the Belle Harbor section of Queens into a comfortable two-story refuge of rejuvenation that enabled him to keep a busy performance schedule.
That’s all gone now, as Times reporter Corey Kilgannon chronicles:
And now in the sand was a bulky roll of two-inch audio tape: the master recording of the “Animal House” soundtrack, which Mr. Vance also produced.
“I had a tape of John Belushi singing a dirty version of ‘Louie Louie,’ which no one will ever hear now,” said Mr. Vance, who was musical director for “Saturday Night Live” in the early 1980s. The backhoe scooped up a poster of Kenny Vance and the Planotones, his current group . . .
Nearby was half of a 45 disc of “Looking for an Echo,” a Vance hit. And there was a sand-encrusted cassette tape of his own compositions with the handwritten label “7 Songs.” “I have no idea what it is,” he said.
Just as Kenny Vance has no idea what the future holds. But that won’t hold him back.
Mr. Vance, who is divorced, has not let what has happened stop him from performing. He has a show scheduled Saturday in Red Bank, N.J.
“Performing is my medicine,” he said, adding that his most poignant find in the wreckage was a photograph of him performing with the singer Johnny Maestro, who died in 2010.
“I cried when I found that,” he said. “I realized that I’m lucky, because I’m still here.”
Actually, everyone’s lucky he’s still here.
New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-Granite This) has staked out a position to the right of Rush Limbaugh in her opposition to the potential nomination of UN Ambassador Susan Rice – or any other Obama nominee – as the new Secretary of State.
From Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal:
Senator Vows to Block Any Clinton Successor
After Meeting With Potential Secretary of State Nominee, Republicans Demand More Answers on Fatal Attack in Libya
WASHINGTON—Ambassador Susan Rice’s attempt to repair her standing with Senate Republicans fell short Tuesday, as a trio of GOP senators emerged from a meeting with her even more harshly critical of the comments she made following the U.S. consulate attack in Libya.
One of the senators, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said she would try to block the confirmation of Ms. Rice or another nominee to succeed departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “My view is we should hold on this until we get sufficient information,” she said.
What “sufficient” means is anyone’s guess.
Now that the Simón Bolívar of Baseball has shuffled off this mortal coil, it’s time to install Marvin Miller in the Hardball Hall of Fame.
His New York Times obituary makes an excellent case, as does this Wall Street Journal piece by Matthew Futterman:
Why the Hall Should Honor Marvin Miller
There may be no greater absurdity in sports than Marvin Miller’s conspicuous absence from baseball’s Hall of Fame.
(Yes, that includes you, Pete Rose.)
Miller, who as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association was arguably the most influential figure in sports during the past 50 years, died Tuesday in New York. He was 95.
Miller came from the steelworkers union in 1966 and helped turn what had essentially been a “house union” into the world’s most powerful trade organization.
In his view, given their talents, baseball players were some of the most exploited and least informed employees he’d ever encountered. Within a decade, Miller and the players union had killed baseball’s archaic reserve clause, which bound players to a single team forever. Through collective bargaining with the owners, the players got a system that largely remains in place today—two reserve years, followed by arbitration eligibility, followed by free agency after six years of service. That system ultimately spread to the other sports and changed the lives of thousands of professional athletes for the better.
And Miller, who’s been barred from baseball’s shrine for lo these many years, deserves better.
So Tip O’Neill is getting a government building in DC named after him. From Boston Globe reporter Glen Johnson’s Political Intelligence column:
The federal office building that will bear O’Neill’s name is currently being renovated. It sits between the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, named for the vice president who served under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and a building named for the late President Gerald R. Ford.
Here’s the story currently on the boston.com homepage:
And here’s what was up there earlier today (Tip ! o’ the pixel to sharp-eyed reader John Emery):
Yep – that’s the actor Ken Howard, who played Tip O’Neill several years ago in a play by local writer Dick Flavin.
Now that’s a convincing portrayal.
Split decision in the local dailies today over the BBC series The Hour, which returns for its second season on BBC America tonight.
First up, the Boston Globe’s Matthew Gilbert, whose opinions the hardwatching staff generally agrees with (except when he called John Simm’s portrayal of Sam Tyler in the original Life on Mars ”weaselly”).
His review in today’s edition . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
From our M.C. Escher desk
As the hardtracking staff has noted this past week, Facebook is trying to turn the last vestiges of its Faceocracy into a Zuckocracy.
Specifically, the billion-strong social network wants to terminate the voting power of its members over changes in the site’s privacy policies.
From TechCrunch:
19K+ Commenters Trigger Vote On If Facebook Users Will Lose The Ability To Vote On Privacy Changes
19,000 Facebook users have commented on proposed changes to Facebook’s governing documents, enough to trigger a vote on whether they’ll go into effect. Today the Electronic Privacy Information Center asked Mark Zuckerberg to withdraw the proposal to combine user data from Facebook and Instagram, and eliminate the same right to vote that users will assert in a 7-day period starting soon.
Facebook gave users one week to review the proposal to change its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Data Use Policy, and that period ends tomorrow morning around 10am PST. Since more than 7,o00 users have left commented on the changes, exceeding the threshold required to cause a vote, Facebook will set up a one-week voting period in the near future. Last May when Facebook made its last proposal that also received enough comments, Facebook set up a voting period starting two weeks after the comment period ended, meaning this vote could begin around December 11th.
But . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
Contrarian Reuters media critic Jack Shafer checks in with this latest post:
Fake press releases are a public service
Yesterday, an enterprising clown used PRWeb to publish a fake press release about the purported purchasing of WiFi provider ICOA by Google for $400 million. The Associated Press,Business Insider, Forbes, Techcrunch and other websites ran stories about the transaction — without gaining confirmation from Google — and shortly after AllThingsD unmasked the release as fraudulent, the hoodwinked news organizations donned hair shirts in penance for their journalistic malpractice.
The pranked news organizations were right to self-flagellate, and the apologies and self-recriminations appeared to be sincere. “We were wrong on this post, for not following up with Google and the other company involved but posting rather than getting waiting [sic] on a solid confirmation beforehand from either source. We apologize to our readers,” confessed Techcrunch.
You don’t even have to be a talented liar to fool the press into publishing one of your lies. You just have to have gumption.
Which plenty of flacks, it goes without saying, have . . .
Read the rest at Sneak Adtack.
His ‘n’ His editorial cartoons at the local dailies today.
In the Boston Globe, the great Tom Toles . . .
Read the rest at It’s Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
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