thoughts, observations and other miscellany

I know it’s old news to some, but if you haven’t read it yet, set aside 20 minutes to read The New Yorker’s profile piece (by Ryan Lizza) on Michele Bachmann, from August 15.  Bachmann’s extremity is nothing new.  Here extreme right-wing Christian beliefs are not a gimmick.  This is not what our country needs right now.  We need logic. Moderation. Statesmanship.

poynterinstitute:

—Cartoons by Robert and Donna Trussell

poynterinstitute:

Actual Malice: Around here, every day is Halloween.

—Cartoons by Robert and Donna Trussell

When late on Sunday night The New York Times tore up one front page and crashed an entirely new one about Osama Bin Laden’s death, it was only the third time in the last 43 years the paper literally stopped the presses.

The Times printed 350,000 copies of a non-Bin Laden paper — which included a story with the headline, “Another Side of Tilapia, the Ideal Farm Fish” — before it dumped that edition and got the news of President Barack Obama’s late night announcement in a new edition, according to an internal memo. Seventy percent of the newspapers the Times wound up printing for Monday had the bin Laden news. The Times printed an additional 165,000 copies of the paper on Monday, as well.

To the best of anyone’s institutional memory, the only other instances when the Times is believed to have stopped the presses in the last few decades: Lyndon Johnson’s abrupt announcement that he would not run for reelection in 1968, and the night of the 2000 cliffhanger election.

From “New York Times Stopped Presses for News of Bin Laden’s Death”

Why the iPad will NEVER replace the newspaper.

Jimmy Fallon and Brian Will.i.ams, slow jamming the news.

It was on this day in 1923 that Time magazine was first published. Pictured above, is the first cover, featuring retired Speaker of the House Joseph G. Gannon.

The power of newspapers!

Super interesting visual.

minnpost:

edkohler:

A sampling of where journalists are being killed.