Steelers: At Least the Other Guy Is Pittsburgh Too

I’m reserving judgment on how I feel about this potential Steelers sale until I know more. But whoa, big changes potentially ahead.

Why Obama Is Breaking Right

This Frank Rich piece from the NY Times makes a good point about the listlessness that seems to have infected the Presidential campaign in the past month or so. Most of that is attributable to the summer vacations drawing away the attention of both the press and the media audience, but it’s true that there hasn’t been a lot of substance recently. So why though does the Obama campaign move away from all that fun audacity of hope stuff?

Thing is, Obama and his campaign have the calculation down: he isn’t going to win the election by appealing to Frank Rich, and no matter how much his changed policies on Iraq and public-campaign financing make his original fans angry, they aren’t going to matter much to the rest of the electorate that has tuned things out until the fall and didn’t agree with the lefty positions on those issues in the first place. He can also save the exciting rhetoric for the time that the spotlight’s turned back on. It’s cynical, but Obama surely won’t lose left-leaning voters in the general election — they’re going to sit this one out after what happened in 2000 and 2004? — and can only potentially gain middle-ground voters by moving that way. Sure, it’s inconsistent, but sometimes you gotta know who you can afford to piss off, and that’s usually the party base.

Happy 232nd

Here’s to January 20, 2009.

The Top News Outlets for May 2008

Just saw this list of the most popular online news sources from Nielsen Online.

Brand or Channel — May ‘08 Unique Audience (000) — May ‘07 Unique Audience (000)

Yahoo! News — 35,846 — 30,451
MSNBC Digital Network — 35,184 — 28,347
CNN Digital Network — 33,101 — 29,094
AOL News — 22,524 — 17,444
NYTimes.com — 21,340 — 12,775

Tribune Newspapers — 16,238 — 13,300
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division — 14,629 — 12,645
Google News — 11,356 — 9,359
ABCNEWS Digital Network — 11,124 — 10,211
USATODAY.com — 10,785 — 9,528

Fox News Digital Network — 10,132 — 7,594
CBS News Digital Network — 9,225 — 8,620
washingtonpost.com — 9,204 — 8,613
McClatchy Newspaper Network — 9,131 — 9,885
Hearst Newspapers Digital — 7,955 — 8,380

WorldNow — 7,523 — 6,232
MediaNews Group Newspapers — 6,965 — 6,189
Slate — 6,456 — 3,856
Advance Internet — 6,202 — 6,006
IB Websites — 5,943 — 5,203

BBC News — 5,933 — 6,554
Cox Newspapers — 5,826 — 3,949
Belo Television — 5,354 — 3,301
Topix — 5,133 — 4,411
Boston.com — 4,962 — 4,038

Gannett Broadcasting — 4,735 — 3,030
TheHuffingtonPost.com — 4,715 — 1,327
Associated Press — 4,527 — 8,191
Belo Newspapers — 4,462 — 2,417
Fox Television Stations — 4,386 — 3,451

I’m happy to see so many newspaper companies are cracking the list. The audience is there; we just need to use that more effectively to make money and keep things going. It’s also good that the big news sites like Yahoo!, AOL and MSN beat out Google News by so much: the first three still have a human element at play in editing, proving that context really does matter.

So good news to all you editors: for now, you still can’t be replaced by robots.

Reading Recs

I recently read and enjoyed the following, so feel free to hook that up for yourself:

• This UK Daily Mail profile of John McCain’s first wife. I had always heard about his first marriage, but knew next to nothing about it. Definitely a sensationalist source, but an unflattering new look.
• An article on the prevalence of skulls by Stephen Marche in Esquire. There’s no link to it on their site, so you can just read this other description of it. Who doesn’t like a memento mori?
• This inspiring article from the Chicago Tribune magazine about a woman in Roseland (a nasty part of Chicago) who started her own anti-violence group for the teens in the neighborhood.

Good on ya.

Tim Russert

I was sad to hear that Tim Russert died today at 58. He represented one of the last of the genial TV-news hosts in a field of openly biased shouters, and for that he was appreciated. There are times he should have been a lot more confrontational — the Iraq war buildup never did have a highly prominent critic in the media, and neither did much of anything involving the government in the years between 2001 and 2005 or so — but I did appreciate Russert’s sense of reasoned discourse and his strong Rust Belt roots. (It’s too bad that the Bills never did get that championship.) Sorry to the family for their loss.

John McLaughlin! OMG WTF

What on Earth is this about? (Watch to the end)

Who even says “Negro” anymore? What does Clarence Page make of this? Are “Orientals” the next Issue One? So many questions as you make me look bad for loving your show here, J McL.

Bye bye!

Not Missing NYC Right Now

“The temperature hit 99 degrees at La Guardia Airport, 4 degrees higher than the previous high set on June 9, 1984; it was 99 degrees at Newark Liberty Airport, tying a record set in 1933. In Central Park, the high temperature was 96, one degree shy of the record. Temperatures in Islip, on Long Island, and Bridgeport in Connecticut, easily broke previous records.

Tuesday was not likely to offer any respite from the 90-degree heat, according to the National Weather Service, adding that temperatures would drop back into the 80s by Wednesday.” — The New York Times

So many memories from those New York summers of 2002-2005–the smell of rotting food in plastic bags; the rolling sweat streams down the back of my leg while I stood on the subway platform each morning; sweaty fat dudes in tank tops bumping into people; the brownouts; the residents yelling at each other in anger on the street.

Yes, summer is the worst time to be a New Yorker, and it’s descended on the city like a dumpsterful of fermented trash juice. So to my peeps still living there: I miss plenty of things about my old town, but as for this and the other heat waves headed your way this summer, I sure am glad to have bailed out.

Don’t forget a change of undershirt–I know I used to need a new one by 2 p.m. or so. Sexy.

Beer or Pizza?

If you had to give up beer or pizza for good, which is the right answer?

I have to choose to give up beer. There’s always The Tyrconnell. There’s just no substitute for pizza.

End post.

Too Big, Too Experienced, Too Osgooded

What a bummer. They went down fighting to the very final seconds–I did the two-handed hair-grab and futile stare at the sky as the puck rolled past Osgood and across the goal mouth–but Detroit has just been too overwhelming this series. I haven’t seen stifling defense like that since the New Jersey trap era.

Props to you, Penguins, for a mad phat season and for never giving up. And please re-sign Brooks Orpik and anybody else you can. Orpik played his ass off and we’ll miss anybody else who goes.

Also, Zetterberg for the Conn Smythe is ridiculous. I would have chosen Osgood, Franzen, Holstrom or Lidstrom first.

Now back to our regularly scheduled non-sports blogging until football season rolls around.

Congrats to Obama. So Now What?

Quick hits:

• Clinton might not have won, but she certainly gets to play kingmaker. She set the pattern for the fall: black people and people under 40 for the O-man, and everybody else for her. Once you add in the masses of lily-white crotchety Republicans and extrapolate that same pattern, it looks like Obama loses by a lot. But if Hillary decides to swing her weight behind him, then that could change things.
• Does Hillary really want the vice-president slot? I don’t know that she does. From a purely self-interested perspective, things might work out better for her if she sits this year out and then makes a comeback in 2012. By then we’ll either have a McCain presidency and she can argue that the Democrats should have picked her in 2008 and certainly should in 2012, or she can find enough Obama mistakes from four years in office to drop in like Reagan in 1976 or Ted Kennedy in 1980.
• Unfortunately for her in that latter scenario, the Republicans lost the general election in 1976 and the Democrats lost it in 1980. Whoops.
• Back to the first point, your man McCain is no political slouch: he sees what I just pointed out and is trying to win over Team Hillary. Under what other circumstances would a Republican ever dare to say something nice about Hillary Clinton? His best option is for her to sit on the sidelines and be pissed, because if she does, that’s just what her supporters will do too.
• It is weird how the fact that a black man is the major-party nominee for President of the United States isn’t being played up a lot more. But then that tends to happen with all significant moments: no matter how big something seems in your own life, the world won’t bother stopping to congratulate you. There’s always more to be done, so the sooner you get down to brass tacks and do it, the better.

Game Six. What.

You know, I was all set to write the Pens’ obituary, and yet I should not have given up on those Frenchies Maxime and Marc-André. And, of course, Sykora with calling the goal. The whole thing was the shiznit.

Now they need to avoid coming back and blowing Game 6 by 8-0 or something.

And sorry to my new neighbors for bringing the celebratory ruckus.

Slow Clap For This Man For Keeping The Penguins Alive Single-Handedly

I can barely even watch this, dudes. There are a few too many spectacular saves for comfort.

MSNBC: Just Filling the Niche, So Relax

Today I was reading this WP article about MSNBC’s left-leaning slant and found myself wondering why dudes were fussing.

MSNBC has exactly two prominent liberal commentators, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. We can pare that down to one because Matthews is usually unwatchable and isn’t really that liberal anyway. (He did vote for Bush in 2000.) So you have a network’s reputation being made off of one smart-assed commentator–full disclosure, I do like Olbermann most of the time–who makes most of his publicity off of YouTube replays. Nor do I see how David Gregory, Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell count as partisan in any way when compared with the likes of Brit Hume and Shephard Smith.

But, let’s assume MSNBC is slanting to the left. McCain and Clinton spokespeople have to rail against any loud voice that ostensibly opposes them, but I wish those kind of complaints–and the ones against Fox News–were recognized more often for what they are: empty gestures ignoring the underlying reality that these networks exist because there’s a market for the slant they’re selling. Protest the viewing public that keeps your favorite target network going, and then you’re on the right track.

The media is a special business because of the effect it has on society, but it is still a business where resources flow to any open opportunity. In NBC / GE’s case, that was for a mildly liberal network that’s happy to scrap with conservative rivals. There’s thus little point in being mad at them for slanting. I think it’s digusting and hilarious that KFC has found a market for the Famous Bowl, but getting mad at KFC for following the dollars is the wrong way to go. They aren’t a 1950s cigarette company keeping a lid on the fact that fatty food is bad for you–we as a nation are clearly aware of it, but plenty of us still clamor for gravy with cheese.

TV is no different. It’s a market, and getting your news from TV is a bad decision in the first place. (Nearly every time “the media” catches flak for being too dumb, it’s really the televised media, but that’s for another post.) So get pissed all you want at MSNBC, McCain and Clinton staffers, but it’s not going to stop the gravy-and-cheese train.

Pens Back in Business

The crowd enthusiasm coming through tonight was amazing. I wanted to jump through my TV screen and beat up an octopus.