Urgency Reader is a quick assembling of texts, risograph printed in Pawtucket, RI, and bound as a book at the last minute to launch at the Odds and Ends Art Book Fair at Yale University Art Gallery on December 6, 2019. […] Inspired by Omnibus News #1 (1969), Assembling (1970–87), and other assembling publications, Urgency Reader is an experiment in publishing as a gesture of call and response: the quick circulation of a charged collection of texts—in some cases raw, in-progress, or sketchy—to a small but deeply engaged audience. […] The order of the texts as they appear in the book was determined by chance by assigning a series of random integers from random.org to the alphabetical list of contributors.

{ Paul Soulellis | Continue reading + Download }

In 1969 three Germans, Thomas Niggl, Christian D’Orville and Heimrad Prem, issued a call for submissions for a periodical in which interested individuals were invited to submit up to 2 pages of art works in an edition of 1500 copies each. Contributors were responsible for the cost of reproducing their own submissions, and all works would be accepted with no editing or censorship. Published the same year under the title Omnibus News, the periodical was comprised of 192 submissions (384 pages) sequenced alphabetically in an A4 format and in an edition of 1500.

{ Arte Contemporanea | Continue reading }

photos { Tania Franco Klein | Adrià Cañameras }

30 years ago, Spy magazine sent “refund” checks for $1.11 to 58 rich people.

The 26 who cashed those got another check, for $.64.

The 13 who cashed those each got a check for $.13.

Two people cashed the $.13 checks—Donald Trump and Jamal Khashoggi’s arms-dealer uncle Annan.

{ Kurt Andersen | Spy, July, 1990 p. 84 + full issue }

Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, asks his editor (Hunter S. Thompson) if he could submit a novella instead of a “thinkpiece” to Rolling Stone. Hunter S. Thompson replies:

Objective
To explore the basis for patient complaints about the oldness of most magazines in practice waiting rooms.

[…]

Conclusions
General practice waiting rooms contain mainly old magazines. This phenomenon relates to the disappearance of the magazines rather than to the supply of old ones. Gossipy magazines were more likely to disappear than non-gossipy ones.

[…]

If we extrapolate our findings of 41 magazines each month at an average cost of £3.20 ($5.00; €4.00) per magazine over the 8000 practices in the United Kingdom, this equates to £12.6m disappearing from general practices, resources that could be better used for healthcare. Practices should consider using old copies of the Economist and Time magazine as a first step towards saving costs.

{ British Medical Journal | Continue reading }

image { Esquire, February 1956 }

Several weeks ago, Vidra communicated the new vision to the staff in what I am told was an uncomfortable stream of business clichés ungrounded in any apparent strategy other than saying things like “let’s break shit” and “we’re a tech company now.”

{ NY mag | Continue reading | Daily Beast }

Journalists consider the importance of events and the audience’s interest in them when deciding on which events to report. Events most likely to be reported are those that are both important and can capture the audience’s interest. In turn, the public is most likely to become aware of important news when some aspect of the story piques their interest.

We suggest an efficacious means of drawing public attention to important news stories: dogs. Examining the national news agenda of 10 regional newspapers relative to that of the New York Times, we evaluated the effect of having a dog in a news event on the likelihood that the event is reported in regional newspapers.

The “dog effect” is approximately equivalent to the effect of whether a story warrants front- or back-page national news coverage in the New York Times. Thus, we conclude that dogs are an important factor in news decisions.

{ Cambridge University Press | PDF }

{ Why Women Buy Magazines that Promote Impossible Body Images }

photo { Guy Sargent }

New study finds Internet not responsible for dying newspapers

Gentzkow notes that the first fallacy is that online advertising revenues are naturally lower than print revenues, so traditional media must adopt a less profitable business model that cannot support paying real reporters. The second is that the web has made the advertising market more competitive, which has driven down rates and, in turn, revenues. The third misconception is that the Internet is responsible for the demise of the newspaper industry.

{ Chicago Booth | Continue reading }

This paper documents a close connection between the timing of corporate news disclosures and CEOs’ absences from headquarters. I identify CEO absences by merging publicly available flight histories of corporate jets with real estate records of CEOs’ property ownership near leisure destinations. I find that CEOs go to their vacation homes just after companies report favorable news, and CEOs return to headquarters right before subsequent news is released. More good news is released when CEOs are back at work, and CEOs appear not to leave headquarters at all if a firm has adverse news to disclose. When CEOs are away from the office, stock prices behave quietly with sharply lower volatility. Volatility increases immediately when CEOs return to work. Mandatory Form 8-K disclosures of material company news are more likely to be filed late if news occurs while CEOs are at their vacation homes. […]

The paper’s results seem consistent with an agency cost hypothesis, under which CEOs might slow down their firms’ news disclosures for personal convenience on the days that they requisition company aircraft for golf or ski trips. However, the observed associations between news disclosures and vacation schedules may well be endogenous, if CEOs plan to be away from the office when the company expects to have little news to announce. To understand more clearly the direction of causation between disclosures and CEO absences, I conduct a variety of tests, examining how company news announcements change when CEOs return to headquarters at unexpected times. I also estimate a bivariate probit model of news days and vacation days, in which weather at the CEO’s vacation site is used as an instrumental variable that should be associated with trips to the vacation home but not be connected to company news developments. Much of the analysis from these tests supports the agency interpretation, with news releases appearing to occurr less frequently simply because the CEO is absent from the office. However, it is difficult to test causation in the other direction, which would require an instrumental variable associated with news at headquarters but uncorrelated with the CEO’s decision to take time off.

{ David Yermack/NYU School of Law | PDF }

Behind the scenes of the NY redesign

That includes using Github instead of SVN for version control, Vagrant environments, Puppet deployment, using requireJS so five different versions of jQuery don’t get loaded, proper build/test frameworks, command-line tools for generating sprites, the use of LESS with a huge set of mixins, a custom grid framework, etc.

{ Source | Continue reading }

CNN booked 11 rooms in one @Sochi2014 media hotel five months ago. We have been here for a day and only one room is available. #cnnsochi

— Harry Reekie (@HarryCNN) February 4, 2014

This is the one hotel room @Sochi2014 have given us so far. Shambles. #cnnsochi pic.twitter.com/RTjEkmyan3

— Harry Reekie (@HarryCNN) February 4, 2014

{ Journalists at Sochi are live-tweeting their hotel experiences }

The colossal project, which cost more than $50 billion – more than all previous Winter Olympics combined – was expected to turn Sochi into a sporting paradise, packed with arenas and a new airport. Instead, corruption and construction accidents have plagued preparations, with hotels still unfinished just days before the opening ceremony.

{ Zero Hedge | Continue reading }

“News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising,” […]

In 2014, the fastest-growing form of online “content” is an epidemic of heartwarming videos (“One Mother Did Something Illegal To Help Her Kids, And This Cop Was Totally, Unexpectedly Cool”), funny lists (“33 Reasons Miley Cyrus Was Actually The Best Thing To Happen To 2013”) and click-bait headlines from sites such as BuzzFeed, Upworthy and ViralNova.

Rather than being found on news sites or through search engines, they flourish on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. While reporters pride themselves on digging out bad news and awkward facts, these stories often appeal to positive emotions – affection, admiration and awe. They are packaged to make people share content with friends, and to spread like a virus.

Some of this is advertising – BuzzFeed designs viral campaigns for companies that are difficult to tell apart from its other output. Much of it has an advertising-like aspect. […]

One study of 7,000 New York Times articles by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that sad stories were the least shared because sadness is a low-arousal, negative state.

{ FT | Continue reading }

“I don’t have a cellphone or a Facebook account. I’ve never sent a text message. I don’t use Twitter,” he said. “I’m not a journalist. I’m not an academic. I’m not a professional writer. I’m not a professional editor. What I am is otherwise unemployed. Superfluous. That’s what I am.”

It’s a résumé that would disqualify Summers from working at most magazines. But most magazines aren’t The Baffler, which could be described as the country’s foremost journal of superfluous opinion. […]

…and The Atlantic, which writer Maureen Tkacik described as “a turgid mouthpiece for the plutocracy, a repository of shallow, lazy spin, and regular host of discussion forums during which nothing is discussed. It is, in every formal trait, a CIA front.”

{ Columbia Journalism Review | Continue reading }

Ukraine’s ‘Killer’ Dolphins Not Killers, Not Gone – Military.

This study finds that women who read sex-related magazine articles from popular women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan are less likely to view premarital sex as a risky behavior. Additionally, the women who are exposed to these articles are more supportive of sexual behavior that both empowers women and prioritizes their own sexual pleasure.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

Traditional newspapers that move online are about to lose the war against pure players and aggregators. Armed with the conviction their intellectual superiority makes them immune to digital modernity, newspapers neglected today’s internet driving forces: relying on technology to build audiences and the ability to coalesce a community over any range of subjects — even the most mundane ones. […]

On one side, legacy medias: Great franchises who grew on strong values, such as “pristine” journalism, independence, storytelling, fact-checking, solid editing, respect for the copyright… Along the way, they made their share of mistakes, but, overall, the result is great. After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers.  Now, this (aging) fraternity faces a new generation of media people who build their fiefdom on a completely different set of values. For instance, the notion of copyright has become exceedingly elastic. A few months ago, Flipboard began to aggregate contents from French news organizations, taking large excerpts — roughly capturing the essence of a story — along with a token link back to the original content. […]

On July 5th, The Wall Street Journal runs an editorial piece about Mitt Romney’s position on Obamacare. The rather dull and generic “Romney’s Tax Confusion” title for this 1000 words article attracted a remarkable 938 comments.

But look at what the Huffington Post did: a 500 words treatment including a 300 words article, plus a 200 words excerpt of the WSJ opinion and a link back (completely useless). But, unlike the Journal, the HuffPo ran a much sexier headline :

Wall Street Journal: Mitt Romney Is ‘Squandering’ Candidacy With Health Care Tax Snafu

A choice of words that takes in account all Search Engine Optimization (SEO) prerequisites, using high yield words such as “Squandering”, “Snafu”, in conjunction with much sought-after topics such as “Romney” and “Health Care”. Altogether, this guarantees a nice blip on Google’s radar — and a considerable audience : 7000+ comments (7x more than the original), 600 Facebook shares, etc.

HuffPo’s editors took no chance: the headline they picked is algorithm-designed to yield the best results in Google.

{ Monday Note | Continue reading }

image { Aleksandra Waliszewska }

Look at this fucking article:

Harry, 15, and his 18-year-old brother are the well-spoken product of cross-pollination of the Übermenschen.

I want to take this sentence, drag it out into the backyard, and beat it to death with a shovel. […]

“Everybody loves celebrity children,” said Stephanie Trong, the editorial director of The Cut.

No, they don’t. That’s wrong. Just last week, I prayed to Jesus that Jaden and Willow Smith would each get hit by a milk truck. No one loves celebrity children. Even Tom Hanks couldn’t be stopped from siring obnoxious offspring. What fucking galaxy did this lady emerge from? […]

Why would the New York Times […] tell us about these fuckfaces?

{ Drew Magary | Continue reading }

Yesterday we found out that Jonah Lehrer, the Gladwellesque whiz kid who’s The New Yorker’s newest staff writer, reused his own old writings for every goddamn blog post he’s written for The New Yorker so far. […] What’s the latest? […]

Repackaging the work of others without disclosure is arguably a much more serious offense than reusing your own work without disclosure. […]

This is also why you should never pay someone in their 20s to give a speech and expect to learn something new.

{ Hamilton Nohan | Continue reading }

Wired editor Chris Anderson cemented his speaker-circuit bona fides with a 2006 book, The Long Tail, that was hailed as cogent and disruptive. His last effort, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, met with considerably worse reviews, and its premise was derided on many blogs. Worse, chunks of it turned out to have been copied and pasted without attribution from Wikipedia. None of that matters on the speaking circuit, where Mr. Anderson’s agency says he is in more demand than almost any other client worldwide.

{ NY Observer | Continue reading }

Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in an April, 2011, post by Jonah Lehrer for Wired.com. We regret the duplication of material.

[…]

Editors’ Note: The introductory paragraphs of this post appeared in similar form in an October, 2011, column by Jonah Lehrer for the Wall Street Journal. We regret the duplication of material.

[…]

Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in a December, 2009, piece by Jonah Lehrer for Wired magazine. We regret the duplication of material.

[…]

Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in an April, 2010, column by Jonah Lehrer for the Wall Street Journal and in a July, 2009, article for the Guardian, which was an excerpt of Lehrer’s book “How We Decide.” We regret the duplication of material.

[…]

Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in an October, 2011, post by Jonah Lehrer for Wired.com and in an August, 2008, column by Lehrer for the Boston Globe. We regret the duplication of material.

{ The New Yorker | Jonah Lehrer just landed a job at the New Yorker and plagiarized the shit out of himself }

{ The Story Behind the Iconic Andy Warhol ‘Esquire’ Cover }