PUBLISHED: December 24, 2008
1. Media correction blog Regret the Error provides their annual summation in “Crunks 2008: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections,” which ranges from cringe-worthy to hilarious. (The AP’s “[Bob Novak] announced late last month he has a brain” lies somewhere between the two.)
2. VQR contributing editor Lawrence Weschler has good MacArthur Awards juju—he writes about somebody, boom they get a genius grant. I remind Mr. Weschler that my mother finds me fascinating.
3. Matthew Vollmer, who wrote for VQR in 2003, would like you to know that he’s got a collection of stories coming out. It includes the story that we published.
4. In Prospect, Tom Chatfield considers the rise of literary awards, their arbitrary and self-serving nature, and finds they’re probably a good thing.
5. “Local Newspaper Doesn’t Have a Website” sounds like a 1999 Onion headline, but David Carr writes about just such a circumstance in the Times. The triCityNews of Monmouth County, NJ is an alt weekly that makes a pretty good argument for having a bare-bones website. Says the publisher, “I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?”
