Web publishing zealot Jeff Jarvis like to yell Darwinian slogans at print journalists . "There is no divine right for newsroom jobs," he wrote earlier this month. "Nor is printing and trucking an eternal verity of the field." It was surprising, then, to hear the media futurist's complaint about today's cover story on him in the Observer: The paper didn't promote his new dead-trees book! And after he gave the reporter so much of his precious time:
What really pisses me off is that they couldn’t bother to mention my book - the only good reason to talk with a reporter - even after the reporter visited the recording of the audiobook. Now that’s bullshit.
Just how long have you been in this racket, Jarvis? A real internet futurist publishes his book online, for free. As a random blogger once reblogged, "The market and the internet don't care if you make money." But then you already knew that.
After we went to all the trouble of offering Spitzer hooker Ashley Dupre seven—seven!—
Hey, how about some more terrible news? The LA Times is 
Martha Stewart, a lady who made billions of dollars talking about stuff for your house and dinner parties and things like that and also went to jail once, is already feuding with her company's new co-CEO, Wendy Harris Millard. Recall that, just this past summer, Stewart's company 
The ad industry 
It may well be within the realm of human achievement to make an ad for Hair Club For Men that does not cause an involuntary shudder of revulsion. But this is not that ad. This is 
John McCain is playing dirty! Tonight, after Barack Obama's speech, McCain bought airtime for a rebuttal ad. There are no details on which markets and channels the ad will air on ("battleground states" does not mean much!) but it will surely end up repeated on every channel in the name of "news" a couple million times. What will McCain do in this mysterious and unprecedented ad? We're not sure, but 
So the Rielle Hunter clips have been available on the internet for ages now. The Edwards campaign famously "scrubbed" them but they were still to be found elsewhere. Still, now that the affair is confirmed, it's fun to go back and rewatch them for creepy hints. Like how Hunter keeps the camera focused on Edwards' blue-jean-clad crotch in the first one. All the videos are available 
Kenneth Cole is not just a middling designer and outspoken 
In an odd bit of television, charming-but-unwatched late night host Craig Ferguson invited a fictional author onto his show Wednesday. The fictional author, 
"A toy being sold over the internet by a Utah couple is causing an uproar from supporters of democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. It’s a sock monkey wearing a suit with a lapel pin for Obama. Supporters of Obama have been filling online forums and blogs with angry words over what they see as the degrading depiction of a black man as a monkey." [
The MySpace suicide case of thirteen-year-old Megan Meier, who killed herself after being tormented via Myspace by her neighbor 
So. 
Was this week a peek at a terrible future? A dreadful harbinger of things to come? Will all the weeks be like this from now on? Yeah, news-wise, it was slow, which is deadly for a blog like this, but it shouldn't have been slow. Two gubernatorial sex scandals! A heated election! A collapsing economy! Shouldn't it be crazy here? Maybe we're all too depressed to write about it! Look at Drudge. The image above has been on top of his site all day. He's talking about the presidential race, but everyone feels like that crying smiley face this week. Right? Let's take a look at the tape:
This is just going to lead to so, so many regrettable "bitch" jokes, isn't it.
