George Polk Awards #fail

This:

The award for Foreign Reporting goes to the staff of The New York Times for unsurpassed coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas

— George Polk Awards (@PolkAwards) February 19, 2024

Is all you need to know. (Well, if you dno't already know the actual facts in the responses, you need to know them too, of course.)

Well, yes, it gets worse. Read this thread by Zei Squirrel.

Is it any wonder that most people don't trust the MSM on many issues, nor their guardians and puffers? (Usually, with wingnuts, the mistrust is for the wrong reasons on the wrong issues, but they have mistrust too.)

The reality, per those responses, is that the Slimes, which truly lives up to that nickname in this case, has  been a reliable hasbara mouthpiece.

As Gannett guts the Austin Stateless ...

 That's of course, in my media world of alt-naming, the Austin American-Statesman.

The Monthly notes how many other outlets are rushing in to fill the vacuum being left by the ongoing gutting. (That said, with the Trib headquarted in Austin, some have a leg up.)

I find it "funny," as in a mix of sad and disgusting, that the vacuum-fillers include Hearst, which cuts away at its own newspapers and hides how much it continues to make by being privately owned and not having to report to Wall Street.

The Monthly does note, contra newspaper union-hater Jim Schuetze, that the one thing that has stopped Craphouse (the tail wagging the dog of the "new Gannett") from even deeper cuts is that Stateless editorial staff is unionized. (Sidebar: Has there been a bigger wasted media space in some ways in the past five years than Schutze?)

That said, even as the union and Craphouse battle over a contract? That contract will almost certainly only cover full-time employees. Like I am sure will happen in Cowtown at the StartleGram, now that their union got a new contract a year ago, any fulltime employees who leave in the future will be replaced by freelancers.

Online only newspaper + monthly print mag = cheapness?

 I was down this road a little over a year ago with Maricopa, Arizona, and it not wanting to pay the ME anywhere decent, as I nosed around. (Set aside that the co-owner sent me a Walgreens clerk type standard two page application form as part of the initial round of the interview and potential hiring process [no, really!] and you lost me.)

I had forgotten that a certain newspaper in the Metromess had gone this same route, and I believe pre-COVID. But, a chance to move back into the Metromess itself, if other thingswere OK.

Well, this position was for an assistant editor. Which I found out means staff writer-plus, really. Then, we eventually got to potential pay. And an "-ish" at the end of what was discussed made me realize that the position was being "sold." Of course; part of the D Mag stable.

And, they did hire somebody else, which is fine, because I don't need to be paid in exposure-plus, along with a possibility of graduating to D Mag itself. (Say hi to Jim Schutze for me.) I think, per what the gist of things were, a generational talent was OK with exposure-plus pay.

Does the newbie get a cut of the advertorial stuff you're running, too? (Looking at the PDF version of the mag, there's more than one piece.) Dunno if that would be happening were Wick still alive.

And, no paywall on the monthly mags? And, wasting print pages with a month's worth of crime logs, even if this area of the Metromess is low-crime (not counting state-level or federal-level fraud cases, since that involves money.) I clicked more than half a dozen individual stories and no paywall there, either; D Mag doesn't, either, I think. Of course, magazines are a bit diff.

That said, I'm not sure we should call this a mag. Unlike Maricopa, both Park Cities People and Preston Hollow People (there, you're named) are in tabloid format, and I figure are as likely to be printed on newsprint as magazine slick.

As for content, other than already noted? They do a "person of the year" issue in January. ONE tabloid page, and that's it. Counting photos. Text is only half the page.

Wow.

Even if they had more money, and better website management, I'm not sure I'd want to be there.

==

Basically, they sort of remind me of a lot of Colorado papers in the heart of the Rockies and the start of the Western Slope: A real estate mag with a few pages of other newspaper stuff as fishwrap. Now, People has more non-real estate ads, tis true; the resemblance isn't total. But, sort of? At least in my book, yes.