Giving Focus Daily News and Marlon Hanson a good kick

 The Daily Snooze (not to be confused with the Dallas Morning Snooze) still claims to be a five-day daily, but, what would you get with that?

Archived as well as current e-editions are all paywalled, so I don't know.

That said, the last freebie "special section" available for view on the website? And, this is why "special section" is in scare quotes! A four-page 2020 Veterans Day "special section," where P1 is a full page editorial cartoon and 2-4 are listings of restaurants that give discounts to veterans. Oops, that's a three-pager, not four, so it was "special pages," not a section. Unless Marlon ran a blank fourth page.

That said, at least on the website, in this restaurant review, The Colony is in the Best Southwest along with Cedar Hill, DeSoto, Duncanville and Lancaster. 

And, he's running unedited press releases as news.

This all said, I don't know if his wife passed, or what. She's not on their "about" page. Don't know why he's still running it, then. He's over 70 — in fact, guessing by his LinkedIn, over 75 — and can surely retire, unless scraping digital newspaper floors for cigar butts still drives him along. Maybe it's the car reviews, and the free test-drive cars, that keep his motor running, so to speak.

I gave it the label of "fake news" because, while not in a pink slime sense, I think it is little more than fake news by press release any more. Take the T-Mobile press release. If Marlon's running that instead of getting a T-Mobile ad ...

And, also on fake news? I believe even less Marlon's claim of a 15K circ today than an 18K circ 15 years ago.

"Pink slime" journalism: both conservatives and liberals do it

Excellent piece by Columbia Journalism Review, following up on a report it did about the Tow Center and other folks. The biggest takeaways from CJR:

1. This problem has grown a lot since the original Tow piece.

2. Per a link to Open Secrets, although this started as a conservative to wingnut-conservative project, liberals are doing it, too. One biggie is the group behind the Shadow vote-tabulation app of infamy from the Iowa Democratic caucus. Another is Pantsuit Nation, obvious Hillbot folks. So, we're talking neoliberals. A third group also gets George Soros PAC money. (Cue wingnut conspiracy theories.)

3. What CJR doesn't mention is that, primarily for capital reasons, leftists aren't. (That said, CJR's general failure to distinguish liberal and leftist is itself an issue.)

4. The original "pink slime" wasn't necessarily partisan as much as it was cheap hypercapitalism.

5. Wanna know who's doing this in Texas? Page 11 of this link. Metric Media and Local News Network are conservative as are Record.

Missing from the CJR account is the problem with this much capitalism sloshing in the system. Missing are accounts of how doing these fake news sites rather than spending this money on ad buys further undercuts community newspapers which both duopoly parties give lip service to helping.