Gawker: local tv

Humpback of the Harbor

Gabriel Snyder — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:15:16 EDT

Today is turning out to be very maritime oriented: A humpback whale has been spotted swimming under the Verrazano Bridge in the New York Harbor. This is kinda cool, and also kinda worrying.

WNBC has been showing the footage of the whale, which apparently almost beached itself on Rockaway Beach yesterday. Last fall, scientists working for the state of New York heard the calls of the endangered humpbacks in the harbor for the first time and were concerned because busy shipping channels are not the safest place for large whales to swim.

Media Bubble: Hearst to Head Home

Jesse — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 16:29:50 EDT

• Hearst mags get move-in dates for new tower, where the cafeteria will serve sushi five days a week. [NYP]
• Four Time Inc. mags will move their TOCs to the first page, sponsored by Philips Electronics. Finally, the cure magazines have been searching for. [WSJ]
• Housekeeping no longer so good for EIC Ellen Levine? [WWD]
• High-end book pubisher Rizzoli looks to enter U.S. magazine market with a title that's "Time Out meets Star magazine with N mero kind of fashion," whatever the hell that might mean. [FWD]
• Critics should stop worrying so much about the Times and focus more on the sins of local TV news, says Brian Montopoli. Coming soon from Public Eye: Is your weatherman really jolly?! [Public Eye/CBS]
• More Times blogs: Now covering state politics. (Oh, shit. Were we not supposed to be talking about the-paper-that-cannot-be-named anymore? Sorry.) [The Politicker/NYO]
• Elizabeth Spiers popularized the word "snarky" when she worked for Gawker. It's a testament to our precocity, then, to have been miraculously using it even before blogs existed. [Downtown Express]

Breaking: Baby Still Stuck in Well

Jesse — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 16:45:04 EDT

Just in case you care — and God knows we certainly don't — that cat is still stuck in that wall, and what seems like every New York City press organization has a representative camped out on Hudson Street waiting for its triumphant reappearance. (Waiting for it to be risen?) As of a few minutes ago, it hadn't.

A few more pics after the jump, including what the photogs are all watching and the four local-news vans ready to go live from the scene.

From Faint Meows, a Frenzy Grows [NYT]

Remainders: The Miracle of Sean Preston's Birth, Yours to Own

Jesse — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 17:24:15 EST

• The art you've always wanted: A sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth. On a bearskin rug. And "the crowning of baby Sean's head." Where would you find such a thing? In Williamsburg, of course. [Send2Press]
• This week's Times correction of the week: "An article in The Metro Section on March 8 profiled Donna Fenton, identifying her as a 37-year-old victim of Hurricane Katrina who had fled Biloxi, Miss., and who was frustrated in efforts to get federal aid as she and her children remained as emergency residents of a hotel in Queens. Yesterday, the New York police arrested Ms. Fenton, charging her with several counts of welfare fraud and grand larceny. Prosecutors in Brooklyn say she was not a Katrina victim, never lived in Biloxi and had improperly received thousands of dollars in government aid." People are so nit-picky these days. [NYT]
• AC 360 finds a new scourge to campaign against: The evil practice of puppy smuggling. [CNN]
• There are dates that end well and dates that end less well. And then there are dates the end in night court. Even worse, without Judge Harry T. Stone. Yikes. [CourtTV]
• Is this for real? Who knows. But it would seem that Mobile, Ala., residents found themselves a leprechaun on St. Patrick's Day, according to the local NBC affiliate. [YouTube]

David Pogue Finds Solutions to Problems We Didn't Know We Had

Jesse — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:52:18 EST

We like technology, really we do. (Yay, technology!) But we confess that David Pogue's latest wet dream, recounted in today's paper, leaves us a bit flummoxed. It seems there's a new gizmo that, when hooked up in your house, allows you to watch your home TV anywhere you can get a WiFi signal to your laptop — or even a cell signal to your Treo. ("Now you can watch your home TV anywhere you can make phone calls — a statement that's never appeared in print before today (at least not accurately)," Pogue proudly proclaims.)

Now, we suppose we appreciate that we'll never again have to forego being lulled to sleep by the dulcet tones of Chuck Scarborough, even when we happen to overnight in far-away cities. But here's the thing: There's technology to take Chuck with us wherever we go, and still no once can figure out how to get a Time Warner guy over to fix the damned cable anytime in the next week? Priorities seem just a bit out of whack, no?

TV Here, There, Everywhere [NYT]

Media Bubble: Watching O'Reilly

Jesse — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:39:04 EST

• Nick Lemann has 5,000 words on Bill O'Reilly. Which we'll get around to reading soon. [NYer]
• David Carr thinks VF, underneath all its bullshit, is actually a pretty good mag. [NYT]
• And Jon Friedman thinks that all the other magazine editors are ganging up on poor David Remnick. [MW]
• We always thought Bill Beutel was kind of a little crazy, but that's probably because we only really watched him in his later years. He helped invent Eyewitness News, and he died Saturday. [NYT]
• Bloggers "are the new media darlings," and — shockingly — many hope to get paid gigs with traditional media. [Newsday]
• More breaking insights: An attractive grad student who is raped and murdered makes for great tabloid fodder. [Baltimore Sun ]
• No Hachette mags were among the Ellie finalists. Again. [WWD]

Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Doppler

Jesse — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 11:55:58 EDT

Things were so much simpler when we were kids. The weekday Times cost 35 cents. Rock lived at 102.7. And at 11:00 we'd all watch Al Roker tell us where it was raining, thanks to his handy-dandy Doppler 4.

But sunrise, sunset, and all that. Al moved to Today. God knows what happened to 102.7. And Doppler 4 was replaced by Doppler 4000, a preventive unilateral escalation presumably designed to keep any meteorological rivals from achieving Doppler supremacy.

Now it has happened. Say hello to — we kid you not — Channel 2's new Doppler 2 Million.

What scares us most about this crazy Doppler arms race is the possibility of loose Dopplers. Because one day advanced Doppler technology will fall into the hands of Fox 5.

And then it's all over.

CBS2 [cbsnewyork.com]