http://www.hitsville.org Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:08:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The recent public caning of OC Register sportswriter Mark Whicker has been fun to watch. In response to the rescue of Kaylee Jaycee Dugard, the 11-year-old girl who was kidnapped and then kept captive by a maniac for some seventeen years, Whicker wrote a jovial column detailing all the major ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/09/10/the-bad-sportswriters-hall-of-fame/ It's always bugged me to read stories in the press about the financial problems the press is having. Journalists, it turns out, aren't too clear-eyed (and often aren't too intellectually honest) when it comes to analyzing the collapse of their own profession. My argument for what's really going on, or at ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/08/13/why-newspapers-are-dying-2/ I've been trying to examine my extreme schadenfreude at the troubles Annie Leibovitz is having. I'm not talking about her personal travails: In that realm, she has been faced with a number of upheavals in the past few years, all of it reason to feel only extreme empathy (the deaths ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/08/01/annie-leibovitz-agonistes/ Talk about a possible Apple tablet has increased over the past week, starting with an Apple Insider story Friday and a Financial Times story yesterday. The sources for the FT one seem to be in the music industry: The device is expected to be launched alongside new content deals, including some ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/07/27/is-apple-trying-to-reconstitute-the-cd/ I've been reading all the stories and I can't figure it out. The LAT says he's sold nine million around the world since his death. The Jackson operation, leaking to a hometown newspaper, has always used the world figures whenever the national one aren't that hot, but let's take it at ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/07/20/how-many-cds-has-michael-jackson-sold-since-he-died/ What's important about the internet to me is how it can undercut and challenge the calcified and celebrity-struck MSN. Oh, wait: [H]ere’s why the CBS Evening News is struggling in the ratings, how it can turn things around…and why none of it is Katie Couric’s fault. That's not the latest love letter to ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/07/20/mediaite-joins-the-katie-couric-pr-bandwagon/ Us Magazine got an exclusive copy of footage shot the day Michael Jackson's hair caught fire on the set of a Pepsi commercial he was filming with his brothers in 1984. The magazine says that the damage from the accident may have started Jackson off on a life of painkiller ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/07/18/the-pepsi-commercial-accident-how-his-addictions-began/ Murdoch's News of the World, the London tabloid, is in trouble right now after the Guardian's ongoing exposes about how the paper does business: Besides, of course, paying for stories, it's also been paying for phone tapping—and then paying some more to keep the victims quiet when the paper got ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/07/14/latoya-goes-for-the-gold/ On the UK message board I wrote about last week, ukmix.org, a poster calling himself MJDangerous has been submitting reams of information about sales figures from around the world, notably about Michael Jackson. With that exhaustive data, I first assumed he was a Sony employee, based either in Britain or France. ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/07/12/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-worldwide-record-sales%e2%80%94jackson-the-beatles-pink-floyd-and-more/ Five years ago, U2 was promoting the iPod; now Bono is shilling for Apple's most sophisticated iPhone competitor, the Blackberry, which is sponsoring the band's latest tour. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA8SM_ivqpY[/youtube] The Moby Quotient on this will be low; no one cares about the song and the product isn't that bad. But Bono has more ... http://www.hitsville.org/2009/07/09/sellout-watch-u2-2/