The Good, The Bad, The Spin

Michael Chertoff did an outstanding job communicating during his visit to Southern California to assess the fire situation. His comments on NPR were particularly sensible, in which he expressed passion and conveyed calmness in responding to the situation. Here is a Q&A conducted with him. Although his performance could be nitpicked in detail, Chertoff nevertheless accomplished something that, at the end of the day, takes remarkable skill.

It’s not just that journalism is sinking down the toilet in terms of consumer interest and profit, it’s more that journalism has not kept up with consumer preferences in light of the increased democratization of information. This was hinted upon in a previous post, but NPR discussed today how parody journalism has become increasingly profitible by abandoning–and ridiculing–traditional news standards.

It’s been awhile. I’ve been sick with the flu not once but twice in the past two weeks and am still groggy in the head. While I was away, I found out my business site (setup in Wordpress) had been receiving more attention in two days than this site has in its few months of existence.

The culprit is the brainiac over at Freakonomics blog on the New York Times Web site, who linked to an article I wrote more than a year ago about a researcher who studied beauty as a motivator for donating. The story received some nice media attention locally when 20/20 did a piece on it nationally. The hook was a University of Nevada researcher was a co-author of the study.

My only complaint: Despite the increased traffic, Google Adwords has been having some glitches lately, and of course, the ads on the page with the original story are affected. Shit.