Daily Archives: August 21, 2016

Trump’s win-win scenario

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Further to John Cassidy’s musings about what Trump is up to, this NYT OpEd by Neal Gabler is interesting:

People run for the presidency for all sorts of reasons. But Donald J. Trump may be the first to run because he sees a presidential campaign as the best way to attract attention to himself. There seems to be no other driving passion in him, certainly not the passion to govern.

He isn’t an ideologue like Ted Cruz, an opportunist like Marco Rubio, a movement builder like Bernie Sanders, a political legatee like Jeb Bush or a policy wonk like Hillary Clinton. For all of them — for any serious candidate — attention is a byproduct of a campaign, not its engine. For Mr. Trump, attention is the whole shebang.

That may be the lesson of his campaign “shake up” earlier this week. The shift is from politics to grabbing attention, and, quite possibly, from winning the election to winning the defeat, which is how he has spent practically his entire career…

Fascinating. Might mean that those of us who are watching the campaign as though it’s about ‘politics’ might be being naive!

Dispatch from a vanished media universe

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The New Yorker recently republished Calvin Trillin’s wonderful profile of R.W. ‘Johnny’ Apple, the famous New York Times journalist.

Sample:

There is a consensus in the trade, I am pleased to report, that Johnny Apple—R. W. Apple, Jr., of the New York Times — is a lot easier to take now than he once was. Even Apple believes that. When I asked him not long ago about the paragraph in Gay Talese’s 1969 book on the Times, “The Kingdom and the Power,” which presents him as a brash young eager beaver, he said it was, alas, “quite an accurate portrait,” although he doesn’t recall boasting in the newsroom that while covering the war in Vietnam he had personally killed a few Vietcong—the remark that, in Talese’s account, led an older reporter to say, “Women and children, I presume.” In speaking of those early days, Apple said, “I was desperate to prove myself.” You could argue, I suppose, that, in the words of a longtime colleague, “he doesn’t have to argue the case anymore.”

It’s long, but well worth a read. A report from a vanished media world.

Sharp practice at the FT? Or just sub-editorial licence?

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Now, what does this column heading in the FT Magazine suggest? That the paper’s star American editor was on holiday with the Prez.

The impression is corroborated by the puff on the front of the paper.

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Now, here’s what the piece actually says:

I was lucky enough to spend last weekend with friends on Martha’s Vineyard. This verdant island off the coast of Massachusetts has long been a playground for the well-heeled, (mostly) liberal crowd, epitomised by the Kennedys and Clintons…

The ‘friends’, however, were not the Obamas. And the article is mostly a complaint about how inconvenient the presence of the President and his entourage makes life in the Vineyard for the mostly well-heeled liberal crowd.

One expects this kind of misleading puffery from the Daily Mail. But from the august FT???

Phones, photography and the Snapchat factor

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This morning’s Observer column:

Living and working, as I do, in a historic city that is swamped by tourists in the summer, I regularly get the opportunity to do some photo-ethnography. You can tell someone’s age by the kind of camera they are using. Elderly folks are still using point-and-shoot compacts. Middle-aged folks are sporting “prosumer” digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) from Canon, Nikon, Fuji and Panasonic. But as far as I can see, everyone under the age of 25 is using a smartphone, possibly with the assistance of a selfie stick.

This is partly because the main reason young people take photographs is to post them on social media, and smartphones make that easy to do. But that’s not the whole story. Those who are more serious about photography tend to upload their pictures to photo-hosting services such as Flickr. Guess what the most popular camera for Flickr members is? Apple’s iPhone – by a mile… Read on