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Knight Science Journalism Tracker Home Suggest Stories About Us Staff Contact Us Log In Register to Comment Romenesko: Smithsonian Magazine calls in its fact checking editors, tells’em the door is over there…

Here’s a quiz: How many real-life magazine or newspaper editors would ever say something like this without his or her stomach churning in self-dismay?: “I’m honored to be joining Smithsonian, a magazine brand that is loved by more than 7 million readers….my challenge is to continue the legacy of journalistic excellence while evolving our brand for the future multimedia needs of our consumer.”

Hmpppf. Brand? I know some of the suits in the front offices of media, old line and new, talk like that but I thought they were only on the ad-sales and circulation side of the business. And how about using ‘evolve’ as a transitive verb? Or referring to one’s readers as consumers. I don’t know Michael Caruso, former editor of Wall Street Journal Magazine, and Men’s Magazine, who last fall took over as editor-in-chief of Smithsonian Magazine. Maybe some even-higher-up, somebody with consumer spin in his or her DNA, hog-tied Mr. Caruso and made him sign off on such a jumble of misbegotten verbiage as [...]

NYTimes (And the Minnesota Cons. Volunteer): Irruption of Snowy Owls, and don’t forget their li’l Canadian kin

What a pic! is what I thought on coming across in the NYTimes Jim Robbins‘s swell, outdoorsy, non-confrontational (ie no global warming, fracking, polluted rivers, or genetic modification shivers) account of a sharp rise in snowy owls in the US lately. They’re swooping south from Canada, showing up all over the place, and maybe they ran out of lemmings up north after a good crop of the little fat rodents last year that brought tons of baby owls now grown up and hungry. Robbins’s story is no excloo, as we’ll see. Several outlets already have run stories over the last mon! th or two. Several pounce on a rather lame angle: these are Harry Potter owls! Robbins, good for him, touched only lightly on that pop. culture reference.

Before we get to a snowy owl roundup, one more thing. Boy, I thought, that great picture looks vaguely familiar. Then the second paragraph (before I’d gone on to read the details alluded to above) told me the owls [...]

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