THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.
PERMALINKS:
THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY
THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY
AMERICA'S MOST UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY WEB SITE!
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Way too many books in 2005
Too many new books seem to be trying to catch the eyes of a dwindling number of buyers. Almost 200,000 new titles appeared in 2004, according to the latest count, a 14 percent jump from 2003. A quarter of those titles came from vanity presses and "print on demand" subsidy publishers, leaving nearly 150,000 from legit-- er, traditional publishing houses.
But for another depressing year, overall book sales in the United States were down, just like newspaper circulation, suggesting the slow hemorrhage of print literacy in America is even worse than had been thought. (Just last week it was reported that the English literacy of the average American college graduate had dropped steeply over the last decade.)
Surely there's a TON OF GENIUS in all this pulp; but who has time to read 200,000 books? Maybe the book biz is suffering because there is too much genius -- just as the profusion of genius in the film biz seems to have cut audiences, even in the arthouse circuit?