TONY OF ALL MEDIA

NPR finally said enough is enough and did what we all want but don't have the balls to: quit Twitter. As Poynter  reports , NPR, which had about 8.8 million followers on the social network, said in a statement: “We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence. We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities.” Preach. 

"The Arabs have decided to jack up the price of oil another 20 percent. The C.I.A. has been caught opening Sen. Humphrey's mail. There's a civil war in Angola, another one in Beirut. New York City's facing default, they've finally caught up with Patricia Hearst ... and the whole front page of the Daily News is Howard Beale." -Diana Christensen, Network I can't help feel this way as I look at the homepages of all the news sites this morning. The Times, CNN, the Posts (Washington and New York), BBC: It's all Trump, all the time (again). And isn't that a depressing reality. The Times couldn't have put it any better when it commented "Biden has the Oval Office, but Trump has center stage." One could be forgiven for not noticing the fact that in the past day there were not one but two important elections, in Wisconsin and Chicago; Israeli police raided a mosque in Jerusalem; a tornado in Missouri caused multiple deaths and injuries; a stud

Some of the world's most loved brands — Adidas, IKEA, PEZ, Arby's — happen to be abbreviations. And certain companies are so iconic that they've embraced going by their initials — KFC being a famous example. It's when people unnecessarily complicate things with "abreeves" (only you fans of the dearly departed TV series "Happy Endings" will get that reference) that it gets ridiculous. I recently tuned into a webinar put together by a well-known ad agency in which the host repeatedly referred to the place by its initials. Not only had I never, in all my years covering this stuff, heard the agency referred to that way before, but as one of the letters was a "W," it actually took the presenter longer to say the abbreviation than it would have to say the actual name of the company. Generally, having "W" in a brand's identity is a horrible idea (unless you happen to be George W. Bush, aka "Dubya," which, love him or hate h

It's official: that gleaming monument to hubris known as Hudson Yards—the mega-development on the West Side that made Tenth Avenue unnavigable for years and ruined the Manhattan skyline with a bunch of ugly, dystopian towers, not to mention that rusting atrocity The Vessel—is a big fat $25 billion flop, as the  Times  reports. I'm sure similar, schadenfreude-stoked stories were written in the 1930s when the Empire State Building opened just in time for the Great Depression and sat half empty for years, but Hudson Yards is uniquely ill-timed, maybe even irredeemably cursed, as the pandemic has shuttered its marquee tenants (most notably Dallas import Neiman Marcus—as if the city didn't already have a surplus of homegrown retailers selling a bunch of overpriced stuff nobody can afford), while even that suicide-inviting, stairway-to-nowhere monstrosity that is its centerpiece has been mothballed. And the residents of the city are stuck with a hideous heap of hulking, deserted

If you are a working journalist, as I am, you could be forgiven for wanting to off yourself daily for being reminded by other reporters of what a complete failure you are. Let me say upfront that I have enjoyed the spoils of my career, of which there have been many. I've been honored to rub elbows with famous journalists and other bold-faced names. I've attended the Oscars, talked at the Cannes ad festival, and partied at the Tribeca Film Festival. I've gone on TV to talk about this or that on occasion. I've had celebrity writers pick fights with me, some of them public — among them Salman Rushdie and the late Jimmy Breslin. Those were a lot of fun. But I never saw myself as the story. How naive of me. Professors, albeit brilliant ones, who like to write about current events are now being classified not just as journalists but as superstar journalists. Consider Ben Smith's puff piece on Heather Cox Richardson in the Times this week. Richardson teaches American hi

Ad agencies are in the business of selling stuff with simple brand names and easy to understand messages — just not when it comes to themselves. As Ad Age reports , agency names have become seriously whack. I swear I think they used alphabet soup to come up with some of these: dentsumcgarrybowen, Muh-tay-zik / Hof-fer (which used to be the somehow even worse M/H VCCP), and what used to be good old reliable Grey getting swallowed up into something called AKQA Group. (If you ask me, AKQA kinda sucked as a name even before the merger. Who in the business of brand marketing would ever decide that AKQA is a better name than simple, elegant and storied Grey ?) Remember when the idea was to make things simpler, not as impossible to make sense of as the Zodiac killer's cipher?