goofy
January 27, 2024, 9:53am
1934
(gift link from bsky)
The owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, had raised concerns with Kevin Merida, who stepped down this month, over reporting about a wealthy doctor and his dog.
LAT’s billionaire owner decided to intervene on behalf of his friend, bringing up all kinds of bad looks:
It is not unheard-of for the owner of a publication to be consulted on sensitive reporting, particularly if it could jeopardize the newspaper legally or financially. But it is unusual for an owner or a publisher to pressure editors to stop reporting on a story well before publication, especially in cases that do not put government secrets or human lives at risk.
The reporter was looking into dueling lawsuits that involved Dr. Michelson and accusations that his dog had bitten a woman at a Los Angeles park. In a suit filed by Dr. Michelson in May, he said the woman had tried to extort him. The woman filed a personal injury lawsuit against Dr. Michelson.
Dr. Michelson, who lives in Los Angeles, and Dr. Soon-Shiong belong to a small and rarefied group of medical professionals who have become billionaires through their innovations and investments. Dr. Soon-Shiong made his fortune in biotechnology. Both are philanthropists.
By last month, before the reporting on Dr. Michelson had reached fruition, Dr. Soon-Shiong had become aware of the story and contacted Mr. Merida to register his displeasure, the people said. Dr. Soon-Shiong told Mr. Merida that he did not believe the paper should pursue the article.
Mr. Merida relayed Dr. Soon-Shiong’s concerns to editors including Scott Kraft, a senior editor, and Jeff Bercovici, the business editor, the people said. The editors agreed to keep Mr. Merida posted on the article, which the newspaper continued working on. Mr. Bercovici was laid off this month.
At one point, Dr. Soon-Shiong asked to see a draft of the article, which Mr. Merida regarded as inappropriate, the people said. Dr. Soon-Shiong also told Mr. Merida on a call that he would fire journalists if he learned they were concealing the completed article from him, the people said.
A Los Angeles Times spokeswoman said in a statement that Dr. Soon-Shiong didn’t want the newspaper to be used as a “source of exploitation” in the dispute between Dr. Michelson and the woman who had sued him.
kerowo
January 27, 2024, 12:22pm
1935
It’s good to be the king.
Jman220
January 30, 2024, 12:07am
1939
So he’s saying that the Presidency is occupied by Trader Joes?
Holy shit
1 this is true
https://x.com/georgetakei/status/1752088086010286288?s=46
Surf
January 31, 2024, 11:53am
1942
Haven’t read article yet but this a pretty stark graph of SF suddenly breaking away from national overdose trends
Jman220
January 31, 2024, 12:46pm
1943
Does that correspond with when SF decriminalized? (It looks like the spike predates covid).
Surf
January 31, 2024, 1:11pm
1944
Yeah haven’t read more than first paragraphs but the article is a compare/contrast of Portugal model vs SF
What Portugal did: Decriminalization is widely misunderstood; it’s not full legalization, but removes criminal penalties for small amounts of drug possession. In 2000, Portugal passed a law that decriminalized all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. But it kept some penalties, like fines and license suspensions, to incentivize people to get addiction treatment and deter outdoor public drug use. If police officers catch someone using drugs, they can, and often do, still cite them.
Along with decriminalization, Portugal also invested in addiction treatment and created a system that tries to push people to seek help for addiction. “Decriminalization by itself means nothing if you have nothing else to offer,” João Goulão, the architect of Portugal’s system, told me.
1 Like
Right wing media rots another brain- or more likely gave mental illness a gruesome outlet.
Mohn referred to himself as a militia leader, called his father a traitor to the country for being a federal employee for 20 years
A belated happy February 3th to all who celebrate
1 Like
I feel like there’s probably an urban dictionary page for “rusty shaft”, but I’m not going to look it up.
goofy
February 9, 2024, 8:25pm
1951
Good article that also speaks to some of the broader problems with modern journalism:
Semafor, a news website for people who are too dumb to read The New York Times but too smart to read Axios, announced this week a partnership with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbot. Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith, who launched the site...
As is usually the case when tech and media companies partner up and start talking about exciting new initiatives, there’s nothing all that innovative going on here. “Global multi-source breaking news feed” is just a pompous description of a standard news wire. The posts that populate the feed are examples of basic news aggregation, a practice that has been a part of journalism for decades. Click around the Signals feed and you’ll encounter the kind of stories—short, aggregated stories—that should be familiar to anyone who was spent more than a day reading the news. Does a three-paragraph story about an anti-aging pill for dogs that cites The New York Times , the BBC, and Yahoo Finance strike you as an innovative piece of digital news?Here’s a bag of money. Find some way to make our AI tools look valuable ?
It wasn’t so long ago that Facebook was making a similar demand of digital newsrooms, when it went around offering them payoffs in exchange for making use of their Facebook Live video feature. I experienced this firsthand: One day, I was doing my normal job of writing and editing posts, and then the next I was told that I would need to start sitting in front of a camera and broadcasting myself live on Facebook for a certain number of minutes per week. Everyone who had to participate in producing those little videos knew it was stupid and that we were just doing it for money we’d never personally see. I will always remember, though, how easily a few of the higher-ups deluded themselves into thinking we were producing something valuable. I remember being told that, actually, our readers really liked engaging with live video content, and that there were numbers to prove it. That was all untrue, of course. Facebook was just lying about the numbers.
and they lived happily ever after
1 Like
LouisCyphre:
image649×1000 107 KB
They left out the end, “After Amazing Adjudication takes its cut and ADT takes its cut, Marie gets 10 cents on the dollar back.”
ADT and Ring resolving their conflict.
