The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
It’s Always in the Last Place You Look
“Lost Sock Owner Learning About Games, Plants and Fish With Varying Success”–headline, Wichita (Kan.) Eagle website, Oct. 15
Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
“An earlier version of this article misspelled, on second reference, the surname of a representative. He is Charlie Dent, not Debt.”–New York Times, Oct. 15
Buy This Magazine or We’ll Kill This Story
“Like members of a youth basketball team raising money for a trip to nationals,” Forbes.com’s Jeff Bercovici reports, “staffers at The New Republic have been hawking subscriptions to their friends and family members for the past two weeks as part of an intra-office contest”:
“We’re all passionate about The New Republic brand and this seemed like a good opportunity to extend an offer to those who support us most,” a spokeswoman for the magazine told me, via email, when I inquired about it. “It’s also a team building exercise and a fun way to generate friendly competition among the staff.”
To make things a little less friendly, management offered a prize of an iPad Mini to whoever signed up the most new readers at the “special friends-and-family rate” of $20 for 20 issues. The winner was senior editor Julia Ioffe, who personally sold 55 of the 309 subscriptions the contest generated. (Julia is a friend and sometime Forbes contributor; I subscribed to support her, and because she wouldn’t tell me more about the contest unless I did.)
Wait, isn’t it unethical to pay a source for an interview?
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
