One More Daily News Post

I don't really want to go on about the Daily News, especially after I had a nice talk with one of their reporters after my previous post. Mainly I just wanted to share this from Monday. Poor Robert Klein...

...and this gives me an excuse to add a few items that I forgot about when I wrote the other post.

One thing that bothered me when ex-Philadelphia Magazine editor Larry Platt took over the Daily News was what you might call stunt-casting. He added Buzz Bissinger and Ed Rendell as columnists. The first "column" from Bissinger was a collection of his Twitter posts and was such utter garbage that, on the rare occasions his column appeared, I never even gave it a glance. And Rendell's sports commentary (which still exists, now relegated to the "Sportsweek" weekend paper) is so dull the column is guaranteed to put an insomniac to sleep. Hell, I could write a column that's as good as anything by Rendell and they could pay me less, if they want to save some money.

Another thing that changed was
the addition of published comments from Facebook, Twitter and Philly.com. Granted, one of my tweets about the Eagles made it into the paper. But if you write a letter to the editor, they insist you provide your name, address and phone number. With Twitter and the website, none of that is verified and the "people" who haunt the Philly.com comments just emerged from the primordial ooze, judging by their venom, hate and abject stupidity. And even Facebook's rule requiring your profile show your actual first and last name instead of screen names can easily be subverted.

Speaking of the sports section of the paper, one thing I miss is a regular roundup of happenings in each of the major sports leagues, particularly baseball. (There's a weekly NFL column from Paul Domowitch but it's mostly Eagles-centric.) I'm sure I can find plenty of notes columns online, but if other papers can run them why can't mine? I feel like I know very little about what's going on with teams in other cities unless some major news event happens (such as a trade or a no-hitter).

Thankfully, other errors in the recent past have been corrected. The change of the paper's nickname from "The People Paper" to "The People's Paper" made no sense. After Platt left, the "'s" followed him out the door. And what was perhaps the most consistent, if not the best, public service the Daily News has done over the years -- the personal-finance advice column by Harry Gross -- was restored after being gone for ten months. These are two hopeful signs.