Party Crashers Stopped by Secret Service

The New York Times - This time, at least, they didn’t get in. Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the Virginia socialites and future reality television cast members, were stopped by the Secret Service driving near the White House during Wednesday night’s state dinner.

The Salahis, who earned international fame — or notoriety — when they managed to get into President Obama’s first state dinner in November without an invitation, were in a stretch limousine that drove through a red light, then tried to turn into a restricted area, the Secret Service said.

A uniformed Secret Service officer stopped the car and discovered the Salahis were in it. “The driver and occupants of the vehicle were interviewed at this point,” said Edwin M. Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman. “The driver was issued a notice of infraction for passing through a red light and all the subjects in the vehicle were released.”

It’s not clear whether the Salahis, who have been tapped to appear on the Bravo channel reality show “The Real Housewives of D.C.,” were trying to enter the Obamas’ second state dinner, being held for President Felipe Calderón of Mexico. They have insisted they were invited to the November dinner but were not on the guest list.

As the Obamas played hosts on Wednesday to Mr. Calderón and his wife, Margarita Zavala, the Salahis were spotted having dinner at Kellari Taverna, a Greek restaurant about four blocks from the White House, according to The Washington Post. They were joined by friends and a camera crew.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/salahis-stopped-by-secret-service/

As CNN Considers Prime-Time Changes, Spitzer’s Name Is Mentioned

The New York Times - As CNN scrambles to replace Campbell Brown on its wounded prime-time lineup, the most intriguing name purportedly on the channel’s list is that of Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York.

Mr. Spitzer has held conversations — but so far only informal ones — about becoming a regular contributor to the cable news channel, according to two people who were briefed on the matter. But the people said he was not being courted for an anchor job, meaning he would not directly replace Ms. Brown at 8 p.m.

Rumors of Mr. Spitzer’s hiring set off widespread speculation inside CNN this week, and even made it into David Letterman’s monologue Tuesday night. His punch line: “That would be a switch — somebody paying him for an hour.”

Mr. Spitzer resigned the governorship in 2008 after it was revealed that he had solicited prostitutes.

Seemingly wrapping himself in the redemptive spirit of television, Mr. Spitzer is a budding pundit, and has even tried his hand at anchoring on MSNBC, one of CNN’s cable news competitors. His first two times as a substitute for the anchor Dylan Ratigan were well received inside MSNBC last month, and he filled in again on Monday.

“He’s a smart guy, extremely smart. And he communicates well,” a cable news executive said of Mr. Spitzer. “The question about him is, how much stench is on him, and is he likable enough?”

MSNBC declined to comment on Mr. Spitzer’s status at the channel. But two news executives said MSNBC was not in talks with him about a paid position at the channel. Like the people briefed on Mr. Spitzer’s conversations with CNN, the executives requested anonymity because they were not authorized by their employers to speak on the record.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/as-cnn-considers-prime-time-changes-spitzers-name-is-mentioned/

Social Media Sites Send Private Data to Advertisers

WSJ - Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent.

The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code.Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent.

The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code.

Advertising companies are receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation.

Several large advertising companies identified by the Journal as receiving the data, including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it.

Across the Web, it's common for advertisers to receive the address of the page from which a user clicked on an ad. Usually, they receive nothing more about the user than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers that can't be traced back to an individual. With social networking sites, however, those addresses typically include user names that could direct advertisers back to a profile page full of personal information. In some cases, user names are people's real names.

Most social networks haven't bothered to obscure user names or ID numbers from their Web addresses, said Craig Wills, a professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who has studied the issue.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704513104575256701215465596.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

How to Save the News

Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to. So some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about this, and working with publishers, and peering ahead to see what the future of journalism looks like. Guess what? It’s bright.


Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.
Of course this overstates Google’s power to destroy, or create. The company’s chief economist, Hal Varian, likes to point out that perhaps the most important measure of the newspaper industry’s viability—the number of subscriptions per household—has headed straight down, not just since Google’s founding in the late 1990s but ever since World War II. In 1947, each 100 U.S. households bought an average of about 140 newspapers daily. Now they buy fewer than 50, and the number has fallen nonstop through those years. If Google had never been invented, changes in commuting patterns, the coming of 24-hour TV news and online information sites that make a newspaper’s information stale before it appears, the general busyness of life, and many other factors would have created major problems for newspapers. Moreover, “Google” is shorthand for an array of other Internet-based pressures on the news business, notably the draining of classified ads to the likes of Craigslist and eBay. On the other side of the balance, Google’s efforts to shore up news organizations are extensive and have recently become intense but are not guaranteed to succeed.


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/how-to-save-the-news/8095/1/