palewire

Today my employer announced that we’re now publishing our newspaper on Amazon’s portable wireless reading device, the Kindle. I don’t have one, but if you do, and you want the LA Times on there, you can subscribe here. Big deal? Not big deal? Let me know.

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So I’m browsing through Christopher Hitchens’ latest screed over at Slate tonight, and what do I bump into but an advertisment for the New York Times. Seems a bit funny, seeing as Slate is owned by the Washington Post Company. I’ve always thought of them as competitors with the NYT.

But maybe I’m wrong. What do you think? Seems a little weird to me.

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Box Office Mojo’s weekend numbers are registering Ben Stein’s creationist documentary Expelled above George Clooney’s screwball comedy Leatherheads (3.1 million vs. 3.0 million), despite Expelled showing on 37 percent as many screens. Granted, it’s Expelled’s opening week versus Leatherhead’s third, but it still seems like an eye-popper. It looks Stein is headed for territory previously inhabited only by Mr. Michael Moore, though there’s some skepticism about how big of a success it should be measured. (hat tip: Chris Mooney)

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UPDATE: The peanut gallery over at Mooney’s blog posed the question about whether the geographic distribution of Expelled showings might offer something of interest.

I didn’t have the time to do anything too sophisticated (no geocoding to lat/long or ZIP code level analysis), but I did have time to pull the latest listings from Expelled’s theater locator and run the following charts over at Many Eyes. (FWIW, I only found 1050 theaters in the Expelled search, but Box Office Mojo says it showed on 1052).

This first one is a map that totals up the number of showings by state.

And then a scatterplot that rates the number of showings in each state against its population. They’re 2006 resident population numbers I pulled from Census.

You can see where the line would probably show up if you ran the numbers on the scatter. What I immediately look for are any states well above or below the pack. It looks like New York has a pretty low number of showings per capita, as do a number of other “blue” states, but so does Pennsylvania, home to the recent Dover controversy over Intelligent Design. On the other end, it looks like North Carolina and Georgia were pretty highly saturated, relatively.

See anything?

The media circus found its latest entertainment Friday when word of Barack Obama’s allegedly controversial remarks shot across the blogosphere. Unlike previous presidential titillations, this one was set off by The Huffington Post. That alone seems somewhat remarkable, considering how the lefty HuffPost openly apes the practices of the usual outlet for this sort of news: the more rightly Drudge Report.

But, in keeping with the spirit of Dave Berry Barry, may he rest in peace, let’s not take this opportunity to reflect upon what the means for the state of the news media, or even the campaign of one Barack Obama. No, let’s use it to consider which related news headline contains the best potential band name.

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Sources:

• Huffington Post: “Obama: No Surprise That Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter”
• Associated Press: “Obama Concedes Remarks Were Ill-Chosen”
• LA Times: “Obama seeks to explain ‘guns or religion’ remark”
• Powerline: “OBAMA ‘SCRAMBLES TO QUELL THE FUROR’”
• NYT: “Obama Says He Mispoke; Clinton Raps Him Hard”
• Daily Kos: “Barack Obama Shows Disrespect For Rural Americans”
• Newsday: “Obama says ‘bitter’ didn’t come out right”
• FoxNews: “Obama on Guns and Religion: ‘I Didn’t Say It as Well as I Should Have.’”
• Washington Post: “Opponents Paint Obama as an Elitist“
• Washington Post: “In Hoosier State, Clinton Ramps Up ‘Bitter’ Talk”