Great promotional idea: Since I just complained about an over-reported magazine promotion, let me praise a creative, under-reported one: Smithsonian Magazine’s Culturefest, as reported by Media News.

Non-story of the year: You know you’ve got the ultimate weapon of mass promotion when pundits are handicapping what will appear on your magazine cover six months in advance. I feel about Time’s Man of the Year like others do about the over-commercializtion of Christmas. Here’s my suggestion for magazine-beat writers: Don’t start running stories about Time’s Person of the Year until after Thanksgiving. To do so before makes you look desperate and lazy. (Note: I linked to Goggle’s cache of the Min story because Mins kills links daily.)

Proof: Rexblog regulars know I believe the best writing in newspapers is found in the sports section. Today, yet again, I point you to another example that leads me to this conclusion. Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post is one of the greatest sports writers to ever practice the craft. And when she’s writing about (or with) Lance Armstrong, it doesn’t get any better.

Quote:

But the thing I’ve always liked best about him is that he doesn’t mind showing weaknesses or imperfections. To this day, the picture on his driver’s license is the one he had taken during chemo, in which he is bald and has no eyebrows. He has a fundamental lack of vanity that I suppose is a result of having been so exposed during his illness, of having his organs, his chest, abdomen, brain and his very bones X-rayed and held up on light tables. Those scans were the pictures of a weak and ailing man: He was scarred up in places and missing a thing or two. When he recovered from the illness, some essential reserve was gone as well.

(via WSJ Daily Fix)