Is Al Sharpton hitting the New York Post at just the right time?

What’s going on at the New York Post?

The Post is a guilty pleasure for many New Yorkers.  It is well known to be a right wing gossip rag that people enjoy flipping through on the subway.  However, no serious person in the city would carry an open copy around their colleagues.

Page Six is still read, but it seems so irrelevant now.  Then there is this Obama/Chimp controversy that is Al Sharpton’s latest campaign.  Michael Wolff is predicting the Chimp will get Col Allan–a “hard-drinking, profane, sometimes violent newspaper hack without education or polish”–fired.  Allan is the paper’s editor and big time Friend of Murdoch.

A typical New York Post reader holds up a typical Post cover when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University in 2007.

Four years ago in 2005 Businessweek wrote that, ” The Post has lost so much money for so long that it would have folded years ago if News Corp. applied the same profit-making rigor to the tabloid as it does to its other businesses.” Hamilton Nolan at Gawker thinks Sharpton’s protest is going to work, but Wolff thinks its the Post‘s losses of $60-$80 million a year that are going to cause a huge shake-up at the paper.  Whether the Post hangs on or not, Murdoch is under fire from investors over deep losses at his beloved newspapers, and according to the New York Times, the Post is in for deep changes:

For years, Mr. Murdoch has stomached tens of millions of dollars in annual losses at The New York Post, in exchange for the power the paper afforded him. But given the economic times and the shift of his attention to The Journal, there is a sense of urgency in the News Corporation executive suite about stemming The Post’s losses.

The Chimp episode apparently has Murdoch “livid,” especially with investors beating him up over the $8.4 billion in write-downs that New Corp. had to take ($3 billion over newspapers).

Steve Cuozzo of the New York Post engaged in the easiest of games: picking out inaccuracies in Wikipedia.  Unfortunately, his target was a particularly horrific mess:  New York City Wikipedia articles.  In “Urban Myths: What Wikipedia Gets Wrong about NYC”, Cuozzo supplies a list of the site’s glaring problems in its coverage of one of the foremost cities in the world.  The problems are hard to defend.

At the New York Wikipedia Meet-Up this Sunday, Newyorkbrad gravely burnished the article for all of us to read.

Shocking inaccuracy on New York Wikipedia articles

Some of the problems are the usual silly things that are not dire, such as mixing up on which side of Broadway that Seventh Avenue falls (the west side south of Times Square; then it switches to the east side).

Still, other problems are more disconcerting in that they are real examples of mangled information, difficult for readers or editors to fix or spot.  A few examples, quoting Cuozzo:

• “For starters, there’s no “residential tower” planned at Ground Zero. A museum will not highlight “many of the different aspects of the past and future World Trade Centers.” The Port Authority did not “organize a competition through the LMDC” to come up with a master plan in 2002 – it was entirely the work of the LMDC.”
• “Take the entry on Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. When Kelly replaced Lee Brown as commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins in the early 1990s, we are told he ‘saw the continuing reduction of crime that started with Lee Brown’s community policing concept.’ Most New Yorkers who recall that period will guffaw at that…”
• “…the article snarks that although Trump values 40 Wall at $400 million, city tax officials assess it at just $90 million. Such assessed valuations have nothing to do with a building’s market value.”
• “Of the New York Palace Hotel, it says former owner Harry Helmsley hired architect Emery Roth to design a 55-story tower to “blend in” with the historic Villard Houses at the site. Of course, although the entry’s writers (maybe the hotel PR people?) don’t mention it, Helmsley, over a period of years, infamously tried to demolish the Villard Houses – a widely reported preservation saga of the 1970s that’s common knowledge to locals, but unknown to Wikipedia.”

These are serious errors.  The New York editors have begun to pledge to at the very least adopt the article(s) that contend with their neighborhood.

The East Village article as model

I adopted the East Village article, and I will brag about what I have done there if I may be so bold.  When I started to edit the article seriously in March of 2008 it was anemic.  The information was littered with trivia, inaccuracies and it contained only seven citations between three sources.  As of August 2008, there are 38 sources.

I expanded coverage of the parks, the museums, the performance and art spaces and the cultural make-up.  I included information about festivals, internal neighborhoods and major art movements.  If you see a section that does not have a source on the article, that’s because I have yet to work on it.

There is much work to be done on the article, but I think Cuozzo will have trouble writing that this article is wildly problematic.