Articles for May 7th, 2012

Dallas Morning News Website Decides It’s Got to Have More Cowbell (Cheap Pageviews)

As Peter noted this morning, NBC5 anchor Jane McGarry was arrested on a DWI charge over the weekend. So today The Dallas Morning News decides it’s the perfect opportunity for a career-retrospective photo gallery of McGarry. (Her mug shot was left out.)  Also teased on the Morning News homepage right now is a gallery of “Local Artist Sarah Jaffe through the years.” You know, all the way from the year 2007 to the year 2012.

Galleries like this are used by websites to raise the number of pageviews they can brag about. Never mind that there’s nothing particularly interesting or educational about the McGarry gallery. Someone on the DMN.com team knows that McGarry’s name is a trending search term locally, and, by gum, they’re going to suck some of those searchers into a gallery of banal photographs in order to spike the numbers. DMN has long had galleries, but I don’t recall the last time I saw them post anything that’s quite as blatant a pageview grab as those today.

(more…)

D Magazine Announces Insanely Talented Group of Summer Interns

I don’t like this one bit. Krista just announced our passel of summer interns. These people are insanely overqualified. Yale? Harvard? A master’s from Cambridge? Way too intimidating. Not letting them attend editorial meetings. I’m serious. See for yourself the short bios Krista sent to the staff:

Teo Soares is a junior at Yale. He’s studying history. He went to high school in Denton. His fiction work has appeared on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He’s the editor for the Yale Historical Review. He has already pitched a story to Nancy.

Matthew Watson is a freshman at Harvard. He’s an arts board staff writer for the Harvard Crimson. He was a student editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News last year. He’s a percussionist, composer, and songwriter. He’s also an Eagle Scout. He went to Flower Mound High School. His dad, formerly a journalist, does not really like his career choice.

Megan Shaw is a junior at Washington and Lee University. She’s a life & arts staff writer for The Ring-Tum Phi, W&L’s weekly newspaper that probably needs a different name. She was also the cops and courts beat reporter for The Rockbridge Report, and a section editor for The Calyx yearbook. She’s from Fort Worth.

Caitlin Giddens is a junior at Baylor University. For the past year, she has been an editorial intern for the Wacoan Magazine. While writing, she also had to sell ads. In fact, she based what she wrote on the ads she sold. We told her it’s not like that here. She’s looking forward to not having to do both.

Paige Harriman is finishing her freshman year at UT, where she is Plan II and editing for the Daily Texan. She went to school at Highland Park High School, where she copy edited The Bagpipe. She founded the Genesis Women’s Shelter Outreach Club.

Lesley Mann is our editorial research intern. She attended the University of Kentucky on a full ride. Then she went to the University of Cambridge on a full ride. She got her master’s in Bioscience Enterprise. She’s now at El Centro getting her certificate in basic culinary skills. She started a business with her dad. It’s a chicken-composting business. She developed the science behind it, and it’s now sold in 15 states.

Gossip Wars: Sens. John Carona and Dan Patrick

Cover_bigState Sen. John Carona of Dallas, the only man ever to appear on the cover of D Magazine astride an elephant, was accused by State Sen. Dan Patrick of Houston of spreading rumors about Patrick’s marriage. Carona fought back with a dig about Patrick’s sexual orientation as well:

“Though I have heard rumors regarding your marital status and sexual preferences for a while now, at no time have I told anyone that you are either separated, divorced or gay,” the Dallas Republican said. “As you know, if you truly believed I had said something unflattering, you could have simply asked. I’ve never been shy about sharing my dislike and distrust of you. Put bluntly, I believe you are a snake oil salesman, a narcissist that would say anything to draw attention to himself.”

Usually we have to listen to politicians speak in nothing but bland non-statements, so this is a nice change of pace.

Things To Do In Dallas Tonight: May 7

Do you have a serious case of the Mondays? Perhaps you need to take a moment and listen to the Ultimate Coach Taylor Pep Talk.

Coach Taylor, coincidentally, was supposed to be in town this evening for the Dallas Museum of Art’s third Texas Bound story series. Alas, the stars did not align (Kyle Chandler had a family emergency). But we do still get Brad Leland, who plays Buddy Garrity, and Steven Walters, who played Glenn Reed on the show and who can be seen in theaters around town as part of the DTC’s acting company and the artistic director of Second Thought Theatre. Leland will read T.C. Boyle’s 56-0, Walters will read Sarah Vowell’s Music Lessons, and an as yet unknown person will read Robert McBrearty’s Silence. The only thing that would make all of this better is if they got someone to do an interpretation of a Coach Taylor motivational speech. It’s all in the Horchow Auditorium, though of course the rest of the museum is not open.

Also tonight, Marc Lynch, the director of George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, discusses his latest scholarly tome at the Rosewood Crescent Hotel. In The Arab Uprising, he examines how a new generation rejected the status quo, revolting against the dictatorships in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya with the rest of countries roiling in unrest. You can get tickets by registering on the World Affairs Council website.

For more to do this evening, go here.

How American Airlines Screwed Some Very Frequent Fliers

The L.A. Times had a very interesting story over the weekend about American Airlines’ “AAirpass” program. It sounds like a dream: for anywhere between $250,000 (when the program began) and $3 million (the most recent offer, in 2004, which nobody took up), AA customers could purchase tickets that gave them unlimited first-class travel for life. As Ken Bensinger writes, “It was almost like owning a fleet of private jets.” But now the financially troubled airline is cutting off these incredibly frequent fliers (Jacques Vroom, of Dallas, has logged more than 37 million miles). The program, it seems, is costing the company more than a million dollars per pass holder per year. The airline told some of the passengers via letters delivered at check-in that their passes were canceled. Needless to say, there are lawsuits filed.

Some thoughts about this. 1) I’m surprised that the L.A. Times, and not the DMN, or Texas Monthly, or National Magazine Award winner Tim Rogers, broke the story. 2) I really, really want one of these passes.

Leading Off (5/7/12)

Identity Theft Leads to Sexual Misconduct Charge (Or One Reason While I’ll Never Teach High School):Bryce Benekos, a teacher and coach at a Burleson high school, was put on paid administrative leave after a police investigation was launched looking into an alleged improper online relationship with a 16-year-old student. Ultimately, Benekos was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence, and now a new investigation has been opened in order to identify who may have impersonated Benekos online, leading to the allegations. Nonetheless, the teacher will remain on administrative leave through August, and the district will not offer him another contract.

Channel 5’s Jane McGarry Arrested for DWI: The KXAS-TV anchorwoman was pulled over in her 2007 Porsche for failing to signal a lane change on the Dallas North Tollway just after 1:30 a.m. early Sunday morning. She had “bloodshot, droopy eyes,” according to the arrest report, and failed several field sobriety tests. That meant four hours in the Dallas County jail before she was released on bail. No comment from the station’s management.

Rough Weekend For Dallas Teenagers: The charred remains of who was possibly a white teenage girl in her late teens or early-20s were found Saturday in Southeast Dallas. Police are still investigating the identity of the victim in the grisly case. Also in Southeast Dallas, a grandfather was killed and three teenagers brutally injured after a group of teenagers straight out of Clockwork Orange invaded a home. At least in this case, one of the teenage victims recognized the perpetrators, and arrests are expected soon.