The Purple Lounge
home of the purple couch

 
 This post comes from Senior Account Executive Li Wang, Q&C’s “Media Criticism” monthly blogger. 
By now it’s been well leaked that The Wall Street Journal is putting its army in place in an attempt to destroy the reeling New York Times.  The Journal is launching its NYC edition this spring and aims to outgun the Times […]

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 This post comes from Senior Account Executive Li Wang, Q&C’s new “Media Criticism” monthly blogger.
In 2006 I was teaching English to rural, Chinese students in a village called Baojing in Hunan Province.  One night while hanging out at a local café, with waitresses periodically breaking into karaoke song, a muted television screen showed bodies being […]

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Independent films have a hard time breaking out. Usually the conventional films with tiny marketing budgets like “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” or “Little Miss Sunshine” are the ones that capture the mainstream public’s imagination.
Enter Lee Daniels’ “Precious,” a story of an overweight abused pregnant Harlem teenager who’s having her father’s child, a decidedly non-sunny […]

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I live in a rental apartment building in North Jersey that has plenty of nice amenities like a gym, pool, residents lounge with WiFi, and a game room with pool and poker tables. Sounds great, right?
Well, the problem is that these spaces have very little life. Residents plod along on the treadmills in solitude or […]

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There’s a great blog called the Bad Pitch Blog, which exposes some truly horrible attempts by public relations “professionals” to pitch the media to cover their clients. It’s entertaining and informative, but as a life-long newspaper guy who is now on “the dark side,” it’s easy to see there’s equal ammunition to fire in the […]

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News of the Newark to Buffalo commuter plane crash broke late last night. How it broke in our new internet-driven news delivery world was remarkable.
As our collective connectivity increases exponentially (we hear 11 percent of all internet users are Twittering!) hard news is continually gaining a new face. Twitter, the trendy messaging site, was delivering […]

Popularity: 26% [?]

It all happened too fast for me to react.
A co-worker had suddenly reinvented herself with a fresh new hairstyle. Ooohs and aahs and declarations of “love” for the new hairdo bounced around the office like a tidal wave.
I didn’t want to appear like I was jumping on the bandwagon of compliments, so when the comments […]

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It’s the day of the presidential inauguration and I can’t be in D.C. But where do I turn to feel like I’m there?
I visit nytimes.com. Greeting me on the homepage is a slideshow of the scene and a mix of hard news and features about the historic day. There’s a multimedia presentation on how readers […]

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