The Press Box - NPR Departures, Awards Season SEO, and Wordle-Loving Reporters

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Bryan and David begin with a breakdown of the recent NPR departures as chronicled by NPR’s own media reporter David Folkenflik (1:06). They transition to the rise of Wordle, a puzzle game heavily featured on the Twitter accounts of reporters everywhere (11:30). Then they discuss the Postgame Question of the Week, posed to Stetson Bennett IV after Monday’s college football national championship game (19:00). They then tackle the Media Piss Test (24:00) and later talk about the unsurprising dissolution of '60 Minutes+' (26:30). Finally, they examine how exactly SEO considerations might affect this upcoming awards seasons (32:33). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen up all you New York fans. Veteran New York Sports Talk host, John Dostromski gives his unique take on all the big stories in the Big Apple and beyond, including guest conversations, gambling picks, and reactions from you, the listener. Check out New York, New York with John Dostromsky on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Friday, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here, along with producer Devin Manzi, who is sitting in for Erica.

We got a huge show today, David. because remember, the trick is you always say you have a huge show. You never tell people that there are only one or two major topics. We have over a jam-packed, action-packed press box today. We're going to talk about why media types love the game word all, which you may have seen on Twitter a few thousand times. We have another post-game question of the week, David, why 60 Minutes Plus was canceled, a media piss test,

and a very, very funny example of Oscars SEO. But I want to start, David, with a big story and a serious story, which has really been the media, the story of the week. It is about the departures at NPR. Have you followed this at all on Twitter or elsewhere? Only very peripherally. I feel really terrible about not being more engaged. But go ahead. Do your part.

Let us just underline this a bit. I'm going to read from a piece by David Fulkenflick, who is NPR's own media reporter. In the wake of a trio of departures, he writes, news stories and news stories and private messages shared among NPR staffers reflected the concern that black and Latina stars are leaving the network in droves. In November, weekend edition Sunday host Lulu Garcia Navarro left to host a podcast for the New York Times opinion section. In December, Noel King departed morning edition and up first for Vox. And last week, all things considered and consider this host Audie Cornish, DeCamp to be a host for CNN's new streaming service. Fulkinflit continues

In addition, NPR and WBUR informed member stations last week that Tanya Mosley would leave her job as the host of the network's midday show here and now at the end of the month. Dot, dot, dot, Mosley, who is black, is pursuing her own podcast. So what happened? Well, here's what Falkenflik write. Hosts have complained to the network's leadership of pay disparities along racial and gender lines. Some say the network does not keep its promises and makes contract negotiations unnecessarily contentious. and several hosts concluded that they were made to be the public face of NPR but did not have the network's full support. Yet the interviews also yield a more complex picture.

Before we get to the reasons, can we just for one second, David, talk about the fact that David Falkenflick, who is NPR's own media reporter, is writing a very good and incisive and complicated piece about what's happening at NPR? Yeah. I mean, how many media organizations would let that happen at all? New York Times, maybe Washington Post, you know, if you want to throw CNN maybe in there, if Brian Stelter really wanted to write about something in the network, it's pretty rare. It's really rare, and it does speak well in this regard of NPR. It might also be speaking to pure conjecture here. It might also be speaking to a sort of, you know, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, I mean, there's a lot of. organizations, there's certainly a lot of people out there who are on the who

as an organization do the right thing or sort of see themselves as right minded, see themselves as well progressive in a very lowercase P sort of way and because of that feel themselves slightly above making certain changes

that address more kind of institutional larger scale problems, right? That sort of goes against what you would think their ethos would be, the sort of idea that, like, I don't have a problem attracting or keeping black or Latino people. How could that be me? Look at my resume, right? And even if that's true, on some very basic level, it doesn't address the fact that, like, it's not just a what's happening today at this very moment in your company problem, right? And you have to, and sometimes, no matter how progressive or right-minded or whatever, you perceive yourself,

to be, you got to go further than that. You got to work harder than that. And you got to make, you got to go over and above to do just the baseline of what's right in these situations. Yeah. I think one way to test what you're talking about, test your, your company's record, is to have a media reporter who's one, really good and two, is not afraid to write about uncomfortable things, even at their own shop, be able to write about it. And, you know, it's one again, I don't want to make him like this into the hero here and I want lots of people to write about NPR. I don't want just one person to write about NPR. But, you know, I was reading like a book the other day by David Shaw, who was the New York Times, or excuse me, the LA Times

media writer for a long time. And he wrote some like really uncomfortable piece that pieces that criticized journalists at his own newspaper. And, you know, it's one of those things, again, where I think you find a lot of institutions that say we're, one, we're transparent. And And two, we love the notion of media reporting. But as soon as that is directed to us, potentially by our own person, we get really, really squeamish about that. So it was really interesting to see this piece. All right.

Here's what he found. In May 2020, and I'm quoting again from Falkenflict, four NPR female hosts of color, Garcia Navarro, King, All Things Considered host, Ailsa Chang, and Weekend all things considered host Michelle Martin, sent a letter seeking a more equitable pay arrangement in comparison to their male peers. Publicly available tax forms listing top paid employees suggested female hosts were paid less than their male counterparts. In the case of morning edition, Steve Inskeep and weekend edition Scott Simon, who are white, seniority and longevity elevated their pay. I'm skipping ahead a little here, David. According to NPR's 2019 tax records, for instance, Simon's annual

base pay was $75,000 more than that of Martin. He is white, she is black, both host two hours of programming each weekend. So that was significant. He goes on to say, as a result of the host advocacy, most female host received five-figure pay raises in subsequent individual contracts. Yet the grid, which was this whole schematic that NPR unveiled, ended up rankling the people it was supposed to reassure. Several hosts concluded that after initial increases, the grid imposed a rigid cap on how

much pay they could earn, regardless of offers from competing news outlets or other factors. So they got a raise, but then they were, then they were. then they are led to believe wait, but there's a ceiling on how much we can get. There was some acrimonious contract negotiations where the host felt NPR was not doing the right thing. Hosts were pitching podcasts and being turned down, Falcon Flick reports. Here's another thing I wanted to land on, because it's really interesting about where we are in the media right now.

Again, quoting Falcon Flick, hosting a traditional radio program no longer holds the same allure it did a generation ago or even a decade ago. For many, it's now a combination of old school prestige and a daily grisement. grind in an era of unrelentingly grim headlines. Dot, dot, dot, dot. The new role is taken elsewhere by Cornish King and Garcia Navarro, afford them greater individual prominence and a form of journalism that will allow them more expression of their individual sensibilities.

So that's a really interesting part, right? NPR, we think of as this big, prestigious thing, but wait, what if you could host this other prestigious thing that would actually let you talk about the things you want to talk about give you more latitude for opinion and personality? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely true. It goes against kind of everything, you know, all the sort of concepts of like, you know, the economy of broadcasting, right? I mean, you would think that a show on a radio station with potentially national reach

and definitely like a limited number of positions would be more attractive in some way than hosting a podcast of which there are as well. we can clearly see by opening up your podcast app an infinite number of opportunities, right? But it's true. I mean, it's absolutely true. And part of that is, you know, this sort of old media, the perception and sometimes the reality that that old media, both in print and in audio form, is sort of tethered to its old ways and not kind of really fleet of foot enough to keep up with new formats like podcasting or whatever.

And part of it's just, I think, I mean, there's a lot of, as cool as it would be to work at NPR. And I think that either you or I aspire to a career in radio, but the concept of having a show on NPR would have been mind-blowing at the age of 20 or 25 or even 30, right? Sure. But in 2022, you don't look around and you say, that person has the job that I want, right? You look around and you say, that person has the opportunity that I want, right? Because I don't want to, I don't want to replace Chris Ryan on the watch, right? But I want to have the ability to broadcast myself to the same amount of esteem and celebration that Chris Ryan has achieved on the watch, right? I do think Andy and I would make a great team.

No pushing there, but what you're saying, but you get the point, right? Absolutely. And it's like a kind of more sophisticated way of thinking about the media than I think we do sometimes. Because I think sometimes we say, okay, podcasting is going to replace radio. Well, maybe someday, but that's not true anywhere in the near term. But what happens, just like blogging with newspapers, it puts a lot of pressure on radio. because you can be like, wait a second, that person over there is able to do X, Y, and Z.

And me, because of the strictures of the format, I'm in, I'm just not able to do that. And I would like to do that. So it becomes, you know, not just a competitor in terms of financial considerations, it becomes a competitor in terms of like artistic considerations. I guess the way I'd put it is what you're saying, right? That's where that opportunity is for me to express myself in a way

that I'm not expressing to pursue some of the things I'd like to pursue in terms of story ideas and things like that. Yeah, and there's a certain level of, I mean, listen, going out on your own and starting a podcast is not exactly like an assurance, is not a guarantee of success and certainly not of money. But that was part of the allure, right, at some point of working for an institution too. Like, that's how you got big and famous and, if not wealthy, then well compensated. And you can look around and see because of all the people that are doing. doing it because of the transparency that so much of the media world operates under now you can

look around and see people that are having enormous success doing things that you can look at and say i can do that job you know i mean there's there's just a lot everything works in a much different way now david we got a request to talk about wordel yeah this is from listener fernando alba why are reporters obsessed with it and why are so many gloating about their scores absolutely love the show by the way are you a wordal person no i i i start started playing for the first time, uh, waiting for a beer at a,

uh, reception after a funeral today so that we could talk about this. That was, that was a loaded answer, huh? Tell us more, dude. Yeah, I love it.

It's a great game. Uh, I'm sure it'll take up a lot of my time, uh, when I'm looking for a game to play and I only have a few minutes. Um, it's created last October by somebody named Josh Wardle, W-A-R-D-L-E.

So he named it kind of after himself. Now here's nearly three million players. Claire McNair wrote about it in the ringer the other day. The magic, as you can see from your first wordal experience, is that five-letter word, you get six guesses at it, and it tells you the letters you got right and also whether you got them in the right position. Okay. So it's a very, very simple game. And the other part that's really cool is that it's very stripped down. You don't have to buy anything. You don't have to register to play Wordle. Josh Wardle told NPR, making Wordle, I specifically rejected a bunch of the things you're supposed to do for a mobile game.

He deliberately didn't include push notifications, allow users to play endlessly, or build in other tools commonly used today to pull users into playing apps for as long as possible. So that's another part of it. There's one puzzle a day. you don't you don't say okay i have i have succeeded at world today now let me play 900 games in a row until i absolutely hate this game you get one yeah and it's the same one that i got that day so we can compare notes yeah and i i can say ha ha you took four turns i only took three turns yeah the comparing contrast i mean certainly there's a lot of you know latent uh low-key competitive in the journalism world. Low key.

That manifests itself outwardly in strange ways, right? I think you'd be much more, I think that you, I mean, who knows? I'm not saying that the entire world of journalism is just built on passive aggression, but I do think you be more, I think, not you, I think a lot of people I know would be more likely to complain about the placement of their desk compared to that of a coworker then to openly complain about an assignment compared to what a coworker got. Yes. And you're saying that manifests itself in wordal because we're, this is, this is our way

of passive, aggressive, comparing ourselves to our peers. But this is just a, this is just a nice way to compete without having to be like, I wrote better than you today. Yeah. But journalists, look, journalists are always want to tell you how smart they are. Yes. But you're right. They want to, they want to kind of do it in a very careful way so they're not actually.

saying, well, most of them anyway, they're not actually coming out and saying, I'm smarter than you. So posting, you know, the word old score is kind of a, it's kind of a nice way to do that. Yeah. I also think word games from my unofficial survey, crossword puzzles, anything like that, have a massive overlap with journalists. Like, you know, that is a big thing. Journalists, by the way, also are just big posters. Yeah, I mean, it came along at a sort of, I mean, not that that's a new phenomenon, but it certainly feels like it, it's, it's, the expression of wordal results is sort of of the moment.

You know, I mean, just the way that, the way that we're talking, we communicate online right now and journalism having sort of established such a, such a platform and vocabulary on Twitter and other social media arenas. What was the, what was the wordal score on Twitter for journalists before the wordal score? That's a great question. uh the word'll score well there's a lot of different ways you can humble brag uh as a journalist yeah um the picture from the press box you know of the field of that's going to have the game you're about to cover just that certainly one of them the not the um the the the un commented upon

retweet of someone praising something that you've written we just got finished too with the season where everybody did the annual recap of all the stories they wrote in 2021, which is always funny to me because it's always kind of a humble brag or not humble brag, but also kind of an open letter to your boss in lieu of a formal evaluation. Just remember, I don't know if you remember in June, but I wrote this. And it was really, really well received. Also, the thanking readers for reading you all year. That's another one that's great.

Just want to thank everybody. I really do because I care about you. It's not about me. The other thing about Whartle that I really like, dude, it's fast. Would I like to be able to sit down and do a New York Times crossword puzzle? Would I like to have that, whatever that's going to take hour, hour and a half? That might be flattering myself. No, come on.

If my wife and I do it together. Set the Sundays aside. Brian, you do it for a month. I swear to God, you'll be texting me that you, got a Friday puzzle in 21 minutes and you'll be down to 18 in six months. It's like it's it's I don't do that. I'm not that see I'm not that kind of journalist. How dare you, sir. No, but I also think that there's an aspect of just this is very generic, but there have been a lot of apps and there have been a lot of specifically like phone iPhone games that have become stories that had a lot

of currency, right? And there have been a lot of people that have been assigned to catch up on whatever app is of the moment, right? We got to, shoot, all these people are getting tracks or getting hits because they're covering this app, let's get on the app. And there's always this sort of boomerang effect in coverage, right? It's like, we didn't have somebody reviewing, you know, Game of Thrones until episode eight.

And we didn't, and we made the same mistake on this other show. So when the third show comes out, we're going to go wall to wall, and we're going to have like 15 people covering it. And so that's what, I mean, that's not exactly the same as why do journalists like it, but why is it getting done? coverage because I think there's a lot of people who are like suddenly pitching stories and a lot of editors who are very interested in it. And listen, when you know your editor is interested in something,

I mean, like, you know, if you worked at a, you know, stodgy newspaper in 2005 and suddenly you realized your editor would be open to like you covering video games, you would get really into video games and pitch a whole lot of stuff, right? If you could like suddenly go watch superhero movies and make a living at it, you'd be pitching like crazy. And, you know, if you can, if you play whordle for five hours a day and somehow justify it, if you can put that on your sort of metaphorical company card, then, then yeah,

I think, I think that's a good deal. This is David's application to be the ringer's new wordel correspondent. I'm not taking Clears beat. I think Clay, I was going to say, I think Claire's already got it. David,

we got another post game question of the week. Oh, yes. We actually had a post game question of the week on Monday. But this is also the post game question of the week, where we evaluate the questions asked to athletes immediately after a game. David, this was after Monday's college football national championship game where Georgia defeated Alabama.

And I'm sure you caught the story of Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett the 4th, who in addition to his amazing name was a walk-on at Georgia, had to transfer out, it had transferred back in, looked like he was never going to play. He does not let us say have they rocked, arm of a typical, you know, big time school, QB. He had a terrible fumble on Monday night. And then he threw an amazing touchdown and pass on the next drive and Georgia won the game.

Okay. Stetson Bennett, great story. Here is ESPN's Holly Row, David, talking to Stetson Bennett right after Georgia won the National Championship. What does your story and your stick around, your fight, your attitude say to all of the underdogs, all of the walk-ons out there? I mean, I have no. All right, no clue.

I have no clue. What my story, what I would like to say to all the underdogs and walk-ons out there? I was laughing at this for a couple of reasons. And to be fair, Stetson Bennett did produce an answer to this question as best he could. But first of all, I was imagining somebody in the audience saying, boy, I am an underdog, as Holly Rose said. And I would like to hear what Stets and Bennett has to say to me. an underdog watching this game. Or, I guess to get even smaller,

I am a walk-on athlete at a major university. What is Stetson Bennett going to tell me immediately after this game? But the bigger problem is, you know, really, isn't it a lot to ask Stets and Bennett to just kind of, do you have a message for everyone out there? Well, do you have a message would have been, I think, a certainly more straightforward question than the one that was asked, right?

The other one is just a matter of intuiting perception. What is your stictuitiveness, your underdoggetiness, your coming from behinditude? What does that have to, what does that say to all of the other underdogs out there? How do you know what it says to them? It feels like, the,

the media member probably has more to do with conveying a message to those people than the man himself. Right, right. It also feels like we're setting him up for one of those success conferences, you know, where famous people go out and tell the story of how they, you know, succeeded or overcame odds. Like, this is kind of his prep. What is your message to the people out there?

David, I want to tell you about what the media is saying is on steroids this week. But first, let's do the Overward Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. nominees to at the press box pod where they are always always gratefully received I don't know if you heard this story a few months back David but the kid on the cover

of Nirvana's Nevermind album. Oh yeah. On the famous shot he filed suit against the group. Yeah. The suit was dismissed and now the kid, well former kid has filed another lawsuit. It was an overwork Twitter joke

to write, hey, wait, he's got a new complaint. Thanks to Jeremy Jensen. Wow. That's a good one. Headline from the New York Post, David, they got a lot of attention this week. Quoting here, COVID loses 50% of ability to infect after 10 seconds in office air. COVID loses 50% of ability to infect after 10 seconds in office air. It was an overword Twitter joke to write, did work write this? Thanks to our good friend Raddy, our good friend Zach Brooks,

and you two give Mariah her Grammy. And finally, David, this news item caught my attention, quoting here, Stuart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the far right Oath Keepers Militia, was arrested on Thursday in charge with seditious conspiracy for organizing a wide-ranging plot to storm the capital last January 6th. Stuart Rhodes arrested. It was an overworked Twitter joke, or maybe just a good joke to call this a

Rhodes Collar. Oh my gosh. A Rhodes Collar. Thanks to Eric Columbus, you came up with what would be a very, very good strain pun headline as a strain pun tweet. Congrats!

You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, in the notebook dump, it's time for another edition of Media Piss Test. Oh, yeah. I had forgotten all about this feature until our listener friend Chris Olson reminded me. media piss test is where we chronicle anything or anyone the media says is on steroids.

It's like baseball in 1998 in the media. Something is always on steroids. Chris sent a couple of examples. One is the company, LG, David, has unveiled a contraption described as, wait for it, Peloton on steroids. Peloton on steroids. Oh, my gosh. I also like this one from the Tulsa World newspaper.

There was an article about how it was an unusually warm December in Tulsa. And an expert quoted says this, quote, it could best be described as a climatological anomaly on steroids. What? I don't feel like I'm smart enough to parse that out, but I don't, but I feel like there's no, there's no ceiling on an anomaly, right? I mean, if I heard climatological anomaly, I would not think like that's necessarily

like a minor weather occurrence. No, that sounds kind of like an emergency. Yeah. Our listener, Taylor, listener friend, Taylin Howland also sent this one in. Another headline, sea level on steroids. Record tides flood Washington coastlines.

Sea level on steroids. Now, C level is not, C level is just the measurement, right? Yeah, it's like a, it's just a number. That's like saying height on steroids. Yeah. C level on steroids. It's not height on steroids. It would be the person on steroids, action on steroids.

I mean, that's so crazy. Okay. Remember the best one the other day was the COVID vaccine on steroids? Yes. But was it? I mean, C level on steroids, again, seems like a much, it seems like a much more passive way to say something that's super freaky, right?

We're talking about a rise in sea level. Aren't there a million like disaster movies or just, you know, tidal wave puns that you could go to on this before just sea level on steroids? Record tides flood Washington coastlines has gotten my attention. Yeah.

I'm sure we needed to know it was on steroids. A quick news item for you, David. 60 minutes plus has been canceled. Did you ever watch 60 Minutes Plus? I did not. Me neither. And I only knew it existed because Wesley Lowry was a reporter for 60 Minutes Plus, so I'd often see references or I'd see him tweeting stuff out.

This is from variety. The clock has stopped ticking for 60 minutes plus. The streaming spinoff of the venerable CBS News mainstay that was once envisioned as a means of introducing the next generation of viewers to the popular Sunday news magazine. First of all, could anything be more doomed than we're going to introduce a new generation of viewers to 60 minutes. This brought up an interesting question to me. Remember when we had Chuck Todd on the podcast?

Uh-huh. And he's doing internet stuff or streaming stuff for peacock. Yeah. And I asked him this. And I don't think he answered this, but I asked him, do we think people who have streaming apps who are younger, the kids, you might say, want you to just do the grammar, recreate the grammar of television news on streaming? Mm-hmm.

Or do they just? want something completely different. Yeah. And I think the answer is probably completely different, but I don't exactly know what that is. Well, I feel like over and over again, these established entities with over the top platforms have failed at introducing the new generation of X, right? That is just folly. Nobody needs, nobody needs, you know, to see days of our lives, but with little kids on NBC's app, right?

or Peacock, you know? Like, it's, what you need is, is, you're right, a re-envisioning of the platform. Obviously, also, if you're committed to introducing a new generation of reporters, you could just put them on 60 minutes. I don't think there's going to be a lot of 60 minutes of yours. Given they love the anchors that they're used to, I don't think anybody is going to be aghast at, you know, Wesley Lowry showing up one week. No.

To report an important, to report on something significant. But, yeah. I mean, I don't think that just switching up vocabulary and background color or whatever is really going to do anything for anybody. I think the only thing that, you know, or one of the only things that the existing, you know, platforms like this have found that it's effective for them is sort of like inning eating, right? And that's what like Chuck Todd is doing. You need to make it seem like this is a vital organ of your, of your, you know, empire. And so, like, Tucker Carlson's doing at Fox, like Chuck Todd's doing for MSNBC or for NBC in general. I mean, you can take people who are already doing stuff and redirect them to do hours and hours of new content on something else.

But if you were just, if you just throw up a whole new slate of shows that no one's ever heard of with hosts that no one's ever heard of, I don't know what's going to really attract people to that, right? What's the hook? Yeah. Which is TV news is funny to me because there's still lifeless. left it in on television, you know, not as much as there once was, of course, but, you know, we look at cable news. We can look at morning television, all that stuff. But TV news is also weird. And if you just, you know, introduce it to people who are watching streaming apps and have never really watched TV news and like, here, watch this. I think they're going to look at this and

like, what the hell is this? And why do I want this? Like, the reason you and I are familiar with TV news is because it was the only thing on. It was the only option we had back in the three network era in the early days of CNN. And that's like why we could sit down and watch like a semi-conventional program that you and I don't even do that very much. So I just think there's an answer here. And there's probably a sports part of this too, right? Like what does sports studio programming look like in streaming? Well, I mean, the one thing that we know for sure is that and I don't even think you can specifically blame anybody in a position of power, but there's just an institutional sort of inability to evolve, right?

I mean, that's, you could say there about a million different industries, but I always make the reference, I mean, I always make the same reference the same sort of quip. Every time somebody starts a new show on a cable program, they're like, we're not going to do this the same old way, you know, I'm not going to, we're not going to have one guest that it's, you know, we're not going to have just a Republican and a Democrat yelling at each other. long conversations. I'm going to wear I'm going to wear an open collar to prove that we're different, you know, whatever. And then like

15 minutes later they're doing what everybody else is doing. Because, I mean, and it's the same thing with, you see the same thing in sports, right? If the Manning cast is the most shocking thing that's happened in broadcasting in the past like 50 years, that says a lot, right? As cool as it is,

it's like you would think we'd be in a world by now where the Manning cast looked fairly, well, I mean, their personalities raise the level of it. But the format-wise, it's not too far from stodgy, right? It's just people talking about a game, you know, on computers with guests.

And there's very few examples of that. So, yeah, I mean, it would be great if someone could imagine something better. But I just think it's not even just the people, it's not the producers who are in charge. It goes all the way up to the top. That you could, someone, whoever, whoever, I mean, CBS News could green light, you know,

what, I mean, who, I mean, who would be the most outside the box choice? Get like Ariana Grande and put her in charge of the news operation and say, just like conceive of 12 hours of broadcast news broadcasting for our app. And you can do whatever you want and we want to interfere. Well, you know what? Guess what? A month later, they're going to interfere.

And they're going to say like, you know what we should do? We should make this look more like 60 minutes. Whether or not they say that out loud, that's just the way that everything pulls. Can we, can we pair you with Dan Rather for this new, uh, an exciting invention. Call it a mashup. The kids love that. Two quick ones for you, Dave, before we go.

From the Department of SEO, I found this really funny. This is from CNN's Brian Lowry, who writes for CNN.com and also for Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy's newsletter. He writes, if you want a clear example of how SEO considerations drive coverage decisions, look no further than the Kristen Stewart was snubbed headlines related to the SAG Awards. SAG Awards, one of these numerous pre-Oscar things we're going through right now. Lowry writes, opinions obviously vary about the movie Spencer, casting Stewart in a fictionalized portrait of Princess Diana, but one could argue that she was good in an otherwise so-so movie. Even for those who admired it, her omission doesn't feel, quote, shocking as Variety dubbed it,

a sentiment echoed elsewhere. Inevitably, a few actors always get overlooked in the way SAG structures its categories actually exacerbates that, but not all of them have reliable fan bases searching their names, which explains why not all snubs are created equal. So what he's saying is if Kristen Stewart gets left out, that's a pretty minor story. But if you know there's an army of Kristen Stewart fans out there who are really interested in news and potentially are going to be angry on Kristen Stewart's behalf, then aha

you will maybe lean into the coverage of saying so and so was snubbed for the award yeah exactly I mean if you're gonna go but if you're gonna go down that path plan I just you know we can also point I mean what where do you draw the line was like Scarlett Johansson's

shockingly snubbed for an award because people are interested in searching for her I don't know man it seems like that's like a that has probably happened right and I would just love to people like, sorry, do you know what the SAG Awards are? Do you know who votes for the SAG Awards?

Pretty funny, though. David, we have Carl Bernstein on the pod next week. And I was reading his book, which is about his career in the early 60s at the Washington Star newspaper. Came across a term, a journalistic term that I knew was old, maybe didn't know quite how old. Thumb sucker. Writing a thumb sucker. Do you know what a thumb sucker is? No.

But I'm familiar with this. There was a, was there a movie called Thumb Sucker or a comic book called Thumb Sucker? I know that at some point I realized that this was more than just a person sucking its thumb and I've totally forgotten now. So consider me a linguistic failure. So as Bernstein explains, news reporters at the Washington Star and elsewhere, you're focused on breaking news, covering news. And then for the weekend paper, say, you would take some things in your notebook you didn't

get to use and write a piece that's kind of more considerate, a little more analytical. That is a thumb sucker. Thumb sucker. Got it. All right. So you and I in our career have, the overwhelming number of things we've written are thumb suckers of a kind of, of a sort or another. Should we just change the name of the podcast to thumb suckers?

I feel like we get a weird new audience. Okay. Might not all be just media fans. Speaking of which, it's time for David Shoemaker, guess is a strain pun headline. All right. Last Monday's headline about Novak Djokovic's uncertain immigration status, which got more uncertain last night,

was return Serb. Today's headline, David, comes from Andy Mosley and Rattie. It's about this Prince Andrews story. We'll start with the New York Post's headline here. Queen Strip's Prince Andrew of titles as he faces New York sex assault suit.

We need to a headline that communicates. This person, his position, with the queen and in her family with his general ickiness. What was the New York Post Strain pun headline? Wow, that is so much to wrestle with right there.

So he's the queen's son, he's a prince, he's a... And the more general term is... Okay, so let's start there. But or royal... Royal flush. Oh, Royal Flushed? Royal...

What if we said a... Royal. Royal with cheat. Okay. Pulp Fiction headline. Royale with cheat with with, icky. Ugh. Ugh.

Oh. Just a bad, just a bad air about him. Slees. Slees. Slees. All right. There we go. Royale with Slees.

And I didn't make you guess the headline on the Daily Star over there in the UK, which was the. the narcissist formerly known as Prince. Oh my gosh, that's great. Pretty funny given the strip titles. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic by Devin Manzi.

Coming next week on the press box. As I said, Carl Bernstein. Yes, that Carl Bernstein. David, I will be asking him for the worse than Watergate power rankings. You can count on that.

Monday, David and I are off. Then we're back Tuesday with more Luke Wormtakes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian. Thank you.