An interesting yarn by Sean Holman's Public Eye. A B.C. reporter and editor are out of a job at Victoria News. The editor, Keith Norbury, got turfed Friday, while reporter Brennan Clarke had resigned a few days earlier.

An advertiser's complaint over a story that talked about someone who saved big bucks buying a luxury car in Portland, Ore. helped trigger the chain of events.

From the NYT:

Michael K. Deaver, who arranged some of Ronald Reagan’s most memorable photographic backdrops for public consumption and privately gave the president blunt, sometimes contrarian advice, died yesterday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 69.

From the Aug. 17 Reuters story on Yahoo! News:

An embarrassed Japanese government has cut the subsidy, but a Tokyo TV company said on Friday it would carry on making a striptease news show with sign language for hearing-impaired viewers.

The government made grants totaling 400,000 yen ($3,500) to help cover production of the weekly five-minute program on satellite TV, which features a newsreader who removes her clothes between news items that she delivers in sign language. ..

"Of course we will continue making the program," said Shinichiro Fukuyama, a spokesman for makers Paradise Television. "We weren't doing it for the subsidy, we just wanted to make something viewers would enjoy."

From the NYT:

News coverage of the Iraq war fell sharply in the second quarter of the year, as the news media paid increased attention to the presidential campaign and the immigration debate, according to a detailed analysis to be released today.

The study is done by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

From the NYT:

Coincidence or not? This month, 10 of Time Inc.’s magazines are running articles about New Orleans.

The answer, for the most part, is “not.” The assorted articles were the result of the editor in chief John Huey’s unusual decision to take 12 editors on a two-day tour in May of the struggling city. Mr. Huey, who oversees the content of more than 150 magazines, said he could not recall a similar trip in the past, nor could others who were involved.

Mr. Huey said he did not presume that each editor would come back and assign articles about New Orleans, but once they did, the timing was coordinated ahead of next week’s two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.

“There were no commercial considerations at all,” Mr. Huey said. “It was just a group of some of the biggest, most influential magazines in the country coming all at once.” ...

Mr. Huey said the multimagazine experiment was not intended to build Web traffic or attract advertisers; rather, it was an attempt to put the journalistic weight of 10 big magazines behind a particular topic. “It felt good to flex those muscles all at the same time,” he said.

Most casual magazine readers would not notice the endeavor; its real impact is evident mostly on the Internet. The print editions steer readers to time.com/katrina, an index of stories from each issue.

From the NYT:

Anyone looking for evidence that liberals are funnier than conservatives might be tempted to point to the demise of Fox News Channel’s “1/2 Hour News Hour,” the network’s answer to left-wing news parodies like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central.

Last week, Fox decided not to renew the show, saying it was too expensive to produce. The last episode will air on Sept. 16.

“It’s a financial issue,” said the executive producer, Joel Surnow, best known as the co-creator of Fox’s “24.” “It’s a very expensive show by their standards. It has to make business sense before anything else.” ...

Mr. Surnow warned against using the show’s demise to infer that conservatives are not funny.

“I think there’s room for great satire and great comedy from either side of the aisle,” he said. “Hypocrisy and hysteria are in both camps, and they should always be taken down a notch.”