Just when you thought the Arizona Republic couldn't get any worser!
Today it publishes a feature—complete with massive photo—on the cover of its business section about …
… Starbucks using a new cup size.
A. New. Cup. Size.
That’s what warrants a cover feature at the Arizona Republic.
As usual, the story itself is correspondingly insipid. Here’s the lede:
Phoenix-area coffee junkies who have grown immune to Starbucks’ maximum 24-ounce jolt now can boost their caffeine intake by 30 percent without loading up on extra shots.
The Seattle-based coffeehouse chain is test-marketing a new 31-ounce cup for iced coffees and teas in Phoenix and Tampa to determine whether customers are ready to supersize their caffeine.
For what is essentially ad copy for a corporation, it’s mighty fine prose. A graf later, looking for a little color to brighten up the story, reporter Max Jarman intrepidly finds a customer drinking from one of the new cups.
Turns out he was drinking decaffeinated ice tea.
Jarman doesn’t say what the drinks will cost, nor does he mention the nutritional issues. Extrapolating from info on Starbucks’ own nutrition pages, you can see that a 31-ounce Frappuccino will contain about 600 calories, and more than 100 grams of carbs.
As for the illustration, it’s a big picture of a coffee cup with a big ol’ Starbucks logo on the side. Some drawings to the right of the photo are a great example of the expository journalism a newspaper can provide its audience with, given some planning and just a tiny bit of creativity.
I think anyone looking at the result will immediately apprehend that a 31-ounce cup is bigger than a 24-ounce cup.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday over in the Living section, the paper has continued its fascination with psychics.
The hedline of the story is this:
Psychics see their popularity rising
Medium’s popularity a sign of public’s growing fascination with the other side
I suppose its relevant to mention that the story is about no such thing. It quotes one alleged psychic saying she was busy, but she never says she has more business than normal, and no one else does, either. (Indeed, she’s the only purported psychic quoted.)
The story does more than you’d expect by quoting a psychic debunker, but then, in an almost parodic descent into a rabit hole of journalistic over-objectivity, finds someone to quarrel with the debunker!
But Richard Mann, a professor emeritus of psychology and religion at the University of Michigan, says people have always expressed a connection with the dead….
Worst of all, the story is a wire piece from Detroit. It’s just amazing to think that an editor at the paper decided that of all the wire stories available that day, the crappy one about the psychics was the one to run.
Previously in PHXated:
5:49 PM
PHXations—Thursday, March 4
Artist Claudio Dicochea’s long-awaited opening is tonight at Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale from 7 to 9. In previous work Dicochea puts a genre of formal Spanish portrait painting through a series of conceptual rethinkings. A set of six of his paintings were to me the highlight of the Phoenix Art Museum’s Locals Only show last year.
Here’s Hearsight’s Scott Andrews on his work:
His painting today continues in a hybrid mode, with Disney characters and Norteño balladeers cohabiting in a Pop-Abstract world of high-low art. Drawing and cartoon transfers are placed on the sheet like collectible toys on a shelf, but don’t confuse these tableaux with facile repetition. Encoded within the play of all- too-familiar stereotypes and candy colors are not only the artist’s childhood memories but a meditation on art’s culpability in the construction of racial classification, a process that ran in tandem with the mixing of peoples after 1492.
A selection of Dicochea’s work, and that of his wife, Adriana Gallega, can be seen here. Details on the show and how to get to it here.
9:53 PM
Tempe: Ve vant das Googlefiber!
Tempe, at least, is aware of the potential of widespread ultrahighspeed fiber optic cable in town. Last month, the WSJ reported that Google was looking for a town to use as a test case to build out internet service with gigabyte-per-second download speed, or roughly 100 times faster than most folks currently have.
The company’s created a March 26 deadline for interested towns to apply.
Tempe’s idea, not a bad one, is to ask people to submit video ideas of what the town could do with such a service:
Tempe wants that fiber. We want it for our 175,000 residents, for our 175,000 workers, for our 4 million visitors who travel here annually for fun and business and for our 200,000 college students. Why do we want it? Tempe, Arizona is known for innovation. We think that the combined brain power of all these people, with this fiber, can change the world. We’ve already done so much.
You can help convince Google that Tempe is the best place to showcase their fiber. Tell us how you can change the world, or at least your corner of it, if you had access to the kind of speed that Google fiber promises.
That’s the spirit. PHXated would move to Tempe overnight if it pulled that off. But if it wants it it’s going to have to deal with Topeka first.
4:41 AM