Champagne bottle corks must be popping today at Sony Pictures Entertainment’s publicity department after whopping print and broadcast coverage/mentions of its comedy film, “The Interview,” before and after it played to full houses at about 300 small independent theaters over the past few days while online video orders kept Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Sony busy, observes Grumpy Editor.
In addition, the film, starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, saw thousands of illegal downloads. The action followed a widely covered cyber attack, including mention by President Barack Obama at last week’s White House press conference, aimed at the Sony Corp. film unit.
Not bad for a movie depicting events leading to the fictional assassination of North Korea leader Kim Jong-un that garnered a C rating from Washington Post reviewer Ann Hornaday.
Hornaday’s review of The Interview took up half a newspaper page.
Beating that, with more than half-page of text and photos was The Wall Street Journal on Friday. The story, written by three staffers, started on the Marketplace section’s opening page then jumped to an inside page. The front page included a photo of Cinema Village, New York, which screened the film while the inside page art spotlighted actor Rogen greeting attendees at a Los Angeles screening.
Variety reported more than 900,000 illegal downloads of The Interview in less than 24 hours.
Editorial cartoonists also got into the act, focusing on the event.
FYI, IN CASE YOUR FAVORITE EDITORS MISSED THESE…
Blue for blue PR. JetBlue Airways provided free flights to New York for two police officers from each city along its routes for funerals of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, New York City police officers killed in an ambush attack…Off track. In Hawaii, White House reporters in President Barack Obama’s motorcade were sidelined for about 45 minutes when their press van’s wobbly tire nearly separated from the vehicle. Vacationing Obama continued on, leaving the stranded journalists waiting for a replacement…The Los Angeles Times, in another shake-‘em-up lengthy feature aimed at already-shaky readers (from previous periodic earthquake stories) noted a major shaker could imperil Los Angeles’s water supply by destroying key sections of three major aqueducts, “cutting off the water supply for more than 22 million people in Southern California”…CNN’s Don Lemon made Columbia Journalism Review’s worst journalism of 2014 list. He grabbed that negative honor in connection with missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 when he asked guests if the aircraft could have been swallowed by a black hole, among other fumbles…Last issue of the Long Beach Register, offspring of Freedom Communications’ Orange County Register, was published Sunday, 16 months after its debut to compete with the Long Beach Press-Telegram…The New York Times plans to open a 100-person office in London that will become the newspaper’s digital hub in Europe and international center.
Ad agencies and their clients don’t notice this?
Major trend with TV commercials is to use tiny, hard-to-read type, usually white against a bright yellow or orange background. Among those making viewers squint or reach for their glasses (or binoculars): ExxonMobil Corp. and Liberty Mutual Insurance.
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