The Board of County Commissioners in Citrus County, Florida opposed the renewal of the regional public library's digital subscription to the New York Times. Why? "Fake news," said the board's second vice chairman Scott Carnahan. "“I agree with President Trump. I will not be voting for this. I don’t want The New York Times in this county.” From Reuters:

Carnahan was joined by Commissioners Ronald Kitchen, who balked at the annual cost of about $2,700, and Jimmie Smith, who wondered, “why the heck would we spend money on something like that?”

Reading the room, First Vice Chairman Brian Coleman withdrew the motion he made to approve the funding request...

The (Citrus County) Chronicle, noting that the decision would affect some 70,000 library card holders, reported that its readers “reacted strongly” to the commissioners’ decision, with “most but not all” critical of it.

The county already pays about $3,000 a year to supply its four regional libraries with the print edition of The Times, Library Services Director Eric Head told the newspaper.

Graphic above borrowed from this fantastic t-shirt. Read the rest

Shown at top of fold: Cover to OTHER SCENES, Volume 1, Number 6, September 1968 — Additional items on the history of OTHER SCENES will be included in the comments section over the week.

From John Wilcock, New York Years, by Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall.

(See all Boing Boing installments)

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The next version of Chrome will patch a bug that lets websites detect users who are in incognito mode by by probing the Filesystem API; they've also pledged to seek out and block any other vulnerabilities that will let servers detect users in incognito mode. Read the rest

UPDATE: A Starbucks spokesperson tells Boing Boing, “We are always looking at what we offer our customers in our stores and making adjustments to our portfolio based on changing customer behavior. As part of our continuous efforts to enhance the overall experience in our stores for both partners and customers, we are removing select fixtures from our retail lobby in September. In addition to Newspaper Stands, we have also removed shelving fixtures that display whole bean coffee and different grab and go snacks.” Read the rest

Joël Franusic became obsessed with Krazy Kat, but was frustrated by the limited availability and high cost of the books anthologizing the strip (some of which were going for $600 or more on Amazon); so he wrote a scraper that would pull down thumbnails from massive archives of pre-1923 newspapers and then identified 100 pages containing Krazy Kat strips to use as training data for a machine-learning model. Read the rest

Sharon Ringel and Angela Woodall have published a comprehensive, in-depth look at the state of news archiving in the digital age, working under the auspices of the Tow Center at the Columbia Journalism Review; it's an excellent, well-researched report and paints an alarming picture of the erosion of the institutional memories of news organizations. Read the rest

That's some mighty fine headline writing from the New York Post for their rehash of Paul McCartney's GQ interview in which he reminisced about masturbating with John Lennon. Read the rest

Ithaca's free alt-weekly The Ithaca Times printed a New York State voter registration form on their cover this week. The medium is the message.

We are using this week’s cover to provide all our readers with a fully functional New York State voter registration form. pic.twitter.com/9Lz1MVwYzE

— The Ithaca Times (@ithacatimes) August 24, 2018

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Forty years ago, investigative journalists in Chicago hatched an audacious plan to create a fake tavern packed with hidden microphones, cameras, and reporters everywhere working as bar staff and customers. Their goal was to document local corruption. Topic has a great oral history of the project. Read the rest

Fort Lauderdale, Florida's Sun Sentinel daily newspaper published an ad for a gun show on the front page just below stories about a benefit for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and another article about the guilty plea of the man who killed 5 people last year at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood airport. After Stoneman Douglas families and others responded with WTF, the paper apologized and then later announced a moratorium on gun ads. From the Miami New Times:

"It's a mess. It's horrible," says Julie Anderson, the Sun Sentinel's editor in chief. "We're taking every step possible to make sure our editorial staff always see ads before publication so something like this doesn't slip through."

In her statement, publisher Nancy Meyer said, "We deeply regret placement of a gun advertisement on our front page Wednesday morning. It has been against our policy to run gun and other types of controversial advertising on our front page."

(Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)

Looks like the Sun Sentinel editor on this page failed. A story on the victims of gun violence and they put a gun coupon on the page. WTF!!! pic.twitter.com/JTEfnTo3s7

— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) May 2, 2018

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This fantastic t-shirt was born from a discussion at b3s, "an online community of designers and coders and other rad folks." All proceeds go toward the b3s hosting costs. Brilliant.

Buy "The New Dark Times" t-shirt Read the rest

Friday's edition of German daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel; this shot was everywhere this weekend, sadly unsourced! Read the rest

On this weekend's Meet the Press, WSJ editor in chief Gerard Baker said that even when he was clear that Trump had uttered a falsehood, his paper would not call that falsehood a lie, because to do so would ascribe "moral intent" to Trump; instead, the WSJ will call Trump's lies "challengeable" and "questionable." Read the rest

LA Times reports that a 113 year-old Japanese American newspaper is in danger of going out of business.

For 113 years, the Rafu Shimpo newspaper has chronicled the story of the Japanese-American community in Southern California. It survived World War II, when writers and editors were shipped off to internment camps. Before leaving, they hid the paper's Japanese type under office floorboards. But if the money-losing paper doesn't raise about $500,000 in revenue-—by more than doubling its subscribers--it could close in December, marking the end of one of the last English-Japanese dailies in the U.S., and the oldest. "Some of the things we cover you can't get anywhere else," said Michael Komai, 64, the paper's publisher, whose family has run the Little Tokyo-based publication for three generations. "Some people aren't going to know they'll miss us until we're gone."

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Digital commissioner Günther Oettinger (CDU – EPP) is joining with European Parliament president Martin Schulz (SPD – S&D) in pressing the European Commission to create a copyright interest in links, meaning that making a link to a Web-page that contains infringing material would expose you to liability for copyright infringement yourself. Read the rest

The McClatchy Company, a chain of more than 30 U.S. newspapers, is expected to close its foreign bureaus by the end of the year. The media giant's chief executive denies the rumors, but it kind of sounds like the closures are likely anyway. Read the rest

The Westport Independent casts you as the clip-happy editor of a newsrag under an oppressive regime, where you decide what goes to print. Can you manage the government threat and still subvert it?