Month: January 2025

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ 1 Comment
  • The air control tower at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. was understaffed when an American Airlines flight collided with a military helicopter, killing 67 people.
  • A spectator was killed at a high school track and field meet on the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus when a competitor lost control of a hammer in the hammer throw event and hurled it into the stands.
  • You might want to grab your popcorn to watch this situation play out: the Downtown Denver Partnership has hired a London– and New York City-based branding firm – DNCO – to create a new brand identity for the 16th Street Mall. Not sure the firm’s “concepts for new digital and physical logos, brands and wayfinding signage” will overcome issues such as the recent double murder and the challenges with the mall being overwhelmed with people experiencing homelessness.
  • Frontier Airlines took the bottom spot (and Delta the top spot) in The Wall Street Journal‘s annual ranking of U.S. airlines. From the report: “The good news for fliers: Carriers held it together relatively well. They lost fewer bags. More than three of four flights arrived on time (by the government’s admittedly generous definition), on par with 2023. Cancellations were flat. Hold the thunderous applause, though. Bumping and tarmac delays were weak spots.”
  • How did the University of South Carolina women’s basketball team celebrate a recent win over LSU? By having the team’s in-arena DJ blast a song from the late rapper Camouflage, who was the father of one of LSU’s players. USC apologized and suspended the DJ.
  • If we aren’t already in a post-truth society, we’re headed there fast. Edelman‘s latest Trust Barometer data finds that 7 in 10 people believe government officials, business leaders and journalists deliberately mislead them by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.
  • Facebook and Instagram parent Meta threatened to fire workers who leak information in a memo that was leaked to the media.
  • In the past month, ABC News and Meta, two companies who have deals that will need to be approved by the federal government, have settled legally dubious claims from President Donald Trump for a combined $41 million. And now CBS parent company Paramount is negotiating a settlement with President Trump over allegations that “60 Minutes” deceptively edited a story on former Vice President Kamala Harris, a claim that would never survive court. As Taegan Goddard noted, “Trump’s lawsuit settlements look a lot like bribery.“
  • Five years after the pandemic, U.S. students’ test scores still have not recovered. Overall, just 39% of fourth-graders and 28% of eighth-graders scored at or above the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) standard for proficiency in math.
  • 9News parent company Tegna is using AI to write articles for some of its affiliates’ websites.
  • Medals won by athletes at the Paris Olympic Games in 2024 are already disintegrating due to a defective varnish intended to protect them. Olympic officials promise that all the medals will be systematically replaced.
  • CNN anchor Jim Acosta has been a thorn in President Donald Trump‘s side for years, and it appears that the network was eager to try to get back into the president’s good graces. CNN moved Acosta’s show to midnight ET, a move that caused Acosta to resign. It also prompted President Trump to praise CNN and post, “Jim is a major loser who will fail no matter where he ends up.”
  • A BBC investigation into comedian Russell Brand when he was one of its radio presenters acknowledged that the company mishandling what the broadcaster called Brand’s “unacceptable behavior” that included sexual assault.
  • A total of 30 professional tennis players have now been suspended for their connections to a match-fixing syndicate in Belgium.
  • A woman who gave birth at a Krispy Kreme in Alabama named her newborn son “Glaze.”

Who won the week?

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ Leave a comment
  • The electronic payment processor Stripe terminated 300 people, or about 3.5% of its global workforce, and many of them received the news via an email that inadvertently included an image of a yellow cartoon duck. The head of HR followed up with another email that said in part, “I apologize for the error and any confusion it caused,” but left unsaid “but you are still fired.”
  • CNN is laying off about 200 employees as part of shift to from a cable-first to a digital-first model. That transition is driven in part by historically low television ratings. Sadly, there is no indication that those who were fired received an email with an emotional support cartoon duck.
  • A former CBI DNA scientist who worked on thousands of cases, has been charged with 102 felonies alleging that she manipulated evidence. Prosecutors worry that more than 1,000 convictions could have relied on her evidence, and an unknown number of cases may not have been prosecuted due to her faulty findings.
  • The Salt Lake City-based NHL hockey team – temporarily named Utah Hockey Club while it tries to finalize its permanent name – had its first choice, the Utah Yetis, rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It is not distinctive enough.
  • Everyone always says they want to be in The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately for one local company, its moment came with the headline, “Vail Resorts Has an Epic Problem.”
  • The NFL forced the New England Patriots to remove its Bluesky social media account because the league has not “approved” the Twitter/X competitor.
  • Jewelry designer Lynn Ban, who starred in the Netflix reality series “Bling Empire: New York,” died following emergency brain surgery due to a skiing accident in Aspen.
  • The head of Panama’s football federation was suspended after he called one of the country’s star players “fat” and “out of shape” after she complained about the lack of investment in the sport.
  • Allen Media Group television stations were forced to back away from a plan to fire local meteorologists and replace them with a Weather Channel feed after a backlash from viewers.
  • One of the bigger stories coming out of the Australian Open tennis tournament this year has been the media. One of the biggest sports anchors in the country was forced to apologize after he insulted Novak Djokovic and his Serbian fans on air, and U.S. player Ben Shelton criticized the post-match, on-court interviews as being “embarrassing and disrespectful.“

Who won the week?

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ 1 Comment

Who won the week?

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ Leave a comment
  • Ten people are dead and nearly 200,000 people have been ordered to evacuate their homes due to wildfires in the Los Angeles area. Like the Marshall Fire in Boulder several years ago, these wildfires are fueled by high winds that are growing fires faster than firefighters can respond. The scale of the fires may impact Coloradans as insurers further evaluate their premiums in what they consider areas vulnerable to wildfires.
  • Could the Denver Broncos build a new stadium in Lone Tree? 9News reports the team is considering it.
  • The public relations team was among the hardest hit departments from recent layoffs at The Washington Post.
  • The Colorado State Patrol is walking back its initial claims that a driver involved in a New Year’s Day crash that killed two people fell asleep at the wheel. The CSP did not explain why potentially inaccurate information was released, but they did apologize to friends and families of the deceased.
  • Colorado is expensive and full, a finding underscored by the U-Haul Growth Index that ranks states by the number of people moving into vs. out of states. Colorado ranked 40th. Before you get too excited about the potential for lower rents, 50.3% of one-way U-Haul trips were out of Colorado, while 49.7% were to Colorado.
  • 9News traffic and entertainment reporter Erica Lopez is taking some time off to have a cyst removed from one of her vocal cords.
  • Denver City Auditor Tim O’Brien has spent the past decade justifying his existence by finding all manner of problems – real and imagined – with numerous city-related programs and departments. This time he has his sights on DIA, and he is threatening to conduct multiple audits if the airport doesn’t bend to his will.
  • TikTok influencers who have made a living off the social media platform are bracing for its potential ban in the United States effective Jan. 19. The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments today attempting to overturn the legislative ban.
  • States in the Southeast are getting hammered by a rare snowstorm, with cities such as Atlanta and Nashville expected to get 2-4 inches (which affects them the way 12-24 inches of snow would affect Denver – Atlanta doesn’t own very many snowplows).
  • Vince McMahon, the founder and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) agreed to pay the SEC $400,000 and reimburse the WWE $1,3 million to settle allegations that he “failed to disclose multimillion-dollar settlements he had reached with two women when he led the W.W.E.”
  • ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery abandoned plans to launch Venu, what would have been a new streaming service featuring content from each. The three announced the new network a year ago, but Fubu had sued alleging that the service was anticompetitive.

Who won the week?

  • KOSI 101 saw its ratings number nearly double in December as it made its annual month-long transition to Christmas music.
  • The University of Colorado Boulder helped launch 35 start-ups over the past fiscal year, a new record. That puts CU Boulder in very good company. For context, Stanford launched 35 start-ups and MIT launched 32.
  • The Denver Broncos are in the NFL playoffs for the first time in a decade. They play the Buffalo Bills on Sunday.

Who Had the Worst Week?

~ Jeremy Story ~ Leave a comment
  • The niche online car rental service Turo is getting massive media attention, but unfortunately for the company it is because its cars were used in both the New Orleans and Las Vegas terror attacks on New Year’s Day.
  • We are getting an inside glimpse into the world of celebrity publicists and crisis communications, and it is every bit the cesspool you imagined. Actress Blake Lively obtained text messages between producer/actor Justin Baldoni and several of his crisis communications consultants that outline a media smear campaign to delegitimize the actress as she prepared to go public with claims that he behaved improperly on set. “All of this will be most importantly untraceable,” said Melissa Nathan, one of the crisis publicists, apparently unaware of how group texts work.
    • Not happy with the resulting media coverage, Baldoni has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. Expect it to be withdrawn just before discovery starts.
  • De Beers is sitting on a $2 billion pile of unsold diamonds as demand for the gemstone has slumped to levels not seen since the 2008 recession. “It’s been a bad year for rough diamond sales,” said De Beers’ CFO.
  • Two Oregon men who set out in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest to find conclusive proof that Sasquatch exists died of exposure. Weather conditions in the Cascade mountains had been below freezing in the days before and during the search, which included snow and freezing rain.
  • United Airlines almost created its own operational meltdown when the food it served to employees at DIA on Christmas Day resulted in food poisoning.
  • All five college football teams – Georgia (SEC), Arizona State (Big 12), Oregon (Big 10), Clemson (ACC) and Boise State (Mountain West) – who made the playoffs by virtue of winning their conference championships have already been eliminated.
  • The Washington Post has assembled the list of 2024’s weirdest celebrity apologies.
  • The cruise industry reported that December 2024 was the worst month for mass gastrointestinal illness outbreaks in more than a decade. Bon voyage!
  • The Times Square Applebee’s offered a New Year’s Eve celebration package that starts at $850. And it sold out.
  • A glowing-hot piece of space junk more than eight feet in diameter and weighing more than 1,000 pounds fell from the sky and crashed in a remote village in Kenya. No one was injured, but scientists warn we should expect more incidents like this as low-orbit space gets more crowded with satellites. Google “Kessler Syndrome” if you want to know more.
  • The U.S. Surgeon General has proposed putting cancer warnings on alcohol, a move that could further depress sales that were already trending down since 2023.
  • Westerra, the sixth-largest credit union in Colorado, selected New York-based Impact PR & Communications as its public relations firm.

Who won the week?

  • 2024 was a mixed bag for the conglomerates that own Denver‘s television news stations. Tegna’s (9News) stock was up 20% for the year, but Nexstar (Fox31) was down 1% and Scripps’ (7News) was down 82%. CBS4 is owned by CBS, which is owned by Paramount, and Paramount’s stock was down 28% for the year. Even more concerning is that 2024 was a presidential election year, which resulted in about $18 billion in political ad money being spent with local television stations.
  • Red Rocks Amphitheatre was the second-most attended concert venue in the country in 2024, trailing only Madison Square Garden. Globally, it ranked No. 4, behind MSG, the O2 Arena in London and Mexico City’s Auditorio Nacional.
  • Actor Will Ferrell attended a post-Christmas L.A. Kings hockey game dressed as Buddy the Elf. This Buddy, however, had a three-day beard and was chugging beers with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Ferrell, in character as Buddy, said it had been “a tough holiday season.”
  • After eight years of acrimonious negotiations and legal filings, actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie finally reached a divorce settlement. They had been married for two years when they filed the initial divorce papers.