South Dakota war hero, senator, presidential candidate and world hunger relief advocate George McGovern passed away Sunday at age 90. Here's how his hometown paper, the Argus Leader of Sioux Falls, played the story today on page one. (more...)

LA Weekly | LA Observed | KTLA 5 | LA Times | LA Daily News
More than 200 Occupy LA protestors were arrested and removed Tuesday night from City Hall Park. Covering the arrests was a media pool selected by the Los Angeles Police Dept. in a meeting announced less than two hours before it began. The pool consisted of 12 journalists, who were asked to share reporting with each other before publishing to their own sites. (more...)

David Higgerson
Newspapers spend less than 1 percent of their revenue on advertising, compared to Coca-Cola's 14 percent, says David Higgerson, head of multimedia for Trinity Mirror Regionals in the U.K., who learned that fact at a recent Society of Editors conference. Coca-Cola's spending, writes Higgerson, "ensures we remember who they are and what they do. Newspapers … have been forgotten by many people." He suggests that better promotion of newspapers might be in order:

• Make promotions local.
• "Don’t over-sensationalise for the sake of it."
• Consider promoting anything -- even job listings or cartoons, if they merit it.

Earlier: Newspaper Association of America tries to sell U.S. readers on the notion that "Smart is the new sexy" | Does Coke's ad on New York Times website violate its policy against ads that look like Times content? (CJR)

AJR
"We have far from given up on the print model. We're not modeling how to diminish it," James Moroney, publisher and CEO of The Dallas Morning News, tells Caitlin Johnston of the American Journalism Review. "I still think the seven-day-a-week business can be sustainable for another decade." Last month, the News' vice president for audience, Mark Medici, told the Inland Press Association conference that "we know in three years we won’t have a seven-day paper"; Moroney later said that it was all a “misstatement or a misunderstanding.” Related: Medici named vice president of audience and digital strategy for the Austin American-Statesman.

CJR | New Yorker
CJR's Brian E. Crowley acknowledges that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain showed ignorance of an immigration issue last week, but he questions how aggressively the national media jumped on it. The issue that stumped Cain this time: Miami Herald reporter Marc Caputo asked the candidate how he felt about the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy regarding Cubans trying to come to the U.S. Crowley writes:

The ledes to many a Cain’s Day in Florida stories wrote themselves: grab that familiar (and, not unfounded) Herman Cain is a foreign policy know-nothing story template, plug in fresh anecdote, and, file!

The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, meanwhile, takes Mitt Romney to task for his first paid campaign ad, which includes video of President Barack Obama saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose." Lizza points out that Obama was quoting an advisor for John McCain:

This is one of those cases where a candidate has put out something that is demonstrably false. If a journalist or writer quoted someone in such an intellectually dishonest way, you would never trust the person’s writing again. And yet this episode is being reported by some as a clever tactic by the Romney camp to spark a debate about the ad’s accuracy that will serve to highlight its overall message that Obama has been a failure. (See, it worked!)

Related: Wolf Blitzer calls Romney ad a "new low" || Earlier: New Cain campaign ad accuses media of "high-tech lynching" | A viewer's guide on how  to watch campaign ads