Have I Got News for You

At first blush, the New York Times' decision to force Josh Friedland, editor of the popular blog The Food Section, to drop the slogan "All the News That's Fit to Eat" seems a bit silly. After all, it does amount to a publishing giant going after a tiny, one-man operation.

Still, trademarks must be protected or their owners could lose them, or so say lawyers. And while Friedland is right that many Web sites use parodies of the Times' "All the News That's Fit to Print," none of the ones he cites is particularly popular. And anyway, maybe the Times is going after them, too. Also, since the Times has a couple of its own food blogs, there is the potential—albeit tiny—for confusion.

Friedland says the ordeal has made him realize that his "attempt at parody was not so original. In fact, the idea of parodying 'All the News That's Fit to Print' turns out to be one of the more hackneyed forms of expression in our popular culture." So perhaps now he'll come up with a new, better one. It's a fine blog, and it deserves a good slogan.

I myself once parodied ATNTFTP for a company newsletter I wrote while running a newspaper's copy desk in the '90s. Its slogan, which I thought at the time was oh-so-clever, was "Fit the Print That's News to All." Not as clever as I then thought, perhaps, but apparently highly original—it draws not a single Google hit (until now). Or maybe it wasn't original as much as it was so irredeemably stupid that nobody else would ever think to use it.

As for the original, Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine asked a few months ago: "What medium but a pulp paper could spin a straight-faced tautology—'All the news that's fit to print'—into a deathless slogan?"