Washington-based website and newsletter The Politico, like the CBS procedural dramas CSI and NCIS before it, is hoping to recapture the magic with a series of region-specific spin-offs. First, already extant The Politico-owned news site Capital New York will "rebrand" itself as The Politico New York, much like when Macy's bought every regional department store chain in America and renamed them all Macy's. Then will come The Politico New Jersey and The Politico Florida. The Politico's choice of expansion markets is perfectly "on-brand."

Today, Hillary Clinton embarked on a "surprise" tour of Iowa, which started at a community college in the eastern town of Monticello. There, she spoke to a small group of supporters, and inadvertently triggered what may be the most embarrassing video we see all campaign season when MSNBC caught sight of a mob of reporters sprinting wildly after her van.

BuzzFeed beauty editor Arabelle Sicardi, who wrote a post criticizing a Dove soap advertising campaign that was later deleted (and eventually restored) at the request of editor-in-chief Ben Smith, is resigning from the site, according to an internal memo distributed by BuzzFeed Style editor Julie Gerstein.

What's amazing about BuzzFeed's perpetual amnesiac/wayward-husband approach to its ethical guidelines (Today is the first day of the rest of our ethics!) is that the person who has to give voice to this ever-evolving set of rationalizations about the trial-and-error nature of developing ethics is the stolidly conventional Ben Smith, who certainly 10 years ago when I shared a newsroom with him, at the New York Observer, showed no signs of not being fully socialized to professional standards. In fact, in that light, his absurd and instantly disprovable messaging about the need to define and restrict BuzzFeed writers' use of personal opinion becomes intelligible—it is meant, consciously or unconsciously, as an appeal to stodgy, ultra-conventional journalistic values. He did not violate basic standards because he is at the helm of a post-moral money-making machine that only impersonates journalism to the extent it helps with its branding, but because he was uncomfortable with this newfangled opinion-slinging.

Yesterday we reported BuzzFeed’s decision to delete a staff-written post that criticized a viral advertisement for Dove beauty products. In response, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith released a rather incredible internal memo that instructed the site’s writers not to “advance [their] personal opinion” and claimed that “we’ve never had to pull a post before”—which is true for BuzzFeed Life, perhaps, but not for BuzzFeed as a whole.

Wednesday afternoon, BuzzFeed published a post by staff writer Arabelle Sicardi that openly criticized a bizarre advertising campaign by Dove. (A sample passage: “The soap manufacturer wants to tell us how we feel about ourselves. And then fix it for us. With soap.”) Thursday morning, however, BuzzFeed deleted the entire post and replaced it with a single sentence: “We pulled this post because it is not consistent with the tone of BuzzFeed Life.”

In his first year as music editor of the Dallas Observer, Jeff Gage, a transplant from the Minneapolis City Pages, has made one thing clear: female musicians perplex him into reductive paralysis. His most recent transgression comes in his description of guitarist St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark), who Gage tells us has been "traumatizing viewers" of late, not with her music—but with her clothes.

Vanity Fair has published a lengthy dissection of NBC’s long-troubled news division and its most visible public persona, the disgraced Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. Any remaining faith in reversing NBC’s death spiral, sources tell the journalist Bryan Burrough, appears to be rapidly evaporating. But Burrough’s piece leaves at least one important question hanging: How on earth can Brian Williams ever return to NBC News?

With an odd sense of fanfare, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism last night produced a 13,000-word report on Rolling Stone's profoundly flawed account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, "A Rape on Campus," that was published last November. Their conclusion? Rolling Stone fucked up a lot.

Jon Krakauer does not shy away from tough topics in his writing: Mormons (Under the Banner of Heaven), poisonous forest plants (Into the Wild), mountain-climbing expeditions during which almost everyone dies (Into Thin Air). So maybe he's the perfect person to write about America's current favorite hot-button issue, campus rape, which is what he's done in his new book, Missoula, out later this month.

The New Republic wants to be less white, and less old. Confusing Rihanna and Beyoncé will probably not help them reach that goal.

Philip Gourevitch took to the New Yorker blog yesterday to publish some words about the Germanwings crash. The resulting blog post is very bad—so bad it is worth taking as a case study in how not to do aggregation.

A tipster sent along the above photos of Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the likely heir to his father’s job as publisher and head chairman of The New York Times, riding the subway sometime last year. The younger Sulzberger may be paid $153,910 per year (and the older, $6.8 million), but sometimes the MTA is more convenient than a cab.

Nicole Krauss, author of the The History of Love and ex-wife of famous vegetarian Jonathan Safran Foer, has done what few literary writers can do: procured a two-book deal for an impressive sum of money—more than four million dollars, our sources tell us.

What?

"I actually want to live in a world where Jonah [Lehrer] should get another chance, even though I really understand that he made some really stupid mistakes," Jon Ronson, author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed, tells New York magazine. Lehrer's next book, The Smarter Screen, is available for preorder from Amazon. [h/t Anna Holmes]

Did you know Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson has a 44-year-old brother and his name is Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson? It’s true. We were reminded of this fact after Rosie Gray at BuzzFeed published an email Buckley sent to a Bill de Blasio spokeswoman today. The message manages to be both sexist (Buckley refers to the spokeswoman as “LabiaFace”) and incompetent (he accidentally CC’d the very spokeswoman he was referring to). Here it is:

Facebook, a dull and endlessly scrolling record of personal propaganda and content headlined in two or more sentences, isn't satisfied with the way its 1.4 billion users (most non-sentient) consume the news. According to the New York Times, it takes an epic eight seconds for the average Joe Facebook User to load an outside news link, clicked on in Facebook, in a new browser tab or window. Unacceptable.