In your modernist Monday media column: Print porn gets desperate, Metro leaves America, reporters now work in coffee shops, and your dumb college newspaper articles are all on your permanent record:

Playboy is tanking, because of internet porn, so they're considering "radical changes" for the magazine, "including price increases, a frequency reduction and lowering its rate base of 2.6 million." So fewer people will read it. We'll see how that works out. On the other hand, Vibe is launching a new tabloid where they can run those naked Rihanna pics if they want to. Free celebrity porn is the new paid anonymous person porn.


Metro, the free morning commuter papers that are a decent 10 minute read on the subway, as long as you didn't watch the news that morning, has sold its NYC, Boston, and Philly papers, and is closing its Spanish papers. It's now focusing on markets where print is still strong, like Bhutan.


Newspapers in the Czech Republic are opening up their own coffee shops, making reporters the socioeconomic equivalents of baristas. The future of journalism! And the Evening Standard in the UK is running a new ad campaign saying "Sorry" to its readers, for sucking. The future of journalism!


Some kids who wrote for their college papers later find the things they wrote to be embarrassing or professionally inconvenient. ZOMG. But the best part of this fake trendwatch is this little "anecdotal lede," as they say in the news business:

When Nickie Dobo wrote a column in 2003 for her college newspaper - The Daily Collegian at Pennsylvania State University - decrying the "hook-up culture" on the campus, she never expected it to resurface years later in an attack on her professional credibility.

But that's what happened when Ms. Dobo, now a reporter for the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania, came under criticism by a white-supremacist group.

Budding journalists: Never forget that your article on your school's "hook-up culture" may be used by white supremacists to discredit you. Nobody said journalism is easy.