In your tremulous Tuesday media column: hard times ahead for magazines, the WSJ is batting .500, David Simon is (reasonably) touchy, investigative reporting may survive, and Weiner/ hole information.

  • Big new report about the Future of Media, again! According to this one, from PricewaterhouseCoopers, tough times are ahead for the magazine industry: "by 2015, overall spending on magazines will still be smaller than it was before the recession." First of all, fuck does PricewaterhouseCoopers know about media? Second of all, even assuming they're right (and they probably are, common sense says), this is only a medium-term problem. In the long run, the whole business model will shift online and, increasingly, to digital tablets, and the magazine industry concept will certainly morph, but as a net whole, content creation will continue to be a field in demand, so don't worry too too much, aspiring content creators of one sort or another. And even in the shorter term, hey, it gives magazines a sort of cachet, when they're more rare. I mean, the New Yorker will still be around, and... that one David Chang just started, and probably some others. Just give it a decade or so, everything will be fine. Swear. In the meantime, there's blogs!
  • David Simon, creator of The Wire, fired off a displeased note to a Baltimore Sun blogger who, he believed, treated the recent news of his tete-a-tete with Eric Holder with too much "snark." To be fair to everyone, since god died and made us judge of everything: David Simon has a well-deserved reputation for being "prickly," but really, he didn't do anything wrong in the Eric Holder bit. So save your fire, until a real tantrum comes along!
  • Hey, how is the WSJ's "New York" section doing, a year after Rupert Murdoch spent tens of millions of dollars to launch it, just because he felt like fucking with the NYT? Nat Ives says it's been a success in terms of ad revenue, but it's failed to pull in any more readers in the NYC area. One out of two is a win, in the newspaper business!
  • Is there any reason at all to be optimistic about the future of investigative reporting, in the long run? We say yes, based on purely theoretical ideas of what constitutes value in the media! And here is someone else who says yes, but based on actual empirical research! Even better!
  • Anthony Weiner filled 17% of the news hole last week. Don't start. Don't even start.

[Photo of the future of magazines: AP]