It's just you and a little machine and you can make history. I find that scary. Nobody should get into print or on the air without some kind of editor. I have an institutional belief that nobody can be above having a good editor.
While gossip novels may not be moving many units, the folks at Simon Spotlight Entertainment still have faith in blog-inspired books. Publisher's Marketplace reports the sale of "Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan's THE FUG AWARDS, fashion critiques of celebrity outfits from the authors of a popular website, to Jeremie Ruby-Strauss at Simon Spotlight Entertainment, in a good deal, by Scott Hoffman at Folio Literary Management (NA)."
Obsessive indie rock kids and Williamsburg hipsters are starting their mornings with bowls of Cocoa Puffs and tears, as it would seem that popular music blog Stereogum.com has fallen victim to a nasty hack. You know, when hackers choose to direct their efforts towards a blog rather than, say, websites of actual consequence, maybe it's a sign that the mainstream media should pick things up a little bit.
A report released today by the Pew Internet & American Life Project surveyed 233 self-identified bloggers, thrilled to navel gaze for a larger cause, on the matter of blogs and blogger habits. The results weren't particularly revealing ("blogs have comments!"), but we've nevertheless provided you with some number crunching after the jump.
Late last week, Stereogum linked to a Ryan Adams fansite posting that appeared to be the work of the East Village's tattered troubador. Now that he's "sober" and doesn't have Parker Posey to distract him from cultivating his own rambling insanity, Adams has found the time and focus to cruise the internet, dropping greasy bundles of good news for his fans (he has three albums in the works) and, if you're lucky, responding to blogs that dare to write of his scruffiness. It's always fantastically entertaining when a celebrity of any mild level takes to the blogosphere, especially when the medium is as unforgiving as a comments section — but Adams' rambling, defensive prose reads like a cracky k nstlerroman:
Here's a sad example of vlog Beet.tv video-stalking bloggers — bloggers! — through the party celebrating the launch of Wired editor Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail on Wednesday night at Tribeca Cinemas. Thrill to blurry footage of the top half of Dealbreaker's Elizabeth Spiers's head, plus Gawker Media's own Nick Denton, shot monolithically (and unawares) from below. Oh yes, and musician David Byrne. He probably has a blog too, the sumbitch.
So after some minor delays, "interim host" Joanne Colan has her Rocketboom debut. A tipster familiar with her body of work correctly describes Colan as "no balloon smuggler" in comparison to former host Amanda Congdon (herself the subject of a gentle chat-job from Time.com today). She does, however, have a certain E! level of professional broadcasting polish that Congdon lacked. And she even does accents! Beyond that, it's the usual routine of taking an Internet joke and re-enacting it in real life, which works just as tepidly well regardless of the chick doing the tittering.
• Everyone's favorite gay escort-cum-White House reporter Jeff Gannon/James Guckert will be speaking this Thursday at the 3 West Club for the Log Cabin Republicans' monthly meeting. Hopefully, it'll be just like a Learning Annex session: how to transform your internet hobby into a viable prostitution endeavor. [Productshop NYC]
• Misguided farter Larry King tries to set up Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper. [Malcontent]
• MyTimes, the Times do-it-yourself homepage service, launches in Beta tonight for some 5,000 users. Some homeless person gave us his login info, and OMG IT IS SO TOTALLY NOT EXCITING. More on that tomorrow. [E&P]
• Shamu is more popular than Star Jones — while they may be of equal stature, one knows how to keep its mouth shut. [Eat the Press]
• New regime at Vibe results in twenty fired staffers. Bodies strewn across a dead-end street... [AdAge]
• Journalist Neil Strauss continues to pimp his pimping skills, drifts further from anything ever resembling a writing career. [iFilm]
• Suri Cruise looks increasingly fake; c'mon, you care! [TMZ]
• French soccer football captain Zinedine Zidane ended his career by headbutting an Italian player's chest during Sunday's World Cup final, and he might have the right idea: Rick Santorum certainly deserves a headbutt or seven. [HuffPo]
• Self-promoting memoirist Toby Young knows you're going to say his second book sucks. [Mediabistro]
• Precocious fabulist Kaavya Viswanathan's archived blog. [Kahini12]
• Anti-abortion blogger gets worked up over "Caroline Webber," a columnist who writes positively about her abortion and is thus branded a murderer. Nevermind the fact that the offensive, murderous column ran in The Onion. While we feign tolerance and respect of all points of view, those pro-life people sure are fucking stupid. [March Together for Life]
It's nice to know that when tragedy strikes, New Yorkers are willing to lend a hand to their fellow citizens. A case in point is city food blog Eater, which, within hours of this morning's explosion, posted a map to help those planning to dine on the Upper East Side this evening figure out whether to choose Aureole or Amaranth. (Aureole, if you're scoring at home.) It's important at a time like this that we don't forget the real victims.
The Huffington Post breaks the news we've all been waiting for: There's a new anchor for Rocketboom! She's former MTV Europe News VJ Joanna Colan. According to HuffPo's Rachel Sklar, Colan "formerly the music/DJ curator at Table 50, will begin on Monday, July 10th, when Rocketboom is scheduled to go live again."
One would assume just from the blog's name that "Midtown Lunch" is entirely empty, like those blank-paged books entitled "German Humor." Yet the ML blogger makes a good-faith attempt to locate and even consume lunch in midtown Manhattan, whereas most midtown dwellers are content with their rations of soup, salad, and shit on a shingle. And even though the blogger cheerfully admits that midtown is a culinary wasteland, he nevertheless embarks on hellish excursions like "Falafel Week." Which is immediately followed by "Constipation Weekend."
Rocketboom was a three-minute, daily video blog that covered the day's news in a quirky, kind-of-humorous-but-eh format. We never really got into it, if only because we just weren't into ogling the show's host, Amanda Congdon. But Juggy McJuggerson was pretty damn popular with the show's virgin audience, who were loyal to Congdon like a baby to his mother's teat. Alas, Congdon — who had a cameo on CSI, you know — has left Rocketboom, leaving the vlog's 300,000-some viewers with no one to masturbate to. Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron wrote on the Rocketboom site that Congdon had left the show to pursue opportunities in Los Angeles and Hollywood; Congdon claims that she was fired. Naturally, she airs her side of the story on her blog, even producing a short video in which she explains that she won't be doing Rocketboom any longer.
• Brangelina's stolen baby shower photos are such a national treasure, the freaking FBI will raid your home to get them back. Tax dollars at work, people. [TMZ]
• Mo Rocca is on Star's side: by blindsiding Barbara Walters and quitting ahead of schedule, she spared us all the two-hour farewell episode from hell. [Fanatical Apathy]
• The Devil's assistant wears Prada, too. And she's shitty at keeping your rolodex up-to-date. [NYP]
• Meet Sarah Stillman, the Nation's Student Writing Contest winner. She will only win $1000, however, because that's what she gets for leaning left. [The Nation]
• The sky over Gristedes bawls "like a fucking constipated baby." Shouldn't this sort of hate be reserved for Duane Reade? [The Call Me Concha]
• There's already a Generation Z, and they're fashion bloggers. [WWD]
• Jane EIC Brandon Holley feeds readers pizza, but not so much that they won't fit into pretty new clothes. [Jossip]
• Natalie Portman and Eddie Izzard are, oddly enough, neck-and-neck for the lead in Cabaret. Such a toss-up, right? [Suicide Girls]
How have we not seen this yet? Daily News copy editor Dawn Eden — everyone's second favorite scary conservative Catholic after Mel Gibson — has posted on her blog a tantalizing preview of her forthcoming book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On. The book is her inspirational account of how she found God (or some such), stopped having sex (or some such), and discovered happiness (somehow). We're still busy trying to unpack this bit on gay men, straight men, straight women, and TV:
The kids at Curbed today run perhaps the best slice-of-NYC-life photo we've seen since that sailor kissed the nurse. We're pretty sure that's Tom & Jerry's in the background, so we're putting this on Elizabeth just north of Houston. You know, just in case you're looking to boost a Fisher-Price jeep.
• The news is still big; it's the newspapers that got small. [Slate]
• David Carr asks: Is CNN news or entertainment? What, it can't be both? [NYT]
• Pissing off Dick Cheney was not, in fact, the Times' reason for running its financial-records-spying story, says Bill Keller. [NYT]
• As we already told you, WWD media man Jeff Bercovici is going to Radar. WWD media woman Sara James, however, is not. She's leaving Women's Wear — we're sure of that — but it's just unclear where she's going. [Jossip]
• Roger Ailes thinks with Fox Newsies aren't working hard enough. [B&C]
• Wednesday will be Charlie Gibson's last day at GMA, and his feeling will be hurt if he doesn't get as many video tributes as Katie did. [USAT]
• Spiers steals David Lat from slutty sister Wonkette for her nascent juggernaut. Next time, she'll just twist Denton's nipple directly, without the intermediary. [WWD (second item)]
• Bigshot VCs give people like Rafat Ali — proprietor of the distressingly capitalized paidContent.org and, years ago, an intern where we used to work — money. [WSJ]
So it seems there's a little scandal brewing at the Huffington Post. We can't say we entirely understand it, but the facts — as reported in London's Guardian today — seem to be this: There's a dude named Peter Rost, a doctor and former Pfizer bigwig, who has been posting on the site. He noticed he was getting a lot of very antagonistic responses from a certain commenter, and he further noticed that those negative comments were quickly and, he thought, rather easily getting ranked as among readers' favorites. So he did some sleuthing and figured out that the flamer was actually the HuffPost's technology manager. The doctor wrote up his findings in a post to his HuffPost blog, and he hypothesized the tech dude was using his server access to somehow boost the popularity ranking of his comments. So what did Arianna and pals do in response? Can the techie attacking their contributors and allegedly mucking with the system, right? Wrong. Instead they suspended the doctor.
• New York's Homeland Security budget may have been tightened, but that's no problem for the Hampton Jitney — they've been given $83K to keep the summer share crew safe, protected in their alcoholic bubble. Honestly, in a time of terror, aren't these the fools we'd want to go first? [Room Eight]
• According to the octagenarians at Reader's Digest, New York is the most courteous city in the world. Except for when it's raining and you need a cab. [RD via Bent Post]
• Jodie Foster will tow your car. Or maybe her girlfriend will. Either way. [The Reeler]
• Blogs aren't catching on in Britain, proving that the English are just as smart as they sound. [Guardian]
• Beware the dangers of sunbathing on Murray Hill rooftops: the area is a hotbed of Syracuse alums looking to show you their mansticks. [The Daily Sally]
• David Cross reads blogs, accepts and ratifies David's Law. [Lindsayism]
• We may not be able to give the troops armor, but if we could just send a few Kenneth Cole boots, Iraq would be a safer place. [Copyranter]
