Apparently, Colorado just appointed a new Senator, and they did it without any 24 news coverage, tabloid leaks, media wars, or Justice Department probes!
Here is your flat-world global economy: Siemens, the German engineering conglomerate, just paid $1.6 billion in fees for all the bribery they've been up to since the end of World War II, back when they were Nazis.
Between the bobbing and the "under-the-table propositions," this looked like possibly the most intriguing Times Thursgay Styles story ever. But it turns out to be a fairly pedestrian, non-sexual piece about outlaw stylists secretly snipping at discount "hair parties." It does feature an "interesting" hairdresser who is still charging $1,900 for a housecall. At that price he better throw in a blow dry. Multiple blow dries. The best goddamn blow dries you've ever experienced.
Neal Boulton is reportedly orgasmic. The editor of a magazine for gays and a website for bis signed a book deal (with an agent) and claims to be drowning in reality show offers following a profile in Page Six Magazine. Everyone wants to screw and/or sign the sexual libtertine, supposedly, because of his oh-so-exciting and freewheeling life. But all indications are that his most famous antics were manufactured in the press. Take his alleged macking with Rolling Stone Jann Wenner, for example, Boulton's claim to "pansexual" fame.
The odd mini-profile on Prince that ran in the most recent New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section made a big splash, mostly because of Prince's religious pronouncements of going door-to-door as a Jehovah's witness and remarks concluding that being gay was wrong. However, his flack went to Perez Hilton and said that Prince had been "grossly misquoted" and accused the writer of the piece, Claire Hoffman, of not using a tape recorder. ("How unprofessional!" Perez squealed.) The New Yorker stood by their story in a confirmation to Wired. But turns out there was a very good reason the interview wasn't recorded: Hoffman explains in an interview that Prince "wouldn’t let me use a tape recorder or my notepad."The quote that got Prince in trouble was, in response to a question about gay marriage and abortion, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out." So, how did Hoffman get that? She explains, "I walked out and sat in my car and wrote for an hour. I don’t have long chunks of dialogue, but I was able to remember stuff." Forbidding a writer of making any record of an interview is a pretty canny move for a celebrity—he can claim to be "misquoted" on anything he didn't like. It's her recollection against his. And given that the Prince version (via Perez) — "What His Purpleness actually did was gesture to the Bible and said he follows what it teaches, referring mainly to the parts about loving everyone and refraining from judgment." — sounds like P.R. puffery, we're going with Hoffman here and Prince is, as usual, DOING IT RONG. [Via Emdashes]
As a member of the vaunted Time Inc. magazine empire, People has always stood a cut or two above most celebrity magazines, ethically speaking. But Angelina Jolie is "scary smart," in the words of celeb-mag editor Bonnie Fuller, and the actress seems to have had little trouble corrupting People's soul. Set aside the now-common practice of paying for baby pictures. Judging from a Times exposé, Jolie also banished the word "Brangelina" from People's pages, dictated coverage of her charitable work in Cambodia and won from People the "positive" tone she demanded. She seems to have pulled this off with a little editor-source dance that gave People plausible deniability.
Despite her repeated public pronouncements of devotion, it will come as no huge shock to anyone anywhere that Paris Hilton just broke up with her boyfriend of nine months, musician Benji Madden. Even if you weren't up to speed on the latest developments — she was spotted with her Greek, shipping-heir ex and rumored desperately flirty with British princes — you have to figure, well, it's Paris Hilton, whose thirst for attention requires not only the intimate affection of various men but also constant press coverage of how those affections fluctuate. But her breakup is worth noting because the mainstream media seems to buying into her psychodrama like never before!
You all know the tale: MediaBistro started as a series of cocktail networking parties hosted by Laurel Touby, who then realized she could monetize a website by charging (voluntarily, at first) for job postings. Then came the classes, which are totally overpriced—especially when compared with nearly identical, yet much longer, journalism classes at the New School. (I've taken both!) Then came the seminars—would you pay $75 to watch dubious dating columnist Julia Allison and others talk about personal branding? MediaBistro makes money by getting people to pay them to learn how to break into journalism. But let's be honest: they're basically an expensive Learning Annex for people who want to work in the media but have no contacts or connections. So what's MediaBistro gonna do to make money turning the downturn, with MediaJobs disappearing left and right? How about desperate stunts: charging for cheesecake videos that cross the line:This video, "How Do I Got from Model to Model Journalist?" costs $15 FOR A SIXTEEN-MINUTES. Laurel, that's the phone-sex model of making money, not the "freelancer-helping" one.
Looks like Sarah "Pit Bull" Palin is just like your supernice Midwestern neighbor who remains polite and doodly-dorable on the phone, even when annoying telemarketers or French president Nicolas Sarkozy calls. The Canadian radio show duo that prank-called her told ABC how they did it. It was duh-easy, just like they taught you in Reporting 101: they "simply began at the bottom of her staff and worked [their] way up."Where to start? Alaska, of course: "'We started by calling the governor's office in Alaska, and after that, we were transferred from one person to another. It took us about four days. We spoke to about a dozen people,' Audette told ABCNews." Once they got her on the phone, they figured that the jig would be up soon enough:
If you can find a bunch of loosely-connected references to a certain subject floating around the zeitgeist, you can write a trend piece! Today's "Move Over, My Pretty, Ugly Is Here" in the NYT's Styles is the pitch-perfect example. A truly bad, meaning typical, trend piece can be broken down into pure science. The first thing you need? A contrarian question or statement! ("Is ugly the new pretty?") Got that? Here's a step-by-step checklist to writing the rest:Now that you've got your contrarian question or statement, the Times editors are going to be on your ass about getting facts and "proof" of this trend existing. Not as highly anecdotal as the Observer, though—you'll have to call in all sorts of experts. Ask yourself:
What to do if you have a magazine assignment, but the mag folds days before you're scheduled to leave for freaking Alaska? If the trip's already paid for, you go anyway and hope to shop the resulting piece to another publication. That was the case with Jessica Pilot (of the infamous "Hipster Hooker" story) and Radar. "It was purchased on [editor] Maer [Roshan's] card, so I guess I'm good to go," she told us.First order of business in Wasilla: a good old-fashioned house party.
People often ask me for media-world advice, assuming that I actually know the answer. Usually I don't, but sometimes I'm able to offer vague, skewed help based on personal experience. What came across the transom (OK, the Gchat) today? "Hey, how do I find a literary agent for my book project?" Well! The first step, of course, is the query letter...The second step is somebody leaking that query letter to a publishing blog or maybe the Observer or something. The third step is your Dad doing a Google search and not talking to you for several weeks. (Sorry, Dad!) Step four: Denial, bargaining. Step five: Ulcer & shrink time. Shrink asks me for advice on how to promote his book. Wants a mention here. Step six: OMG, a date just Googled you! Go back to step three. Step seven: "Fuck it." Freedom! Rinse & repeat. After that, my friends, it's smooth sailing ahead. See? It's easy. Don't be afraid to follow your dreams!
Do you ever get the feeling that you're only just now starting to be an "adult" with their "shit together"? It's only very recently that I no longer have to think, "Gotta wait til next Wednesday to buy new shampoo" and stopped drinking abandoned beers at bars. Then, someone your own age who didn't spend a few years fucking off mentions their intern. Wait, you have an intern? Yeah, it's like a doorman for your job. Like Mandy Stadtmiller needs one—she's the Post columnist whose tales of dating woe (and an insufferable lug nicknamed Super Preppy) made us LOL at (and not with) her all last year. Haha, she's getting her intern via Craigslist, though, so cancel that order of Oh-God-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life. (You can't get your casual encounters and your casually-paid career-helpers from the same place.)It's an unpaid internship, by the way. So when she tells you "I won New York's Funniest Reporter in 2006 and last year placed in the semi-finals for New York's Funniest Stand-Up"—she means it.
When your quotidian indiscretions can be photographed, Twittered, and uploaded before you've stumbled out of a cab and up the steps at the end of the night, extra precautions must be taken. Especially you're dating extreme lifestreaming oversharer Julia Allison. Yes, one brave gent has stepped up to the plate. Crazy we didn't hear about it sooner, because she usually shares all her important life decisions with us via her blog—and most men are therefore afraid to date her. "She realized this recently after three promising first dates abruptly called it quits," as her recent NYT profile put it. "In an e-mail message, Ms. Allison acknowledged that her chosen profession may have permanently ruined her social life." But not entirely. Eater's darkly handsome blogger-about-town Ben Leventhal has taken her on.Ohai, Ben! You have been fearing this day for a while, haven't you?
Hey, has somebody confused Neal Boulton's e-mail address with mine? 'Cause we get a lot of messages for and about the admittedly charming, bisexual editor of Genre mag. Whether it's bitter screeds from angry ex-lovers, or girls who saw him at the bar last night and felt it in their hearts to send us a message (encouraged by whom, I wonder?) telling us that he's cute, we have seen no shortage of Neal drama up in here. Item! Boulton's been seen leaving 1633 Broadway—home of MTV—several times. Is he developing a pilot with MTV? He'd like us to know that he might be. "What's up darlin," the e-mail begins.(Neal, I am only swayed by cash and alcohol, dollface!)
The doubters were wrong: the Wired cover featuring dating columnist/microcelebrity Julia Allison is one of the best-selling covers for the tech magazine in the last eight years, Portfolio reports. We suppose that congratulations are in order. So congrats or whatever. Julia's Wired cover outsold Rupert Murdoch's and Sarah Silverman's. (That is 103,000 copies.) Except. She won by default! Sex n' high heels sells, obviousy, and a woman on the cover of a geek magazine—or a celebrity or fashion magazine, for that matter—always does better. And Wired doesn't put very many women on its cover. It's the Sarah Palin effect.
