media-bubble

Media Bubble: Zip Zilch Nada

Jesse · 11/25/05 10:30AM

• When Jim Romenesko takes the day off, it's as though the entire media world has taken the day off. [Romenesko]
• In this case, it has.

Media Bubble: 'Teen People' Kills Article on N**i Teen Singers

Jesse · 11/23/05 02:45PM

Teen People kills story on Nazi bubblegum popsters after learning that a staffer promised not to use the words "Nazi," "supremacist," or "hate" in discussing the hateful white supremacists, and after Holocaust survivors picket Time Warner HQ. Keith Kelly calls incident a test for new Time Inc. EIC John Huey, but we gotta wonder about what this means for new Teen People m.e. Lori Majewski. [NYP]
• Per the latest Plamegate wrinkle, Mr. Wonkette notes that Bob Woodward isn't "the preeminent investigative reporter of his generation;" he's just a highly placed transcriptionist. [NYO]
• From just after the invasion until last week's withdrawal excitement, U.S. media did a shitty job of covering the Iraq war, [NYO]
• Ruth Reichl will be making miso-rubbed turkey with gravy, persimmon cranberry sauce, and rustic porcini onion stuffing for Thanksgiving. [WWD]
• Did Anna Wintour bring down the Variety spinoff V Life? She certainly thinks so. [Radar]
• Two Bloomberg L.P. employees charge the mayor's media company with disability discrimination. [NYP]
• 2005 was a crummy year, says Jon Friedman. [MW]

Media Bubble: Martha Unveils a Mag We Might Read, Damn Her

Jesse · 11/22/05 03:10PM

• Martha Stewart's next mag, Blueprint, will cater to 20-somethings buying their first homes. God, might we actually have to read it? [AdAge]
• Talking Points Memo'er Josh Marshall hires two bloggers to report for him. Bloggers who have to report?! Huh? Wha? [NY Sun]
• Craig of Craiglist to launch journalism project. Which is good, because he's slowly killing newspapers by taking their classifieds, anyway. [Guardian]
• Total mag ad pages up ever so slightly in 2005. Woo-hoo! Not dead yet! [MIN]
• Disaggregated media content confuses Simon Dumenco, who generously offers to disaggregate his column. [AdAge]
• Greg Mitchell says John Tierney is full of shit. [E&P]
• NBC Universal to close Trio, leaving one fewer cable network you don't watch. [Hollywood Reporter via MSNCB]

Media Bubble: J-School Applications Inexplicably Keep Rising

Jesse · 11/21/05 12:35PM

• As the news business reels — layoffs, papers for sale, Google Base, Judy Miller — j-students become even more characteristically naive and optimistic. [USAT]
• Jon Friedman thinks Adam Moss's New York can be one of the legendarily great magazines, like Gurley Brown's Cosmo, Ross and Shawn's New Yorkers, or Felker's New York. Moss's staffers, meantime, are all afraid they're going to be fired. [MW]
• This just in: Howie Kurtz has conflicting roles, covering media for both WP and CNN. As he has for years. [NYT]
Times public editor Barney Calame's latest earth-shattering announcement: "Anonymous sourcing can be both a blessing and a curse for journalism." [NYT]
• Miller got axed and Woodward won't because Woodward's one of the cool kids and Miller isn't. Or something like that. [BG]
• On CNN, Maureen Dowd — did you know she wrote a book? — calls for more female columnists. [E&P]

Media Bubble: Media Conspiracy to Convene at Time Warner Center; Surprisingly, It's Not Jewish

Jesse · 11/18/05 03:00PM

• Emap considers sale of FHM to Hearst. More interesting — unless Keith Kelly is kidding, which is doesn't seem like he is — there will be a secret ceremony Nov. 28 at which outgoing Time Inc. EIC Norm Pearlstine will pass a Vatican-like miter to successor John Huey. Time Warner brass and Time Inc. top editors will be in attendance, alongside, we assume, a goodly contingent of Freemasons. [NYP]
• Bob Woodward's no ordinary reporter, says Jon Friedman [MW]
• But he's also no Judy, says Jack Shafer. [Slate]
• Wall Street agrees that newspapers are dying. Which could very well become self-fulfilling. [IHT]
• Amusingly baronial former newspaper publisher Conrad Black indicted on eight counts of fraud. [CS-T]
• Ziff Davis shutters Sync. [Jossip]
• Heretofore-believed-to-be-mild-mannered Jim Romenesko is, in fact, the scourge of college journalists everywhere. [Slate]

Media Bubble: Plamegate Ensnares Woodward

Jesse · 11/17/05 02:20PM

• Bob Woodward's in truh-ble. [NYT]
WP's Walter Pincus set to go the way of Judith Miller in the Wen Ho Lee case. Except without the everyone-hates-him-at-the-end part. [WP]
• Need your dose of softcore porn more frequently than once a month? It's looking like Keith Blanchard's prototype for a weekly lad book might see life at Bauer. And thank God for that. [WWD]
• William T. Vollman, Joan Didion win National Book Awards. [USAT]
• Hotshot founders of Penguin's Riverhead imprint bolt for Random's Doubleday Broadway group and a new, yet-to-be-named imprint. [NYP]
• The lucky winner of that fundraising lunch with Rupert Murdoch? Learning Annex chief Bill Zanker. Be you're even happier now that you overpaid for that mediocre lecture. [Guardian]
• HBO still confident it owns Sunday night, Lisa Kudrow's dreadful Comeback notwithstanding. [NYT]
• Speaking at the University of Texas, Maureen Dowd — who, apparently, has a new book out — speculates that Judy Miller will end up with a Fox News talkshow. [Daily Texan]
• Bad things often happen to Time Persons of the Year. [The Media Mob/NYO]

Media Bubble: Scocca Hits Because He Loves

Jesse · 11/16/05 02:10PM

• Come on, Pinch, you're breaking poor Tom Scocca's heart. [NYO]
• Was Bob Woodward the first reporter to learn of Valerie Plame's identity? And why didn't he mention that to anyone till now? [WP]
• Ah, but at least Ben Bradlee says it's OK Woodward didn't tell his nominal bosses. [E&P]
• Turns out Bush-crony public-broadcasting chief Kenneth Tomlinson — you know, the guy determined to get more conservatives on PBS — broke all sorts of laws and regulations. [NYT]
• Who's to blame for Arrested Development's (latest) demise. America, obviously. [NYO]
• Rupert: This internet thing is gonna be huge! [Hollywood Reporter]
• What reference in a headline will conclusively show that boomer media dominance is over? [Slate]
• MSNBC's Chris Matthews name-drops, and Jon Friedman loves him anyway. [MW]

Media Bubble: Newspapers Are Dying. Thinktanks to the Rescue!

Jesse · 11/15/05 01:44PM

• American Press Institute launches $2 million project to figure out the future of newspapers. By all current evidence: Death. [E&P]
• How will Nightline survive post-Koppel? Standards, dammit, says Koppel. [USAT]
• Bob Woodward grew up and turned in his father, metaphorically speaking. [VV]
• Bill Keller has a "serious case of Judy Miller fatigue." Just like everyone else. [Daily Princetonian]
• Media transparency is busting out all over. Yay! [LAT]
• Liberals don't listen to the radio or watch much TV, says NBC chief. And it's for genetic reasons. [B&C]
• Aaron Brown is the king of lunch. Also, he'd take the ABC or CBS jobs, if they were offered. We would, too. [Phil. Inquirer]
• The Judy World Tour continues, last night at George Washington University. [FishbowlDC]
• Peacock to Martha: You're fired! [WP]

Media Bubble: Right-Wingers Like Judy. Imagine That.

Jesse · 11/14/05 12:01PM

• Is Judy Miller now a right-wing hero? Wait, what was she before the war, then? [NYM]
• Andrew Sullivan to move his blog to Time.com. Sellout! MSM! All those other things we're supposed to say! Yada yada yada. [NYP]
• Bob Schieffer to stay longer as CBS Evening News anchor. [NYT]
Times to launch quarterly sports mag. [NYP]
Esquire likes undulating apartments. [NYT]
• Google considers offering book rentals, sort of. [Reuters via Yahoo]
• Ruth Reichl reads The Bruni Digest. Bruni doesn't. Or so he says. [AP via Yahoo]

Media Bubble: Never Again Will Perhaps-Imaginary Authors Write for 'NYT'

Jesse · 11/11/05 12:25PM

• After Blairgate and Judygate (and with Wen Ho Leegate and Stephen Hatfillgate pending) Times cancels J.T. LeRoy piece for T after New York convinces them he may or may not exist. [WWD]
• Is People the new Us Weekly? Keith Kelly seems to think so, saying that Time Inc. celeb title is up while its competitors are down. [NYP]
• Bill and Cathie at ASME: Buckley and Hearst's Black to receive lifetime-achievement awards from the mag group. [AdAge]
Tokion sold, as if that makes any difference to your life. [Folio:]
• Taking a cue from his pals' pal Judy, Bush, too, should take a severance and a letter to the editor and just retire already, says Greg Mitchell. [E&P]
• It seems the kids like the blogs. [News.com]

Media Bubble: Gays Take Over Gay Media

Jesse · 11/10/05 01:49PM

• Gays get confused about plan to take over all media and instead simply take over other gay media, which doesn't really help the cause. [SFC]
• Whatever Bush's goons on the CPB say, Americans trust news on public broadcasting the most. [B&C]
• St. Martin's Press to re-release Scooter Libby's novel. We can't wait. [AP via USAT]
• TV indecency complaints on the rise again, presumably coming from people we'd all find horribly indecent in the first place. [B&C]
60 Minutes correspondent Dan Rather might have a segment on 60 Minutes this weekend. Wow. [NYT]
New Yorker on DVD is tough to navigate because God forbid Conde Nast should pay freelancers for reproducing their work. [WSJ]
• Even in New Orleans, nobody eats quite like NYT's Johnny Apple. [New Orleans T-P]
• So apparently Maureen Dowd wrote a book. [Newsweek]

Media Bubble: Syd, Jim. Jim, Syd.

Jesse · 11/08/05 01:10PM

• Syd Schanberg says journalism's big problem is insufficient transparency — that is, not enough journalism about journalism. In next week's "Press Clips," we fill him in on the existence of Jim Romenesko. [VV]
• Amid yesterday's newspaper-circ horror show, Post gains on News. Yay! [NYP]
• Yet the News is still ahead. Yay! [NYDN]
• Never mind the Judy mess; NYT still hasn't fulfilled post-Jayson promises. [PR Week]
• Why'd Andrew Heyward stick around CBS News for so long after the Memogate debacle? For his pension to kick in, of course. [Radar]
• Can't figure out why you should care about the recent sale rumblings at Knight Ridder? Because no less is at stake than — cue ominous music — the entire future of print journalism. Well, fuck. [LAT]
• Ted Koppel is leaving Nightline, in case you didn't know. [WP]

Media Bubble: Hard 'Times'

Jesse · 11/07/05 01:37PM

• Never mind Judy Miller; everything about working at the Times sucks right now. [WP]
• Of course, the entire newspaper business sucks right now, at least judging from the new circ numbers. [E&P]
• In a bid to create the most conservative editorial page in the history of the planet, Rupert Murdoch wants to buy the Journal, although he knows it's not for sale. [WSJ]
• Microsoft leads the crowded pack of companies interested in buying AOL. [NYT]
• The problem, however, is that AOL sucks ass. [AdAge]
• Anderson Cooper is termed a "boyish metrosexual," in which five of the seven syllables are accurate. [Boston Globe]
• New MSNBC show will be like dinner at the Chung-Povitch's. Just what we've always wanted. [NYT]
• Libby trial might be toughest on reporters — Miller, Cooper, and Russert. [WSJ]
Glamour editor discovers gender imbalance in top mags' bylines. Glamour, on the other hand, we're sure has a masthead that, to use Clinton's term, "looks like America." [NYT]

Media Bubble: Coming to Praise Brown and to Bury Him

Jesse · 11/03/05 02:30PM

• CNN's changes had nothing to do with getting rid of Brown; that was just a coincidence. "He's really a doll to work with," says CNN chief. [NYT]
• Of course, ol' Aaron had been a "drag" on CNN's ratings. [NYP]
• Knight Ridder sale could spark industry consolidation. You know, because there are too many independently owned papers left these days. [WSJ]
• S&S EIC Micahel Korda to step down, after 938 years in job. [WP]
• Comedy Central ups Colbert Report order to a full year, ensure 11 more months of a show we sort of feel like we should be watching but also don't enjoy as we'd hoped to when we do. [E! Online]
• Jack McCoy's flannel suits too boring for your TV-crimefighting tastes? Rejoice, then, in Sleuth, NBC Universal's new cable net featuring old crime shows from The A-Team to Miami Vice. [B&C]
• Russ Smith doesn't like Arthur Sulzberger. We're shocked. [NY Press]

Media Bubble: Knight Ridder Decides Newspapers Suck

Jesse · 11/02/05 03:15PM

• Major investor in Knight Ridder newspaper chain demands the chain be sold "to increase shareholder value." Because 20 percent profit margins at KR papers — or whatever astronomincal number the company demands — clearly aren't enough. [NYT]
• CBS News's new Roone Arledge learned at the feet — literally — of the old Roone Arledge. [TV Guide]
• More tsuris for the hip-hop bible: The Source is $156K behind in rent. [Radar]
• Unsurprisingly, Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show, is obnoxious — and successful. [NYO]
• After last year's bout of excitement, bloggers have not overtaken the White House briefing room. One imagines because bloggers chose not to waste their time being stonewalled and lied to. [E&P]
• Mother Nature for Time's Person of the Year, campaigns Jon Friedman, who is clearly hoping his weekend place — if he has one — will be spared when the next Nor'eastern hits. [MW]

Media Bubble: Introducing 'The CBS Evening News with Andy Borowitz'

Jesse · 10/28/05 03:28PM

• Jon Friedman thinks the CBS Evening News needs more funny. [MarketWatch]
• There's a new round of rumors that Dow Jones is for sale. The alleged buyer this time: Warren Buffett. [Dow Jones Newswires via SmartMoney]
• At conference, Sulzberger lays out plan for "meeting the demands of modern consumers while staying true to journalism's traditional values." Surprising, "make sure your paper has a major ethics crisis at least every other year" was not a recommendation. [E&P]
• The Times scandals are good news, says Bill Powers. [National Journal]
• Is the final liquidation of Primedia imminent? One can only hope. [Folio:]
New York mag adds new section of real-estate porn, and Cosmo editor Kate White hates late close nights at the office. Yes, it's hard being a Hearst EIC. [WWD]
• We'd make a joke about hip-hop mag The Source going broke and writing bad checks, but we're a little afraid of them. [NYP]

Media Bubble: Even Shills Gotta Eat

Pareene · 10/27/05 12:10PM

Spin and Vibe are — shhh! — up for sale, much to Quincy Jones' chagrin. Buy 'em now, 'cause they're not getting any more relevant. [Radar]
• Andrea Peyser, winner of the Bestest Column In the History Of the World Ever Award For Excellence, really, really, really wants to stir up shit with Maureen Dowd. She quotes an Imus transcript, sort of calls MoDo a slut while calling her out on calling Judy Miller a slut. Women, jeez. [NYP]
• New CBS News boss Sean McManus donated a whopping $250 to Bush in '04. So he's a conservative and extremely stingy. That's no way to be a Pioneer, Sean! [E&P, via some blog]
• The internet "encourages even the most diligent reporters to become entertainers, even shills." Hey, did you hear that Al Reynolds got arrested? [CityPaper]
• Rupert Murdoch is buying the internet. By the way, please welcome new Gawker Editor Andrea Peyser. [Guardian]

Media Bubble: Raise Ev'ry 'Voice'

Jesse · 10/26/05 03:11PM

• The Voice turns 50. Long live independent journalism! Oh, wait. [VV]
• Old Voicers, shockingly, continue to be apprehensive about merger. [NYP]
• Four reasons regulators should block the Voice-New Times deal. [SFBG]
Nightliners are apprehensive, too, as overhauled, Koppel-less version of the show moves toward its launch. [NYO]
• Al Franken to enter Minnesota politics. Which will require moving there. The horror. [NYO]
• New New York Press editor Harry Siegel, who used to work at the Sun, is profiled by a freelancing Sun editor, who reveals Siegel's Press ascension was engineered by the paper's founder, Russ Smith, who doesn't own it anymore. It's almost as incestuous as one of our Mediabistro-EIC posts. [Doublethink]
• James Truman's new job will be in London, not New York. And Judy Miller's car sports a "Support Our Troops" bumper sticker. We don't mean to suggest any correlation. [WWD
• Why's the Times at war with itself? Because it deserves it. [MarketWatch]

Media Bubble: Old Lefties Don't Like Media Consolidation

Jesse · 10/25/05 11:44AM

• Former Voicers react to New Times deal; one actually likes it. [Boston Phoenix]
• Barely competent magazine publisher Primedia sacks CEO, explores plan to further break itself up. [NYP]
• Some bloggers would be protected under proposed federal shield law. And thank God for that. [E&P]
• Um, yeah. So it turns out actually Diane Sawyer isn't gunning for the World News Tonight job. [AP via USAT]
• Tom Masland, Newsweeker who reported from Mideast, Africa, war zones, and elsewere, is hit by SUV on West End Avenue. He's at St. Luke's in critical condition. [NYDN]
• Bob Wallace, erstwhile Wenner Books chief, takes a walk. [Media Mob/NYO]
• In fact, so few people want to work for Wenner that no one wanted to run Men's Journal. "It's like going to work for George Steinbrenner," said one uninterested candidate. [WWD, second item]
• Apparently, Andrew Krucoff lost a job yesterday. [NYT]

Media Bubble: Sorry, Charlie

Jesse · 10/24/05 03:29PM

• Now Diane Sawyer wants the World News Tonight job. [B&C]
• But Geraldo says Elizabeth Vargas should get it. [B&C]
• New Time Inc. chief John Huey isn't as bad as he's rumored to be, says Huey. [NYP]
• Selma Blair went to an old psychiatric hospital and put a live rat in her mouth. For a photo shoot. For the Times, of course. [WWD]
• Announcing the cast for Miss Run Amok: The Movie. [Media Mob/NYO]
• After two days of conferring in Puerto Rico, magazine bigshots have breakout insight: Things must change. Wow. [Mediaweek]
• David Carr's kids believe only suckers pay for content. Content companies sort of believe it, too. [NYT]
• City of Newark, N.J., pays $100K for good news coverage. Which has clearly been very successful. [NJ.com]