Editor Bill Keller to the New York Times Metro team, whose stand-alone section will soon be folded in with the sports section: "I know it will take more than a beer to make up for the loss of your section...But I figure a beer can't hurt. I'm buying." As if the Times can even afford that! [Observer]
New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. met with the paper's employees yesterday to reassure them that everything is just fine at the Gray Lady and they have absolutely nothing to worry about even though bad-ass hedge funder Phil Falcone and now Mexican mogul Carlos Slim have significant stakes in the company. Sulzberger also demonstrated that he's totally in touch with what the kids are listening to these days on those newfangled little portable music players manufactured by Apple: His slideshow was set to the background of Coldplay's "Clocks." And some employees describe him as "tone deaf"? [NYO]
Times food writer Kim Severson spends her time these days not with restaurateurs but in Alaska, where her background at the Anchorage Daily News has suddenly become a very valuable asset. Severson today reeled in a tasty scoop: Confirmation, first, that Levi Johnston, the teen father who is marrying into Sarah Palin's family, has in fact dropped out of high school, as rumored, amid slipping grades and unwelcome pressure from his family to play hockey. Severson also delivered the most credible explanation yet for why Track Palin, son of the Republican vice presidential nominee, enlisted in the Army. The rumor mill had him caught up in a drug bust, or perhaps nailed for vandlizing some school buses, and under pressure to join as a corrective. It sounds, for now at least, like the reality is more mundane, if still quite sad. It seems Track, a top Wasilla hockey prospect prone to rink rage, met his fate on the ice:
Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecom mogul, is worth about $60 billion, most of which he's built since 2003. That puts him right behind Warren Buffett and just ahead of Bill Gates. He's just acquired a 6.4 percent stake in the New York Times Co., whose stock has dropped 20 percent this year. Slim's initial fortune came from Mexico's privatization of national landline operator Teléfonos de México, or Telmex.Critics say that he milked Telmex's monopoly for cash instead of putting the billions into Mexico's telecom infrastructure. As an occasional New York Times contributor, I dread his arrival for the a much more petty reason: Every drunk entrepreneur whose world-changing wireless startup doesn't get blogged in Bits will blather to me that Slim had the story spiked. (Photo by AP/Miguel Tovar)
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's $127 million investment in the New York Times Company made headlines this morning, but left unremarked upon, including by the Times itself, are the murkier aspects of how Slim made his fortune. Yes, Slim acquired control of telephone monopoly Telmex in 1990 when it privatized in part by smartly partnering with Southwestern Bell and France Telecom. It's also true he has strongly denied there was anything untoward about the $1.7 billion purchase price, even though the company just 14 years later was valued at $37 billion. But Slim's financial support for the ruling PRI party, including a $25 million donation at a notorious 1993 fundraising dinner, was at the very least leveraged in an unseemly manner elsewhere. Slim went on to use his "influence over the government" to fight off the entry of competing phone companies into the impoverished Mexican market — that according to the Times itself in 2006. And what of the billionaire as a "decent philanthropist"?
"This has to be off the record," New York Times.com Digital Editor Jim Roberts told a room of about 150 people at last night's Future of Publishing panel. No problem, Jimbo. The question? Internet gaffes in the age of online journalism! "We [recently] had two major problems in two days. The Friday after the Democratic convention," as the Sarah Palin-as-running-mate rumor was unfolding, "our blog ran out of gas. Users were without access to the NYT blog platform" for several hours. Oh no! But even worse: the next Monday, when the Bristol Palin pregnancy story broke, "thousands came to the same blog" and crashed it again. If a news story breaks and nobody on the Internet comments, did it really happen? Sounds like the Times blogs can't handle Sarah Palin.
It's a good thing Times dining critic Frank Bruni reviews food for a living, which only relies on his sense of taste and not his eyesight. The photo that accompanied his takedown of power lunch spot Michael's yesterday included quite the collection of moguls in the background, not that Bruni—or anyone else at the Times—seemed to notice. In the audio interview that accompanied the review, Bruni says that the eatery "seems to draw in particularly large measure from the publishing, literary and journalistic worlds. You know, you might see someone like Graydon Carter there. Apparently, you do see some celebrities there. I didn't spot them, but maybe I just missed them as I was hustled to Siberia." Carter isn't much of a Michael's devotee, actually, but perhaps Bruni should have taken a closer look at the picture that accompanied his review.
SpinSpotter, a startup which aims to detect bias in articles, was one of the stars of Chris Shipley's Demo startup conference in San Diego. And it got New York Times writer Claire Cain Miller curious. Failing to find spin in the Times's own work, she turned to what she thought would be an obvious target: Valleywag. She failed in her quest.
The pressure of financial woes at the New York Times must be getting to its Metro editor Joe Sexton. (That's him, dancing to hip-hop on the last day in the paper's old W. 43rd Street building last year.) Remember, his section is the one they're planning to consolidate with sports. His most recent memo takes comfort in a bought-out Des Moines journalist's farewell speech. The Bible is involved!
The New York Times announced today that it's (finally?) starting a dedicated Media desk. The beat has been split between the Business and Culture sections, but now the paper is pulling a dozen reporters together and moving them to the third floor—the floor between the other two sections, and where the top Times editors now sit. Symbolic! It's all about "convergence," they say. But why now? And, look who's not going to be assigned to the Media desk: The Times' most visible media writer and newly minted authorial rock star, David Carr! We've emailed NYT Culture editor Sam Sifton for an explanation. Regardless, this has to be interpreted as a move that assigns more importance to the media beat. The Times currently gives over the bulk of its Monday business page to media stories, and there's no indication that that will change. The selection of that page's editor, Bruce Headlam, to head the new desk is a major promotion for him. A united media beat, though, will presumably be better able to coordinate its coverage so that it's competing every day of the week—which will become ever more important as the Wall Street Journal continues its own transition into a general-interest, business-friendly paper. The WSJ's media coverage is heavy on marketing, but it is naturally the Times' biggest competitor for the most important media stories. The full memo from the Times:
Most people don't know that The New York Times Company owns a newspaper distribution company, called City & Suburban, that it founded in 1992. City & Suburban distributes the Times, the Wall Street Journal and about 200 other newspapers and magazines to newsstands, cafes and stores in the New York metro area. The Times created City & Suburban to reduce its dependency on the powerful, sometimes violent deliverer's union that once controlled in-town deliveries. Things have changed in sixteen years. "Wholesale distribution is no longer an economical business for the Times Company," NYT president Scott Heekin-Canedy said in a prepared statement. What he didn't say: Union clout has fallen enough that the Times can eliminate City & Suburban's 550 union jobs in favor of cheaper, non-union third-party distributors — that's how the Times already delivers nationwide. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)
Wait, is it really the New York Times that assigned at least four reporters to essentially investigate those conspiracy theories about how Sarah Palin didn't really give birth to her son Trig? Because while internet rumors are never mentioned in the Times's lengthy Palin baby story this morning, it's hard to imagine any other reason the newspaper went to such great lengths to write about Palin's fifth and most recent child, despite a lack of cooperation from the Republican vice presidential candidate. The Times has not always been so eager to delve into the private lives of politicians, as John Edwards well knows! The bottom-line on Palin, for those who study intricate flow charts about why she took such a lengthy trip home when childbirth seemed imminent, or wonder why there are precious few photos of her pregnant:
Everyone's nightmares and memories about the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center are important. And every year a few people and their memories are deemed more important than everyone else's—not survivors or rescuers, just folks who had been in New York, somewhere, at the time. And every year we're expected to read their important memories in periodicals like The New York Times and The New Yorker. And every year it's just very sad, strangely insulting, not soothing and, in the end, rarely enlightening. There's this, for instance: "I remember the weekend before. A friend was visiting. We went to Chinatown for dinner on Mulberry Street, then walked north to Little Italy, stumbling into the Feast of San Gennaro. My friend kept eating things, suddenly in street-food heaven. I remember him gnawing on a big brick of nougat. I remember I had dinner plans for Tuesday. I remember the general panic, my wife and me stocking up at the Food Emporium a block from our Upper East Side apartment, buying provisions almost at random. (Salmon steaks — why not?)."
Today's New York Times wants you to know about a lovely-sounding new intoxicant that just might be worth braving the Lower East Side for. For centuries people in many parts of South America have been gathering to drink the tea of the yerba mate plant, which is traditionally served in a gourd, sipped through a silver straw and passed around "like a bong in a dorm room" to cure stomach trouble and nervous disorders. Now, Yuppies and hipsters are gathering at Manhattan watering holes and drinking the elixir mixed with Chilean grape brandy and fruit juice to "cure nothing save the stress and ennui of urban life."
The New York Times is always looking for a way to save a little scratch, since the paper is losing revenue like a Bible store in a whorehouse, for lack of more time to think of a better metaphor. So today NYT publisher Arthur "Pinch My Moose" Sulzberger announced the paper is going to be combining the metro section with the main news section, and the sports section with the business section on most days of the week. This will save printing costs but will not shrink the news hole, they say. Full memo from Pinchy to the staff after the jump [UPDATE: And an even more detailed memo about the changes from Times editor Bill Keller]: From Sulzberger:
For some strange reason, the Post's Page Six today published a long item on the book Black & White And Dead All Over, a newsroom roman a clef by a 40-year Timesman. The timing is a bit odd because this book was reviewed in the Post in late July, around the time we posted our second item on it, and according to Amazon it's been on sale since July 29. But Page Six does reveal the book contains a hard-to-believe interaction we somehow missed, between elder Arhur "Punch" Sulzberger and his son Arthur Jr.:
