"The New York Times Company reported a $335,000 first-quarter loss on Thursday in a performance that fell far short of both analysts' expectations and its $23.9 million profit in the quarter a year earlier. The loss was a fraction of a penny per share, compared with the average analyst forecast of earnings of 14 cents and the 17 cents earned in the first quarter of 2007." [Times]
The following email was sent by the deputy editor of The Straits Times, an English language newspaper in the only growing market for print papers left: Asia. Singapore, specifically. The editor would like to know if maybe anyone who is going to get laid off from the New York Times would like to go work in a country whose "press freedom ranks below Nigeria and just ahead of Russia." They are in dire need of copy-editors, apparently! The last couple were maybe caned? Email below, via Thomas Crampton.
More and more people are turning to the New York Times to tell them what to think about the growing number of people who are turning to the internet to tell them what to think. Can't make a decision about your hair? The internet will tell you what to do. In a groundbreaking story, the Times reveals that your annoying "should I get bangs or not" friend is now subjecting the masses to her neuroses. And women aren't the only ones seeking validation from strangers. Men are using Flickr to ask if they should keep their goatee. The answer, unless you're a college freshman at a Dave Matthews concert, is no. But all this Wisdom of Crowds stuff is upsetting corporations!
The New York Times is desperate for some of their overpaid, aging staffers to accept a buyout deal. A staff email yesterday pleaded with people to gracefully take the money and run—'cause if they don't, there will be layoffs. Now we don't want to see that. It breaks our heart. No, we'd much rather some noble Times stars just pack up and leave. So we asked you who should take buyouts. You named names! Now, we poll. The winner of this poll has to quit the paper, or else they'll have layoffs on their conscience. Poll below! Choose wisely!
Among the names floated by Radar yesterday as possibly taking a Times buyout was Craig Whitney, the assistant managing editor overseeing journalistic standards. Whitney sided with public editor Clark Hoyt in a recent internal Times feud over semi-nude photos in T Magazine of a 17-year-old girl (pictured) whose blurred breast was exposed. Hoyt and Whitney argued the photo did not belong in the paper, T and the main Times Magazine basically called Hoyt and Whitney Philistines. The folks at T would be happy to see "prudish" Whitney go, claims one observer, if only because they see his very job as unnecessary. Of course, it was barely a month ago that Whitney was reminding everyone to attempt to interview multiple people when writing profiles. Sometimes a prude is just what you need.
Jill Abramson, managing editor for news at the Times, finally has a way to share with the world the information she finds most interesting and relevant. Abramson began blogging tonight, apparently for the first time, if you set aside a structured panel discussion last December on a Times Book Review site. Her post to Times blog The Caucus was about comments from Michelle Obama on charges of elitism against her husband, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Writes a snarky Times staffer:
New York Times Associate managing editor William "Bill" Schmidt just sent an email around the paper begging people to accept buyout offers, for the good of everyone else. "Each buyout we record before next Tuesday reduces the number of layoffs we will have to seek." Retire! Earlier today, Radar media critic Charles Kaiser named a couple people who might take buyouts, but none of them were people we want to see leave. None of them are responsible for Thursday Styles, after all. Though we suppose the idea is for old people to leave, right? Can Clyde Haberman take one? Wait, is Clyde Haberman still alive? Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Dan Barry can stay as long as he goes back to investigative reporting and not writing columns about quaint happenings in quaint places. Oh, and COUGH COUGH ALESSANDRA STANLEY? Your further suggestions are appreciated. Full memo after the jump.
The heavily-reported decline of the American movie critic hasn't touched New York Times first-stringer A.O. Scott, who has gradually outgrown and stabilized our wildly fluctuating regard for him over the years. After a long period of wondering where he might have found all this new maturity and gravitas, a perceptive Scott reader points out today that like Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, James Agee and all the greats who preceded him, he simply stole from his kids:
Just as one tires of Sam Zell's schtick-the 66-year-old newspaper proprietor's folksy pep talks to Tribune newsrooms have become sadistic rituals-there comes a useful reminder of the alternative, the pompous grandees of journalism who used to run the newspapers. Six former editors of Zell's Los Angeles Times have spoken up, in the manner of retired generals opposing the war in Iraq, with generally unhelpful suggestions for the former real-estate magnate. Worst of the bunch is Dean Baquet, now Washington, DC bureau chief for the New York Times. Zell's threat to dismantle the Tribune newspapers' national and foreign coverage is not merely shocking, or stupid-according to Baquet, it's no less than "unpatriotic".
The Wall Street Journal broke a terribly large piece of media news this week—CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric is leaving the network after the elections, before her contract is up. That they had this story and not, say, the Times—who generally handle the TV media beat pretty well and on their own, thank you—is a nice coup for Murdoch's newest acquisition. It took a little while for the Times to catch up, but they came out last night with their own story on the meeting that ended Couric's career. (Amusingly, they credit "press reports in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere on Thursday" for breaking the Journal's exclusive scoop. Petty!) While some speculate as to what Katie will do next, or when she'll leave, Henry Blodget wonders who killed her. We're inclined to believe she killed herself.
All the news about Katie Couric maybe leaving her anchor job at the CBS Evening News grew out of "idle talk and musings" about her departure, one CBS source told the Times. Where did this supposed "idle talk" take place? In CBS Chairman Les Moonves' office, with Moonves, Couric, her agent and the president of CBS News all present. Funny, if I had a $15 million-per-year job I wanted to keep, I don't think I'd openly talk about leaving three years early in front of my boss and my boss' boss. Regardless, it now looks like Couric will, in fact, exit her contract before its 2011 expiration.
If you've ever been a fact-checker, you probably had beaten into you the fact that — above everything else — you must get a person's name and age right. When we were starting out, we once let "Kerri" Kennedy Cuomo slip by us and we can still count the cane lashing scars on our ass. So our buttocks started tingling in sympathy when we read the New York Times' corrections admitting that they'd screwed up Charlton Heston's birth name and age in his obituary. There were some other goofs as well.
This cute thing with the Googlegangers in the Times? You know, where people search for other people across the country with their same name, and feel some sort of mystical kinship, or something, because of innate biological self-similarity biases? Some people have funny last names that were made up out of whole cloth a couple generations ago at Ellis Island or somewhere, like in An American Tail. These people have no Googlegangers, which is a stupid word, because everyone on Earth with that last name is directly related to them and probably embarrassed by what's being done with it on the Internet. The closest non-relative these hypothetical people can manage to track down on the Google might be Dana Perino. So screw you, "Jon Lee" and "Jason Rodriguez." [NYT]
The Wall Street Journal's scoop about Katie Couric's CBS Evening News exit has a deliciously bitchy media backstory: The Journal reporter who broke the news, Rebecca Dana, last year lost a plum staff position at the Times for bragging to her friends that she would "kick [Times TV reporter] Bill Carter's ass" once she started. After she was ratted out by her buddies, the Times rescinded her job offer, supposedly over concerns about the young reporter's maturity. The paper did offer Dana a lesser position with three-year probationary status, but she opted to bide her time, take a media reporting job at the Journal and then, uh, kick Bill Carter's ass. (Photo via Jossip)
Mike Ovitz just testified about how he hired private eye Anthony Pellicano, on trial on federal racketeering and wiretap charges, to obtain "embarrassing or otherwise useful information about the New York Times journalists and their sources," according to the Times. The former Hollywood mogul said he paid Pellicano $75,000, which did not get him information about the reporters, but did net him a fetching nickname, "Gaspar," some dirt on his rivals and, if reporter Anita Busch's hotly-contested testimony is any indication, some serious cloak and dagger directed at the reporters:
Fellow MSNBC host Keith Olbermann is on Chris Matthews' shit list, as you knew, while Race For The White House host David Gregory makes him nervous, because Gregory is an obvious possible replacement for Matthews, according to a leaked copy of a forthcoming Times magazine profile obtained by FishbowlDC. More embarrassing: fellow network personality Tim Russert, who Matthews kind of idolizes, supposedly can't stand the high-volume Hardball host. Profiler Mark Leibovich was of course sure to include a fresh batch of Matthews' leering comments toward women:
A tipster, prompted by yesterday's article about the gay mafia at the New York Times, reminds us that we're missing at least a couple of names: Andrew Jacobs and his boyfriend, Dan Levin. Truth be told, the Times gay mafia isn't really much of a mafia. It's not as if the group, which includes political reporters such as Patrick Healy and Adam Nagourney, plots to pink the Gray Lady and introduce America to the homosexual agenda. Nor is it directly responsible for Dan Levin's soaring byline count since the young freelancer started dating Jacobs. But connections definitely help. And Levin's Times commissions have nicely tracked his dating life. Last month the cute couple traveled together in Ohio; on March 4, they both filed pieces on the state's primary campaign. The only giveaway more obvious would have been a double byline. After the jump, a cuddly photograph from Levin's Facebook profile (Jacobs is on the left) and proof of their Times-funded trip to Ohio.
Former New York Times editor Amanda Hesser is starting a new company called Seawinkle, which may or may not be named after an obscure character from the My Little Pony universe. It will aggregate content you produce online into one happy page, she promised in a tetchy response to New York Magazine's insinuation that she was politely kicked out of the new Times building. Hesser also detailed her qualifications as a wantrepreneur:
