What do you get when you take the snobbish manufactured exclusivity of the downtown NYC faux-celebrity modeltrash circuit and combine it with the barren urban nightmare that is Atlantic City? I don't know, but idly rich hipsters across the tristate area will soon be paying big money to find out, if cultural connoisseur Paul Sevigny has anything to say about it!
Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard is trying to sell his very popular cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb as a turban, which helped to ignite all that hysteria among fundamentalist Muslims a couple years back. They're still trying to kill Westergaard, and he's getting pretty tired of it. Now he's trying to unload the infamous cartoon, so he can at least get some cash to buy a Playstation 3 to entertain himself while in hiding. Of course, no auction house wants to touch it and no collector wants to hang it up, so he's having a hard time [WSJ]. Somebody please just buy it—display it, burn it, use it as toilet paper, who cares—this controversy is one of the more exasperating and stupid of the 21st century. Raffle time! Below, a reprint of the full page of mediocre cartoons that cause the pointless fuss.
There is a charming story that Malcolm Gladwell has told over and over again about how he used to try to sneak funny phrases into the newspaper he worked for, back when he was a journalist and not yet a personality. Turns out everyone's done it! Michael Scherer, currently with Time, explains that when he was working at an unnamed newspaper bureau in Easthampton, Mass, he and his "colleague" would try to sneak "obscure 10-dollar word[s]" into their copy. The best he ever did was "dun." But the dude who wrote noted Scrabble champion William F. Buckley's obit for the Times got his Roget's on and used "Sesquipedalian" in an A1 headline. Jesus, journalists need hobbies. What happened to drinking and fucking again? [Swampland]
Rebecca Aronauer, a former writer on gossip blog Jossip, is guesting on Gawker for the next month. She'll be covering print media, though Rebecca would much rather muse on Brooklyn neighborhoods. And they say newspapers can't adapt to web culture. Why, the Washington Post even converted the smokers' room, which has been unused for years, into a game room. With foosball, air hockey and Wii, Washington Post writers are sure not to feel demoralized about sinking ad sales and the larger downturn in the publishing industry. And if the game room fails to inspire the staff, they can always turn it into a drinking room. Or just skip the ruse and turn the whole office into a bar. [Washington City Paper]
It must truly be the end of print if Real Simple, that charming Time Inc publication about "Life Made Easier," is advertising "10 New Uses for Newspaper." (We hear that they're good to wrap around your feet if you're homeless and sleeping outside!) What are the rest? Hint: did you know that newspapers are actually quite "absorbent, because [newsprint] has to absorb ink"?
Spanish newspaper El Pais has a sweet idea for how to influence people to read the newspaper: digitally altered pictures of the World Trade Center tragedy! See, if you read El Pais, you'd know that some details have been changed in the photo of this horrible disaster [Copyranter]. Is that really the correct model of plane about to crash into the building, leaving us all scarred for life? Subscribing to El Pais would help you answer that. It's like the terrorist version of the "Spot Five Difference In These Pictures" thing on the comics page. How many differences can YOU pick out? Good, clean, tragic fun. Larger version of the ad, and the educational changes revealed, after the jump.
UK tabloids are enjoying huge web traffic thanks to American celebrity scandals. Unfortunately for our trade deficit, we see none of that money. Even when the Daily Mail runs New York's NUDE LINDSAY LOHAN shots, without permission. (The photos, owned by Bert Stern, are under embargo—the Daily Mail just made up a little "nymag.com" watermark, slapped it on, and ran with them.) [FishbowlNY]
The Wall Street Journal's lifestyle magazine, Pursuits, has a brand-new name! It will be called: WSJ. Note the period... the period is part of the name. OK? WSJ (period). Wow, that's even more annoying than Yahoo! or OK! "Its understatedness suits the personality of the Journal and avoids the pretense and artifice of many bad magazine names," says a WSJ(.) spokesperson. "The three letters happen to be typographically quite pleasing." Not as pleasing as WTF! (We think the period stands for Rupert Murdoch symbolically putting his foot down: "No, srsly, guys, I am in charge now. PERIOD.") [WWD]
An important ongoing story has come to our attention: the so-called Poopgate scandal of the Cherry Hill, NJ Courier-Post. It seems that newsroom morale has reached such a low level that an anonymous pooper or poopers has purposely pooped in both the men and women's bathroom—not in the actual toilet, so use your imagination. The excrement in the men's room sat for 13 hours before being cleaned up. Employees are using Poopgate as a rallying cry for their righteous indignation; management has sent in investigators to get to the bottom of the case [GannettBlog/ Philadelphia Will Do] Below, the entire protest letter from the newsroom to management, which portrays the errant poop as the embodiment of a "climate of crisis." We will keep you informed of the situation as it develops, obviously. [UPDATE: We hear that Mergermarket may also be experiencing poop issues. Anywhere else? E-mail us.]
Thank god that News Corp. bought the Wall Street Journal, so that it can use the paper as a platform to give voice to the voiceless in our society: News Corp. executives. Yesterday, the Journal ran an op-ed by William McGurn, who's back at News Corp. after spending the last three years writing speeches for noted speaker George W. Bush. In it, McGurn identifies our country's leading problem: Reporters who are "full of snark."
LA Times publisher David Hiller, the corporate emissary the Tribune bosses in Chicago sent out to California to handle all the editor-firing, is a bit of a dork. He got all goofy and excited over the fact that the paper got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last year, which convinced the jaded LAT newsroom that he is a total touristy nerd who will never really grasp the City of Angels. He manages like a pussy, mumbling inaudibly about what his long term plans and mandates are before springing the hatchet on angry editors, according to lots of anonymous interviewees in a New York Times profile today. They also say he has sent notes about individual stories to reporters (a huge no-no for a publisher), and is considering putting the paper's entire Sunday magazine section under the control of the marketing department. On top of all that, he likes to sing corny songs. Whew! A weak manager, muddling around without a strong long-term plan, trying to endear himself to his inferiors in an annoying, kind of nerdy fashion. Who does that remind you of? New York Times publisher Arthur "Pinch Pinch Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., of course! Observe this list of Sulzberger's greatest Hiller-like moments:
With all the layoffs that just about every major newspaper has gone through over the past few years, reporting staffs have already been chopped to the bone. Or all the way through the bone and out the other side, in some cases. So when the next round of layoffs inevitably comes, where do the cuts come from? A provocative, insightful, and obvious idea: How about firing some more of those freaking editors? Or at least making them do a little more work.
Gannett, Hearst, the New York Times Co. and Tribune, in the grand tradition of doomed online-newspaper joint ventures, is creating an ad network, QuadrantOne. The new partners said QuardrantOne will reach more than 50 million monthly visitors through more than 120 papers. But not the New York Times or USA Today, which already have national sales operations. Yahoo launched a similar newspaper consortium last year, to no visible effect. [WSJ]
By year's end, the New York Times will cut 100 newsroom positions, executive editor Bill Keller announced this morning at his regular "Throw Stuff At Bill" meeting. "At the end of the year, the newsroom will be smaller than it is now," Keller told the group, warning that staffers should prepare for layoffs. "The newsroom leadership will share in the sacrifice," he said, according to an attendee. When the Times announced the elimination of a dozen support positions last fall, Keller said the paper would cut "a few management jobs in administrative areas," a far cry from today's announcement. Despite the planned cuts, Keller said today, the Times will still have 150 more newsroom staffers than any other paper; spokeslady Catherine Mathis tells Jeff Bercovici the newsroom's staff is currently 1,332. "As you know, we have not been reducing our staff. It's been quite the opposite," she told him. "We've been increasing the number of newsroom staff. [But] right now we're in the midst of a very difficult time in the business." Well that's odd. During the December cuts, Keller said something completely different!
The Daily News was very busy this afternoon telling everyone and their mom that the city tabloid will go all color by the end of 2009, making it the "first major market daily newspaper in the United States" to do so, according to a release. (Never mind that Europe's been doing this for years, along with plenty of far more inferior weeklies stateside.) Publisher Mort Zuckerman may not be losing quite as much money on his tabloid as Rupert Murdoch does on his Post, but we're fairly sure Mort's not changing the hue of his paper just so it'll look a little prettier at the prom.
Will the kvetching never end? The photog recipient of that famous "fuck you" from Tribune CEO Sam Zell has finally come out of witness protection to speak about her harrowing experience. "It was not my intention to offend him," Sara Fajardo told the Orlando Sentinel's ombudsman, who also spoke to the paper's publisher and editor for his Sunday piece. Both of them hated on "Sam" (so accessible Zell is with the first-name bases!) for his "inappropriate" comment to their shutterbug, who for her part says that contrary to reports that Zell begged and pleaded for her forgiveness in the days after his public cuss-fit, she hasn't spoken with him since. At the Los Angeles Times, Gustavo Arellano gives his paper hell for using the phrase "two-word obscenity" to describe what Zell had said to Fajardo. Fucking pussies.
With all the talk of newspapers' declining influence, and amidst all the food blogs, a bad review from Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni will still throw your kitchen into absolute chaos, Le Cirque founder Sirio Maccioni reveals to Portfolio. "Who's [Frank Bruni]? I don't know him," he snarks. (Oh, and it's hard even for Maccioni to get a reservation at the Waverly Inn: "You have to call Vanity Fair."). After the jump: how a bad NYT review in 2006 prompted him to change everything.
