While doubtless in pursuit of some important story yesterday, angry ad blogger Copyranter came across this adventure in contextual advertising on the dedicated Sarah Palin web page of Alaska's Anchorage Daily News: ads for SHRED ALASKA onsite document shredding. Ha, can they shred Yahoo accounts, ha? A new ad on the Palin page today also seems appropriate, in its own way:
The Observer has a new profile of Matthew Moinian, a 23-year-old "real estate magnate" whose family's real estate business is one of the biggest property owners in downtown New York. He has a full-floor bachelor pad in a brand new W hotel—a construction project he's in charge of. Nice for him! It's a typical Observer profile that is simultaneously fascinated by a rich kid and mocking of him. But they did miss one thing: the lawsuit just filed against Moinian's dad, the real real estate magnate in the family:
The Newark Star-Ledger is in serious danger of going out of business, as we mentioned earlier. Its publisher yesterday threatened bluntly to close the paper on January 5 unless it gets major concessions from its drivers' union. Even if the threat is a negotiating tactic, it also reflects economic reality. Everyone knows the business is rough, but wow: are we about to see the first major American city without a newspaper? This would be historic. And not in the good way. As the industry has declined during this decade, almost every newspaper has suffered economically. Layoffs have become ubiquitous. Foreign bureaus have been shuttered across the board as a matter of policy. Large metro papers, which dominate major cities but lack a national readership, have suffered the worst. Many (if not most) of them have pulled their correspondents from Washington and brought them home, to save money and cover local news, which is believed to be the wisest area of investment. The glory days are over. Salaries are down. Older, more expensive reporters and editors are urged to take buyouts. It's harder for aspiring journalists to get first jobs, or even internships. Papers have changed physically. Their pages have shrunk. Their page count has come down. Sections which once stood alone have been combined, all to save printing and newsprint costs. Two-paper towns are becoming a rarity. Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, and, of course, New York all support at least two sizable papers. But some of them shouldn't. Particularly in smaller or declining markets, it's a war of attrition to see which paper can hang on the longest. The idea that two editorial viewpoints are a necessity in most cities has been rendered anachronistic by the internet. Recent buyers of newspapers or newspaper companies have been disappointed. Brian Tierney, an ad wizard, has been unable to restore the Philadelphia papers to their former glory. Sam Zell is being sued by his own employees for the Tribune company's declining prospects. McClatchy wishes it had never bought Knight Ridder. What we haven't seen in all this, though, is a major American city with no newspaper. Everyone believes that a paper is an essential part of a city's fabric, like city hall and the jail and the local sports team. If Newark—a town with more problems than most—is left without a paper, who will tell the world what's going on there? Who will tell Newark what its own government is up to? Even bloggers should be humble enough to pray that the Star-Ledger isn't the first in a long line of papers that disappear and leave people with no forum for the local bickering, minutiae, and moments of glory that are the real American civics lesson. Print may be dead. But it shouldn't die before something better is in place.
It's a Chicago media tussle—hardball style! Yes, well. The Chicago Sun-Times threatened to sue the Chicago Tribune for job discussions the Tribune had with Jay Mariotti, the sports columnist who quit the Sun-Times just last month. But, um, hey Jay: didn't you quit your LUCRATIVE NEW contract at the Sun-Times out of the blue because you were inspired by all the other sports journalists you saw "writing for web sites?" Where's your "web site" now, you idiot man-child? Ahahaha!
Newsday reporter Rocco Parascandola either drew the short straw at the assignment desk yesterday, or he sincerely believes that a five-year-old's opinion on the graffiti menace is worth 700 words. A mouthy little law-and-order kindergartener on Long Island got so worked up by an earlier Newsday story on taggers that he had his grandpa transcribe his tiny thoughts on the issue into a letter, which warranted another Newsday story, in which everybody comes off as monumentally stupid. Particularly Newsday:
Gnomish asshole Tribune owner Sam Zell is getting sued. By his own (current and former) employees! They filed a class action suit in LA today charging that "Zell's illegal and irresponsible actions and public statements have damaged the reputation and business of the company." Which is legalese for "You made all the Tribune employees take ownership of this shitty company under your stupid ESOP plan and we'd rather not all go broke, thanks." We imagine Zell is uttering some colorful expressions right now in response. ("Fuck you!" is what we mean specifically). This should be interesting! Click through for the full press release.
Hey, Washington DC is getting its very own newspaper fashion magazine! The New York Times has T, which makes enough money to pay for the other, real news bureaus; the Wall Street Journal has its new glossy weekend magazine, which debuted with a model on the cover; and now the Washington Post has decided to celebrate DC's fashionistas with... a "newspaper insert"?
The morning news is terrifying even before the ominous opening of U.S. markets today, and was also scary hours ago before overseas markets opened and U.S. stock futures fell sharply. The bankruptcy at Lehman Brothers, the takeover of Merrill Lynch and the plea by insurance giant AIG for $40 billion in federal aid made for scary front pages (pictured, click for larger image) and heated chatter on CNBC. And no one wasted any time telling everyone how bad things really are. The "American financial system was shaken to its core," the Wall Street Journal said, warning of a "crisis on Wall Street." Other media outlets were scarcely more comforting:
Times editor Bill Keller's hand was suspected in the May departure of Michael Oreskes from the Times-owned International Herald Tribune. "Fiercely ambitious" Oreskes once vied for editorship of the Times itself, the Post's Keith Kelly reported at the time, and may have been made to pay for a "long history of animosity" with Keller. Now another IHT hand, Serge Schemann is being nudged out the door after accusations of disloyalty to Keller, an email tipster claims. His supposed crime: A meeting with former IHT publisher Michael Golden, the rival and cousin to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, just hours after a "make or break" November IHT meeting in Manhattan, a meeting that presumably involved Sulzberger underling Keller.
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]
It's always fun to see a journalist fall on his sword. It has that righteous feel of a principled but stubborn man putting on his dinner jacket to sit calmly on the deck of the sinking Titanic. Except in the case of the newspaper industry, that man would eventually float to the surface and go into PR. Anyhow, the editor of a Southern California business paper called The Business Press got himself stone cold fired for blasting out an adorably serious email about how design changes are eroding the paper's credibility. He was promptly ejected from the building! Fey big city media elites who mock traditional newspaper values can learn something from the memos below. (How to get fired):
If someone at a film screening taps you a couple times on the shoulder asking you to move over so they can see, what do you do? If you're New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick, you haul off and hit them with your binder—and then realize that you just slugged Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, according to Rush & Molloy. Ebert can't speak, as he's been dealing with throat and thyroid cancer for years, so that explains the shoulder-tapping. But there's really no good explanation for Lumenick's hitting:
"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.
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!
Len Downie was executive editor of the Washington Post for years and years and years. Now he is the Vice President At Large. We don't know what that means except that it maybe gave him time to finish his novel, The Rules of the Game, which is a story of political intrigue, of fucking course. Also of fucking course: there is a newspaper editor in it! Uh oh! Time to name the thinly veiled real-life Post figures involved! The problem is there is like one easy-to-identify thinly veiled real person, and it's former Post editor Ben Bradlee, and the Bradlee character is a big brave hero, which is how everyone already publicly idolizes him. Actually it looks like all the journalists involved are big heroic hero types!
Ruh-roh, Kim Jong-Il is sick, what happens when he dies? Hell if we know!! And will we truly know tomorrow or whenever this guy gets back to the executive assistant charged with Explainer-ing it for Slate? Not really! As literary Tumblrer Keith Gessen pointed out while trying to make sense of the whole Ossetia mess, you know there's a redundant "inadequacy" to the international news in our dying newspapers when even bloggers with the attention spans of Piper Palin feel it. But isn't that because our dying newspapers have mostly killed their foreign bureaus because there's no money in it?Yes! Which is why, as readers, we are happy these guys from Boston have founded the Politico of international news. (It is already poaching people from Politico.) And those newsroom cutbacks may enable Global News Enterprises LLC.* to put together a pretty strong team. From an announcement in March:
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:
Lee Abrams looks like Dunkin Donuts' Fred the Baker without his hair dye. But Fred the Baker got up every day to make donuts, and that's the type of old-style thinking that Lee Abrams is here to destroy! Abrams is the "Chief Innovation Officer" (LOL) of the dying Tribune Company, and also the man who says the most mystifying (and sometimes infuriating) things you will ever hear about the newspaper industry. All the time. Seriously. ""I just try to inpsire people to rethink things," Abrams declared yesterday. "There's no reason we can't create a newspaper renaissance." Ha. Here are ten of Lee Abrams' stupidest "NOT IRRELIVENT" inspirational messages:
