McClatchy, the struggling newspaper chain that made an ill-fated purchase of Knight Ridder in 2006, has just sent out a memo announcing that it is freezing employee wages across the entire company for the next year. The message that is increasingly going out to newspaper employees: accept wage freezes (or cuts), buyouts, and layoffs, or face total extinction. The full McClatchy memo is after the jump:
Did you know that charismatic Virginia governor Tim Kaine is on Barack Obama's Vice Presidential short list? It's true, according to today's New York Times! "Now the Obama campaign is eyeing Mr. Kaine as a potential running mate, seeing in him a like-minded breath of fresh air who has also shown he can win in a red state," Kate Zernike reports today. Pretty convincing! In totally unrelated news, the Washington Post reports today that the selection of former Virginia governor Mark Warner to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention is a "hint" that current Virginia governor Tim Kaine will not be Obama's VP choice. "If Kaine were chosen as Obama's running mate, two Virginians would have back-to-back prime-time speaking slots, a scenario that party officials regard as unlikely." This is great media management by Obama, right? No one knows anything! [WP, NYT]
Page Six is not just a gossip column; it's the ultimate favor trading tool. Boss Richard Johnson can (within reason) make the in-crowd believe that a particular restaurant is a great place to see and be seen-whether true or not. We took a look back through all of Page Six's coverage for the first six months of this year, and put together the chart you see above, tracking the most-mentioned restaurants. It conforms to one's mental list of New York hot spots, with one exception: Cipriani, whose 21 mentions (for three locations) took the top spot. Now, Cipriani is prestigious in its own musty old way, but it hardly fits in with the rest of the list, which is full of buzz-worthy celebrity nightspots and the odd mogul hangout. Favor trading illustrated? Below are some of the more press release-like Cipriani "gossip" items P6 saw fit to print this year; judge for yourself: 6/22/08
News of the worsening condition of Senator Ted Kennedy-currently suffering from a malignant brain tumor-made the front page of The Globe, one of the trashiest of the trashy tabloids. But in the respectable press, all we hear is that a lavish celebration of Kennedy's life is being prepared for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. The reader is asked to read between the lines and figure out that Kennedy is perhaps near death. Anyone who purchases The Globe, though, is always kept well-informed as to which old famous person is closest to death's door. It's a macabre little niche that they've been allowed to dominate thanks to the squeamishness of the rest of the press in covering celebrity health. Recently, the tabloids have led the MSM in covering the illnesses of Kennedy, Liz Taylor, and Paul Newman-though how reliable their coverage has been is called into question by the continuing survival of all of those people. Then again, when the mainstream press waded into the fray with their alarmist reports of the imminent death of Patrick Swayze, Swayze seemingly underwent a miracle recovery. So the reader is almost completely without reliable information. It does seem newsworthy, in this case, to ask precisely how bad Kennedy's doing. Does he actually have two weeks to live? Wasn't he just recently showing up to work at the Senate? But much as the press only ever hinted at how far gone Reagan or Strom Thurmond were (until they were done with public service), notions of privacy and respect lead editors to gloss over the uncomfortable details. Not so in England, where tabloid media is often indistinguishable from the "real" press. The Daily Mail, Mirror, and Sun all keep running tabs on the mortality of Britain's famous. Decrepitude and mortality sell papers! Who knew? Not American editors, yet.
Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. looks increasingly backed into a corner. Bloomberg yesterday marshaled a wide array of evidence, including quotes from analysts and the mounting cost to hedge against a Times Co. bond default, to establish that the company's bonds are close to falling to junk status. The already-bludgeoned stock quickly fell another 6 percent. Implicated in the credit deterioration: The company's decision last year to hike its dividend payout 23 percent, a move no doubt popular with Sulzberger's stockholdling relatives but one that is gobbling up nearly all the company's free cash flow. The family has already conceded board seats to the corporate marauders from Harbinger Capital Partners and an affiliated partnership, and Harbinger now controls nearly 20 percent of the company. Sulzberger faces some unsavory choices — cut the dividend, slash costs (probably via layoffs) or flirt with selling junk bonds — all of which carry the whiff of defeat. He is running out of room to maneuver.
The New York Times has 32 reporters covering the Olympics in Beijing. Thirty-two! That's quite an investment from a company in the newspaper industry. Any big cash outlay is risky these days. Without relying on the crutch of "official budget numbers," we combined our sophisticated economic estimation skills with a patented "Media Value" formula to determine: Is this Olympics coverage worth the cost? Read on!
The wee free newspapers of nutty Christian entrepreneur Philip Anschutz (the DC, Baltimore, and San Francisco Examiners) have announced an exciting new method of paying content-providers: based on the page views those content-providers accumulate! The Examiner umbrella brand has launched what looks like 1,000 new blogs based on every possible topic one could blog about (with plenty of overlap), written by, who knows, hobos and bored high school students, and all of them will be paid between $2.50 and $10 for every 1,000 views they attract to their pages. Do you want to be an Examiner? Here's how!
Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about the John Edwards affair, detailing the circumstances behind the meeting of Edwards and Rielle Hunter in a Beverly Hills hotel that ended up getting the ex-VP candidate caught by the National Enquirer. The story includes various bits of background info on Bob McGovern, a new-age friend of Hunter who set up the meeting. Just about all of that background appears to have been taken from a post more than a week earlier on Deceiver.com-although the Times didn't credit them at all. That's stealing. Full comparison of the Times story and the blog info, below: Deceiver, July 31:
Allen Salkin is the Times' designated kitschy trend specialist and author of a book about fake holiday Festivus, which sums up his sensibility very well. When we last encountered him he was sending out email blasts looking for travel companions to the Olympics, dinner companions to a barbecue joint, and sources for a story about ukeleles. You'll be happy to know that his aggressive pursuit of ukulele players has paid off! But you've tipped your hand, Salkin. We're onto you: Salkin's story on the hot ukulele trend is out, and fits perfectly in his oeuvre. His past investigations have exposed chicks who eat meat, revealed how no one goes on vacations any more, and uncovered prepsters who hang out downtown-as well as their rival hipsters who hang out in Atlantic City. We're now prepared to reveal Salkin's journalistic method to the public: He solicits you to hang out with him in casual settings and mines you for minutiae, which he then seasons with his patented significance-inflating sauce: "I see you're no vegetarian!" "Downtown is getting so preppy." "Can you believe my dumbass roommate bought a ukulele?" Lately I've been tying my shoelaces inside the shoe, to prevent those floppy strings on the outside. Others in Brooklyn are doing the same. Call me, Allen. [NYT]
As you may have heard, a faux-grizzled Mississippi boy named Brett Favre has brought his quarterbacking services to the New York Jets, the sad and mopey second-tier football team in a second-tier football town. This is quite big news, since Favre is a revered football icon, an unpredictable head case, and could easily win a Super Bowl or have one of the worst seasons in professional football history. Favre's arrival has created a frenzy amongst the bloodthirsty NYC sports media. Which has itself created a separate frenzy of analysis about why this particular segment of the media is such a schizophrenic mob. All of which has circled back into a scrum of grown men fighting over this simple question: Is New York City the pinnacle of sports media; or the most hellacious sports reporting town in America? New York City boasts a tabloid-led sports media machine that is unrivaled anywhere in America. But to outside observers, this can seem like the worst possible setup. Here's what Gregg Doyle, a columnist for CBS Sportsline, had to say on Howard Kurtz's CNN show yesterday:
Let's just put it out there: copy editors are vaguely creepy. There they sit in their corner, poring over pages while all the reporters and (other) editors are doing the real, sexy work of journalism. What makes someone want to be a copy editor in the first place? Could it be... sexual perversion? (Kidding of course! We love copy editors, platonically). Charles Cretella, a veteran New York Times copy editor, is now going to court over a sexual harassment case that centers on-you guessed it-a fellow copy editor, who was masturbating at work. Goodness. The strange details: Cretella says the Times didn't give him a promotion because he was falsely charged with sexually harassing a new 33-year-old copy editor that Cretella was training. Very enthusiastically:
There's no question the auto industry-particularly the US auto industry-is currently in the toilet. There's also no question that bad times for the auto industry lead to cuts in car companies' advertising budgets, which hurts the print and broadcast media outlets that reap billions from automakers every year. That's not news to anybody. What is news is the revelation that prospects for the print media have grown so dim that they are now celebrating the fact of declining auto ads, as proof that they're at the mercy of temporary business cycles beyond their control. Wow, that's sad: Newspapers nationwide lost more than $130 million last year in auto ad sales. Car ads have gone from 10% of national newspaper ads, to less that 3% in just three years. That's terrible by any standards. Magazines are experiencing a similar decline. So how to put this disaster in a good light?
Traditional media acted with predictable arrogance for ten months in ignoring tabloid and blog stories about John Edwards' philandering. Also utterly predictable: The self-flagellation now occurring on how the story was missed and what it means for the future of newspapers. Yes, if there's one story the public eats up more than a sex scandal complete with love child, it's yet another navel-gaze at media ethics and economics! Reporters for the Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all shared their thoughts on the matter. But the fact that they waited, or had to wait, so long to do so hints that their bosses are missing the point.
Remember the article from Slate music writer Jody Rosen, who stumbled upon a little alt-weekly in Texas, the Montgomery County Bulletin, who had stolen his Jimmy Buffet article? Rosen got obsessed, did some research, and found that one of the paper's few writers, Mark Williams, had pretty much plagiarized everything ever. Now, says the Houston Press, the Bulletin is up and quitting due to the scandal. "It's no longer a publication. I'm quitting. After this Slate article and this is the future of journalism in New York City. I don't want any part of it," said publisher Mike Ladyman. (It's hard to feel sorry for Ladyman; he didn't seem to give a rat's about the plagiarism issue when Rosen contacted him repeatedly.) Good job, Slate! (A fun quote from the non-media-savvy Ladyman after the jump, plus an angry letter from copycat writer Mark Williams.)
Last Sunday, the New York Times wrote about Chinese couples getting married on 8/8/08—their lucky day 'cause it's a lucky number. And of course the Beijing Olympics start on that day for the same reason, WE KNOW. Today, they do the weddings article again (not, this time, written by Jennifer 8. Lee.) However, there is a fun bit that reveals that getting married on this auspicious day isn't bliss for everyone:
Chaunce Hayden, the random dude from Jersey who publishes the little-read but often-stolen-from gossip rag Steppin' Out, is really learning to play the retribution game! Page Six boss Richard Johnson angrily told off Chaunce after Chaunce gave him a bad tip about a radio shock jock fiancee's sex tape that got the Post sued for millions. But now Chaunce has gotten his revenge the gossip way-by giving rival gossip hack Shallon Lester from the Daily News a chance to trash Page Six as a dirty place that's out to "smear people and ruin people's lives." People like Chaunce Hayden, for example! Then Shallon talks about how everyone takes bribes. "Everyone" like Page Six (yes)? We haven't quite sorted out who we're backing in this war of too many words:
Bernann McKinney mortgaged her home to travel to South Korea to have her pit bull cloned. Turns out, 30 years ago she kidnapped a Mormon missionary, chained him to a bed, and allegedly forced him to have sex with her. The Times of London further reports: "To add further mystery and zing to the whole story, Mr Anderson was said to have been wearing a Mormon chastity belt at the time." [The Australian, The Times]
Speaking of the constantly, publicly self-flagellating New York Times, now they're just co-opting our ragging on them. "After Deadline," a column on one of their 600 blogs, has an item today on phrases the Times overuses and grammatical mistakes they make far too often. It's like four nice little Gawker posts, but they're running them for some reason. What are the Times' various crimes against language? Misusing "Like." It's not a conjunction, people! Well, it is in casual English, but not according to the stylebook. Please use "as" or "the way." "Best" is the superlative form of "well." In other words, there is not really such a thing as "most well-known." They make this mistake all the time. "Meltdown" Meltdown! The easiest way for the Times to reference the current fiscal crisis is to call it a "meltdown," as they have 400 times this year. Finally, most egregiously, Tale of Two Cities references must be stopped. The Grey Lady published eight headlines involving the "Tale of Two..." construction last year, and one this year. This does not even take into account the many "Best of __, worst of ___" references. Editors, there are far, far better Dickens works to constantly allude to. Isn't Hard Times more appropriate these days? Still, we're pissed that someone in-house picked this up before we could. Stop taking the fun out of mocking you, New York Times!
