Yankees player Alex Rodriguez's nickname, A-Rod, is already so delightfully phallic! Sadly, when choosing a headline to reveal his affair with Madonna, the tabloids went with hackneyed baseball metaphors instead. The Daily News wonders if A-Rod got to "first base;" meanwhile, the Post announces a "squeeze play." (Here's our headline suggestion from yesterday.)
For unclear reasons, the Times felt compelled to hand a huge chunk of its Sunday Business section over to a profile of Bonnie Fuller—the woman most responsible for creating our nation's soul-destroying cast of powerful celebrity magazines—who was recently axed from her multimillion-dollar gig as editorial chief of American Media. A sympathetic profile! The news peg, purportedly: Bonnie Fuller is doing some vague new project on the internet. For women! With specifics to be determined! Color us skeptical. The Fuller that the Times describes does not sound like the woman who was so despised by her assistants that they put snot in her food. What's the major malfunction here?
New York media is, of course, incestuous; its Russian subset even more so. Russia! magazine, edited by New York magazine contributing editor Michael Idov, is "a niche quarterly about Russian culture and design," as the Observer put it in a recent party report. The salmon-colored paper had a lot to say in a sniper-neg style that made us wonder if one of its authors had a bone to pick. Either that or they just really don't like the "inexplicable little magazine"? Oh:
We were sent this tear-jerking tale of the going-away party for a New York Times employee who got the best gift ever. "The story: Merrill Perlman, the director of copy desks at The Times, who has 'chosen' to leave the paper (read: got pushed out) received a send-off today in the same spot where the Pulitzers were given out earlier this year. (This, after the farewell had originally been scheduled for the Page One conference room - never mind that the copy editors constitute the biggest staff in the New York office.)" Read on!
Oh, hey, people of The South! The New York Times might like to hire you as a stringer/researcher/ admin/journalistic sharecropper! But please remember: This is an elite newspaper for the elitist elites in fancy New York, so please no redneck type people. To help ensure you are not a hick, the Times has asked you to pre-pitch five stories NOT involving anything the Times has ever covered before (you do take the Times right? It's only $665 per year in trashy zip codes!), and also NOT about cliché things only of interest to the poors: "Please do not submit ideas concerning dog fights, cock fights, or the Confederate flag." Anyway, if you do get the job, you'll be rewarded with good pay and creative freedom. Ha ha, just kidding, you'll tackle "light administrative duties" and also "the pay is very modest," but at least you'll learn how to talk right, and the money will probably go a long way in your shantytown or whatever. Full job listing after the jump!
Remember when Page Six published a story in April about a purported sex tape featuring Bam Margera and the fiancee of radio shock jock Opie? And Opie immediately denied it, and then the Post admitted it probably wasn't true, and blamed it on a bad source? Well Opie is not the type to let them off that easy—his fiancee has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the Post, Page Six editor Richard Johnson, and the source, Steppin' Out editor Chaunce Hayden. It's a bottom-of-the-barrel multimillion-dollar legal slapfight! Highlights of the lawsuit:
Journo-nerds rejoice: the AP Stylebook has been updated! It's the Bible of all that is considered acceptable in middle American newsrooms, and, like middle America itself, is consistently several years behind the times. So what changes can you look forward to in tomorrow's edition of the Mattoon Journal Gazette? More text messaging, less malarkey, and no more retarded people!
"The editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for example, likened AP President and Chief Executive Tom Curley to the secretary-general of the Politburo at a convention in April... While the AP's 1,500 member newspapers still own the organization... they account for only 27% of AP revenue, down from more than 50% in the mid-1980s." [WSJ]
Further cause for existential despair in journalism: the (Pulitzer-Prize winning!) OC Register is going to outsource some of its copy editing and layout work to a company in India. But uh, don't worry staffers, it's only a test! A test which will inevitably lead to foreigners taking good old American journalism jobs. Don't be fooled by management doublespeak. It's time to panic!
Yesterday, a reader asked us: just how the hell does one get a media job in this town? Good question! Even the recently-graduated Ivy Leaguers have it bad, notes the Observer today. ("You've got 21-year-old girls being hazed by their 25-year-old bosses, and the assistants have college students that they're totally hazing.") And that if you get a job. We rounded up the best comments into a list of servicey advice that's actually useful!
From the New York Observer's accounting of the "diaspora" from the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, one would think the business newspaper was melting down under its new régime. The Observer's Koblin lists 24 departures and the exodus tallies with the word reaching anyone with friends at the paper: morale is so low that anonymous leaking provides one of the few sources of entertainment for the more sullen veterans. But Murdoch lieutenant Robert Thomson can take his time on newsroom surgery at the Journal; the patient isn't going anywhere. Let's put aside the fact that most of the departed reporters and editors have been pushed out, or left under the old guard, as an exasperated commenter notes. But, more importantly, even if the Journal's talents were inclined to leave, there's nowhere in today's faltering business media for them to go.
Ring the alarm: the paper of record is treating rappers separately and unequally! In a surprisingly fresh piece of analysis, the Columbia Journalism Review unearths the NYT's sneaky tendency to "birth-name" rappers more than other musicians. (They also coin the term "birth-name," which I like, although for the sake of hip hop consistency they should say "government-name"). That means, for example, that RZA gets second-referenced as "Robert Diggs," but Marilyn Manson gets to keep his stage name throughout Times stories. That is so foul! Government names are nerdy. Plus, culture editor Sam Sifton gives a nonsense nilla explanation for the discrepancy:
The Miami Herald just laid copy editor Brayden Simms off. Amazingly, he also wrote a blog for them about saving money in this terrible economy. He wrote a depressing column about how they tricked him into taking a full-time job and then outsourced it to India. Now he is blogging-for the Herald!-about meeting with his financial planner to discuss how to survive without an income. This is just sick. Jesus, they're making him dig his own grave after his execution. Please forward this to every journalism student you know.
Sports blogs might be losing their edge! Back in the good old days they were all bile-spewing, rumormongering perverts who cared about nothing but posting pictures of NFL players cavorting drunkenly with Buzz Bissinger (pictured, ranting). But as time went on, they actually started making money and gaining credibility and—wouldn't you know it—now they're paying more attention to making sure stuff is true! At least that's the theme of the weekend's sort of obvious-day LAT trend piece. The reality is that this entire "These kids are finally maturing, thanks to us" angle is primarily designed to make old school sportswriters feel better about themselves as blogs steal their lunch money.
The NYT values their super-smart readers! Or do they? "I got this back from the Times after I complained about a mistake in Alex Witchel's article on [the television show] "Mad Men,'" in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, says a reader. "Looks like somebody hit "Reply To All" once too often! Both [writer] Witchel & [research editor] Alani called me a know-it-all."
Another grim set of numbers for May-grimmer than a Goldman Sachs analyst's "most bearish dreams"-have left newspaper advertising revenues about 12% below last year's level. If business doesn't pick up, newspapers can expect to bring in about $37bn in 2008, down from $49bn at the height of the boom in 2000. But the data is even more depressing if adjusted for inflation: in 2000 dollars, ad revenues will be down nearly 40% on their level at the start of the decade. [Data via New York Times and Newspaper Association of America; inflation-adjustment and chart by Gawker]
