The funniest thing so far today is the fact that Page Six reported this item with the "Won't Somebody Please Think of the Noble Press?" angle instead of the "Look at these whining, babied reporters" angle.

It was business as usual — all messed up — for six journalists from such upscale magazines as Forbes Life, Manhattan, and Prestige who were invited to experience the new luxury seats designed exclusively for first-class travel on Swissair. The junketeering journos found themselves booked into less luxurious business class both to and from Switzerland last week. Maybe the airline felt so many people are flying first-class these days, it didn't really need the press

I guess it's up to us, then? Hey everyone, look at these whining, babied reporters.


The Week is guaranteeing advertisers that their ads will test highly in consumer recall, or the magazine will keep running the ads for free until they do test well enough. This means, I think, The Week has plenty of extra ad space just lying around.


If you were waiting impatiently for the arrival of Esquire's latest bleepy technology doo-dad thingy, in the magazine, good news: It's here. Go look at it if you want, or not.


Conde Nast is planning to launch more of its titles in China, where the print magazine business is not such a god damn train wreck. We cannot mock them for this sound strategic move.

According to a story in the New York Times today (in which the NYT tries very hard to suppress its glee), the Post's circulation has fallen by 30% in less than three years, to just a hair over half a million; and its financial losses were around $70 million last year, making the paper an expensive habit even by Rupert Murdoch's standards. And the fact that Rupert's adding local reporting to the WSJ makes Post reporters (reasonably) nervous they're falling out of favor.

We must not let this perpetually money-losing right-wing tabloid fall from grace! New York would be such a boring newspaper city without a loud, drunk voice of opposition. A few helpful suggestions:

• Andrea Peyser's sexxxy, but is she sexxxy enough? Millions of people in New York have sex every day without being mentioned in Andrea Peyser's column. Work on that.
• Col Allan is drunk, but is he drunk enough? Secretly rig the water fountains to emit gin, if you haven't done so already.
• Sean Delonas is racist, but is he racist enough? Racist cartoons are all well and good, but try upping Sean's visibility by getting him out there on the street, among the people, beating up minorities, then quick-sketching it on a blog. After he's all done promoting his children's book.

British writer and analyst Charles Leadbeater, and researcher Annika Wong, have put together a report called Cloud Culture to be published by the British Council next year. Their statistical study, provided to me by Leadbeater, is based on figures from the social media analytics company Sysomos. It shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran when the 'Iranian internet revolution' story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

Leadbeater and Wong also compile a series of hyperbolic quotes from a variety of media sources at the time of the protests:

• "Twitter has become a key information conduit as the authorities in Tehran have cracked down on reporting by traditional media." Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times.
• "After disputed election results and massive street demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, information is flooding out of the country – on Twitter." Ashley Terry, Global News.
• "This is it. The big one." Clay Shirky of NYU.
• "We've been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony... The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over." Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The meme was just too tempting, it seems, for anyone to dig into its veracity. The media — this site included — loves to write about Twitter, and loved doing so even more in summer when it was even newer and shiner. The storyline also fit the fact that Iran is a young country, and chimed with the heartbreaking YouTube video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

The solidarity that thousands, even millions of Americans showed with the people of Iran during June's elections and the subsequent protests was admirable. It was also potentially dangerous. I was at the UN protests against President Ahmadinejad earlier this fall. Several young men were wearing dust masks they had purchased from hardware stores. I asked one why. "I am wearing it because I have to go back to Iran," said a softly-spoken and shy 28-year-old student who gave his name only as Mohammed. "I return next year and this is for safety, in case they are watching," he added, pointing to his mask. "It could be the best $3 I ever spend."

If Mohammed is picked up despite his dust mask, the fact that the protests in Tehran were partly fomented by Western support based on a false story about Twitter will be of no consolation. It's probably not much comfort to these people either.

Firstly there's a new image - of Hasan in his military uniform. (It's the equivalent of running a graduation photo when someone dies young - it's shorthand for 'look what potential we lost in this tragedy'.) Secondly there's apparently a link between Hasan and two of the 9/11 attackers, through a mosque they all shared. This will only fuel the wingnut scapegoating of Muslims.

The Washington Post carries the considered version of the story, below the fold, as well as a stellar story about the execution of the DC sniper. The New York Post - which runs the mosque link on the front page - is somewhat less measured. The New York Times, conversely, looks at what it's like to be Muslim in the US military as part of an above-the-fold package of stories. The main tale is the work of 12 reporters and researchers, and is worth every one. The Daily News, meanwhile, has an exclusive interview with the mother of a soldier who was treated by psychiatrist Hasan.

Disclosure: I freelance write and report for newspapers that are included in this roundup. Where there is a direct conflict of interest I will make it clear.

The New York Times: has a comprehensive and genuinely moving analysis of Hasan's motivations, and addresses the wider issue of Muslims in the military. President Obama is using his influence to press the Senate to move the healthcare bill along. Iraq has passed a law that will help get American troops out of the country. Catholic priests helped lobby anti-abortion measures into the healthcare bill. Also: Nelson Mandela is not dead.

The Washington Post: also proves that, given a weekend and some leeway to get fruity with the words, great reporters can deliver on a story as rich as the shootings. Their above-the-fold story is, if anything, even better and examines whether the families of the DC sniper's victims will watch him die or not. The picture is amazing, it's exclusive and local but of national importance. It even speaks to a wider issue. The only flaw? The story opens with weather. Everyone loves an abortion/healthcare story. Finally, a local story about safety inspections on the DC Metro.

The LA Times: has its cake and eats it too. They run a picture on the shootings above the fold, but devote all the words to other stories. There is a really good profile of Nancy Pelosi - who was instrumental in getting the healthcare bill through the House, but abandoned her own history to do so. And a look at where the bill goes from here. Today's front page feature is about the shutting down of mountain resorts for the winter. The Iraqi law that will help US troops leave is covered here too, and there's lots of service-y local reporting: pension funds and a poll on state reform.

The Wall Street Journal: pulls the same 'Fort Hood picture on the front' trick as the LA Times. And run a very similar picture of a soldier praying, actually. And even has a similar story on the future trials of the healthcare bill, though they add a piece on what it means for insurers. There's a story about Bank of America chief Ken Lewis' battles with the Fed - which includes the fact that his mother nudged him to pay back the bailout money he took. And also to eat his greens. And did Iran build a giant mosque in Nicaragua, where there are only 300 Muslims?

The New York Post: perhaps worried by today's Times report of their circulation woes, the Post opens with the Fort Hood shootings (last week, when it happened, they ran baseball stories on the front page). Also, the headline should be the title of a right-wing horror movie.

The Daily News: interviews the mother of a soldier who was treated by the Fort Hood shooter. She saw evil in his eyes, and thinks the shootings were a calculated act of terrorism. Let's hope she reads the Times cover story today for some context.

The Anchorage Daily News: I know they gave us Sarah Palin to mock,but who knew life in Alaska was so interesting? Today alone there is a story on a new gold rush, the one federal dog mushing job, and how to get it, and viruses that can put child porn on your computer without you even knowing it. Their Fort Hood story is the dullest thing here! Inside, the arts reviewer even (kind of) says mime is better than opera! Which everyone knows but no-one says.

The New Zealand Herald: parliament in New Zealand is a far more interesting place than elsewhere in the world. An MP once called women 'front bums'. The latest political escapades are somewhat less creative, but still pretty fun. The best thing about this fron page? They go big on the Carrie Prejean sex tape!

Blair is now a life coach, specializing in substance abuse, and wants to teach young journalists how not to lie - he addressed 150 at Washington and Lee University's Journalism Ethics Institute on Friday too.

Maybe one day he won't have the word 'disgraced' put in front of his name as a reflex. But I doubt it.

Media junkies everywhere, young and old, this is crack-like goodness. Kaplan's supposed to be on the show to talk about a new compilation book from the New York Observer, but that's passed over pretty quickly for the good stuff. There's even a clip spliced in of former New York editor Clay Felker, who died last year, discussing what makes a great editor. Some of the more compelling lines:

• Sadly, his only swipe at the New York Observer's (Michael Corleone-esque) owner Jared Kushner was a passive-aggressive pawing: "(Jared's positioning it) a little bit different than where I live." Classy, but like Jared, I wanted more blood.
  
  
• On his departure: "I thought I had driven the car as far as it could go."
  
  
• "I have an evangelical mission to save the part of the print media that I love. Which is, to me, sophisticated, arcane, a little bit of a throwback to the 20s, but also a 21st century medium that the internet was a direct assault on."
  
  
• "All my mean friends on the internet say you can't put the genie back in the bottle..."
  
  
• "Tina (Brown) is a lot stronger than I am."
  
  
• "(The best New York editors) come from outside and bang on the door to try to understand it. The really great ones are desperate to understand New York City and are desperate to say what they don't know."
  
  
• On how long it takes him to spot a great reporter: "About a day."
  
  
• "I don't know what's going to happen. I have close friends who work in various (what I like to think of) as information supermarkets. Aggregation has undermined the American news process...It separates the news item from the news story. It's (by definition) a shallow landscape."

Interestingly enough, Kaplan at one point talks about the future of journalism returning to a pay model with a new medium—like, say, an Apple Tablet—that could shut out the broad sheet altogether and create a narrow outlet through which people would have to pay for something like, say, the New York Times (who are more or less cozying up with Apple in anticipation of the Tablet's 'impending' release).

I'd rather leave the futurism to someone else, but this kind of thinking seems a little reckless. Sure, the New York Times is pretty, and has great content, but isn't the information at the heart of every New York Times article—gathering it, compiling it, fact-checking and editing it—where a lot of the money is? And you can't charge people for information. A New York Times exclusive is only an exclusive for the minute or two before someone else has posted their Google-landgrab headline reporting on the New York Times' reporting.

Nevertheless! Kaplan's maybe-changing old-school methodology and the quality he put into his work is going to be interesting to watch as he tries to move whatever products he continues to move forward with as time goes on, which is to say nothing of whatever direction the New York Observer's going to take as well.

Via Torontoist, the story goes like this: the Toronto Star—Canada's largest daily circulation newspaper—is, like every other newspaper, starting to come to terms with how completely doomed it is. So they're going through the company's biggest restructuring in its history, offering buyouts to everyone in the company, and outsourcing both copy editing and pagination work. First of all, is pagination work really that hard? There are people at the New York Observer who write Very Short List, half of Transom, and do Kushner's taxes. Pussy Canadians. Learn from us.

But apparently, it is, or it's hard enough to require outsourcing. Also, they vaguely alluded to this nice gem:

The plans could expand to include editorial content and other production, he added.

So, you know when you call American Airlines and they pick up and they're like AMEERICKAN URLUNES CHALO DEES IZ, URR, BOB, OW CAN YOU BE HALPED PLEEZE? And you're like, Bob, I know you're name isn't Bob, and you're not picking up this call in Austin either, are you? Well, imagine what happens when they start outsourcing your editorial content to the same people who pick up American Airlines' numbers?

Or so was the thought process of a certain Toronto Star editor, who took a memo written by the Star's publisher, John Cruickshank, to the editorial staff, and showed Cruickshank just how much they need their in-house copy-editors by leaking it to Torontoist. Observe:

LEDE!! indeed. If anything, this only serves to remind me how patently annoying copy editors are. Besides, isn't that what #commenters are for? Punctuation Nazis, all of them, imposing their draconian rules on the beautiful words of beautiful writers with flowing hair and long, circumspect...typing fingers. But from a publisher's standpoint, they might, you know, come in handy every once in a while. Like when you're writing a doomsday memo to your staff.

The journalists, columnists, editors, and one blogger (also along for the ride was the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal, and Cynthia Tucker from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) lunched with Obama, David Axelrod, Anita Dunn, Bill Burton, and Robert Gibbs. It was, of course, off the record, so stop emailing Gail about it already Maureen jeez!

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo brand new to the official White House press pool, so now Marshall gets to hang out with the grown-up journalists (and David Brooks).

Earlier this week, we used New York's open records law to obtain email exchanges between reporters and Eliot Spitzer's communications director during last year's hookergate fiasco — a story that the Times broke. We turned up examples of Times reporters asking for permission to call sources, previewing copy for sign-off, and generally being surprisingly collaborative with a woman who was paid to manage and mislead them.

In an editorial, PR Week's response is, What's so wrong with that?

True, there are places where it seems the journalists went above and beyond what was necessary in a professional relationship, such as asking for permission to call a source, but let's not forget who broke the story. The fact is that it often takes negotiation to get a great story. We can only see the emails; we don't know the content of the phone calls and meetings that no doubt also took place to put the initial piece and continuous follow-up stories together. It takes trade-offs with your sources and, yes, many times those sources are communications staffers.

So there you have it. Sometimes good journalism requires engaging negotiations and trade-offs with the people who are paid to make sure reporters have to engage in negotiations and trade-offs, according to the people who are paid to make sure reporters have to engage in negotiations and trade-offs. And, to judge by the response we got to that item, according to a lot of reporters, too.

The highlight is probably the unveiling of the conspiratorial internal organ chalkboard. All the notes—references to old and discredited texts, the Founding Fathers, transparently phony stabs at nonpartisanship, crying—are hit, though Stewart never quite reaches the operatic unhingedness of a genuine Beck performance. The glasses are a wonderful touch, though.

According to Keith Kelly, Lucky publisher Gina Sanders—married to Steven Newhouse, of the formerly declasse newspaper Newhouses—convinced Si of the necessity of hiring Michael Sheehan, who's coached presidents and aided AIG and JP Morgan. Who knows what Sheehan will do, besides pull in a hefty salary.

You know who is probably sadder about the end of the Conde Christmas Lunch than any of the Conde editors? Keith Kelly. No one's ever enjoyed analyzing a seating chart more than Kelly.

This is the second year in a row of no Xmas Lunch. Instead, Si will host a cocktail party, at night, which sounds more fun, to us, but we are not Graydon Carter, so what do we know?

The only image of Nidal Hasan available (until the shoe-leather journalists hit the streets, harass his friends and family, and get something better) is tiny and black and white. So the three broadsheets go with photojournalistic depictions of the horror on the army base. The Daily News runs a stark black front page with the small picture in the corner. The Post, at least in the editions available online goes with... baseball.

In most of the papers Hasan is a troubled Army psychiatrist, possibly suffering from PTSD after hearing the harrowing tales of returning soldiers. In the Post he's an 'Army Muslim Major'.

Oh, and there are other stories too, doubtless cut at the last minute when the shooting news broke. Palestinian politics! Gruesomeness in Cleveland! Healthcare! Baseball!

The New York Times: has perhaps the best analysis of the shooter and his motivations. They also seem to have got to his cousin - the one family member who is happy to talk to anyone who asks - first. Their straight news story also devotes some time to the three other soldiers held in connection with the shootings. They also cover former Police Chief Bernie Kerik's guilty plea and expected prison term, the potentially destabilising news that Mahmoud Abbas will not seek re-election in Palestine, a dreadful tale of 11 bodies - hidden by a murderous sex offender - found in a house in Ohio. Oh, and the Afghan army is inept.

The Washington Post: mentions the shooter's local connection - to Walter Reed hospital, and repeats the claim that deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan was Hasan's "worst nightmare." They also have some original reporting - an interview with Hasan's aunt and a fellow psychiatrist - that shows what we'd lose if newsrooms shrink, I think. There's politics in the form of a healthcare infighting tale and the story about Congress extending jobless benefits.

The LA Times: above the main story is a crop of a picture the NY Times is running on their website too. I always think it's amazing how a consensus between disconnected editors emerges when there's one story. Consensus is the word here - they effectively round up the strands (PTSD, Islam, suicide bombing sympathising) seen elsewhere. There's a great detail in this story about a hedge fund scandal - one trader tried to eat his phone's sim card to hide evidence. There's a new sheriff in town on the Mexican border, the wranglings over Afghanistan get play here too, and there is optimism over the health bill.

The New York Post: once you get beyond the baseball, adds the somewhat poignant detail that Nidal Hasan had trouble finding love. The News has more though...

The Daily News: interviews Hasan's former Imam who says the shooter wanted a wife far more religious than himself. One who prayed five times a day, in fact. They have the best reporter (IMO) in New York - Kerry Burke - on the story, so expect more detail and mini-scoops to come from the News.

The Austin American_Statesman: when a big story breaks in your backyard you want to be on top of it. There's some good local reporting here.

The Times (London): want a depressing fact? The world is so inured to massacres in America that today's Times, in London, devotes all of two square inches to it.

In making the announcement, Observer owner and publisher Jared Kushner said, "Kyle is an outstanding journalist - an accomplished reporter and editor - who also possesses an intimate knowledge of the media business. We're looking forward to his leadership in helping to shape and sharpen our product as we continue to drive this newspaper forward. We're thrilled to have him on board."

He starts next week and he'll have his work cut out for him.
[NYO]

For years, Andrew Breitbart, second-in-command at the Drudge Report, labored in the shadows cast by his boss's legendary fedora. Now, he's known as a major media player in his own right, the architect of a burgeoning conservative news network that's far more ambitious than anything his boss has ever attempted. In 2005, he created Breitbart.com, a streamlined news portal that carries the latest articles from the Associated Press, UPI, and other major newswires. In 2008, he created Big Hollywood, a group blog that counters liberal bias emanating from a dangerous fifth column of Malibu gasbags, statist puppets, and singing schoolchildren. In 2009, he introduced Big Government, a group blog that counters the liberal bias emanating from liberals. And perhaps just in case it turns out prime numbers emanate liberal bias too, he's even registered Big23.com.

Breitbart has a reputation for ideological transparency. "At no point have I attempted to hide my political leanings as I have endeavored to create Big Hollywood and Big Government. There is a need for a checks and balance against the New York Times and the rest of the supposedly neutral traditional press," he exclaimed at Big Hollywood. In an interview with the Financial Times, he reiterated his commitment to openness. "I make no bones about coming from an ideological and partisan point of view. But at least I'm honest about it."

But he's not just outspoken. Taunting his own nipples on Red Eye, trash-talking Upton Sinclair at a Tea Party rally, he's entertainingly outspoken. Catch him in an especially playful mood, and he practically pukes candor. "This is the Abu Ghraib of Abu Ghraib," he exclaimed to the Washington Independent about his ACORN video series. "Abu Ghraibs for everyone! NEA Abu Ghraib! White House Abu Ghraib! ACORN Abu Ghraib! Journalism Abu Ghraib! You've all been exposed, you corrupt bastards."

NO COMMENT

When an interview subject delivers quotes like that, you pretty much just turn on your tape recorder and let the magic happen. So you can imagine how disappointed I was when I called up Breitbart, asked him about a long-term business deal he has with Reuters, and he declined to comment.

I was hoping he'd brag about how much money he's made from the deal. And fire off some zingers about how unlikely it is that he, a guy so conservative he once suggested to the New York Observer that it would "almost disgust" him to have sex with the liberal movie star Maggie Gyllenhaal, had hooked up with Reuters, an international newswire with a reputation for anti-American bias, anti-Israeli bias, and anti-conservative bias.

And maybe if I had caught in a particularly expansive mood, I figured he might brazenly exclaim that while Reuters is charging its MSM brethren thousands of dollars a month to license its content, it's paying him, the anti-MSM upstart, for editorial links he places on his two news portals, Breitbart.com and Breitbart.TV, and even on the Drudge Report.

At which point, I would have probably said something like, "Dude, you're living the blogger dream! Mainstream media's paying you to link to its content, and you're using the money you make from them to fund sites which, as you told the Wall Street Journal, aim to ‘attack the media and to expose them . . . for the partisan hacks that they are.' They're paying you to say they suck! I don't think it gets any better than that."

At which point, Breitbart might have replied, "It doesn't. It really doesn't. It does not get any better than that."



Unfortunately, Breitbart isn't talking.

Instead, he suggested I take my questions directly to Reuters. Reuters, in turn, is being tight-lipped about the deal as well. This isn't that surprising. Reuters is a major international news agency — it reports on either people's business, not its own. Finally, there's the third party in this odd menage, Matt Drudge. He hasn't responded to email requests for an interview either.

What are they trying to hide?

MATT DRUDGE: UNHERALDED WEB ALTRUIST

This particular story started in 2005, when Breitbart decided to create Breitbart.com, a streamlined news portal for hardcore information junkies seeking access to every single story produced by the major newswires.

The genius of this simple idea cannot be fully appreciated unless you understand how the Drudge Report works. To the average hard-working blockhead who's never figured out how to make millions of dollars simply for rewriting AP headlines, the Drudge Report may seem like little more than a lazy parasite. But it's actually more complicated than that. Because while Matt Drudge realized early on that the best way to make money on the web is to leverage other people's content, he's also one of the web's most generous sugar daddies, giving away tons of potential revenue to rather arbitrary beneficiaries in the newspaper industry.

That's because a large percentage of the stories the Drudge Report links to are newswire stories, which can be licensed by any entity willing to pay for them. An Associated Press story, for example, may be carried on literally hundreds of sites – and Drudge is free to link to whichever one of those sites he chooses, for whatever reasons. In turn, the lucky site he links to is rewarded with a huge blast of monetizable traffic through no reportorial work of its own.

In the early days of the Drudge Report, the Washington Post was a frequent recipient of Drudge's largesse. Take, for example, this Drudge Report screenshot from February 8, 2000. It contained eight links to the Washington Post's website, and yet to get all the traffic that resulted, the Post's reportorial staff didn't even have to investigate a press release, much less wear out any shoe-leather — every single link went to an AP story carried on the Post's site.

Over the course of a year, the Drudge Report links to thousands of AP and other newswire stories. At some point, Breitbart realized this was basically like pouring money down a drain, only worse. It was like pouring money down a drain that some random newspaper publisher was sitting under, cackling gleefully as the money poured down on him.

Why, Breitbart must have wondered, couldn't he be that cackling publisher? A newswire portal would require little investment other than the newswire licensing fees, and yet with the Drudge Report sending it a thundering river of traffic every day, it could potentially make millions of dollars in advertising too.

That Drudge didn't pursue such a plan himself is just one more reason he remains, like Morocco's tree-climbing goats, an inexplicable phenomenon of nature. Maybe he figured he was making enough money as it was. (In 2001, Drudge told a reporter that he first started earning more than "seven digits" a year in 2000.) Maybe he thought running AP articles on his own site would diminish his carefully cultivated persona as a renegade citizen journalist working outside the bounds of the traditional news media.

In any case, Breitbart.com officially launched in 2005. Over the years, both Breitbart and Drudge have maintained that Drudge has no financial interest in the site. In a 2005 CNET article about Breitbart.com, Drudge exclaimed that he had "never owned a share of any company that [he's] linked to." In 2007, Breitbart told the L.A. Times that Drudge has "zero creative or business interest in the site."

Breitbart, however, does have a business interest in the site, and as soon as it launched, he began sending Drudge Report readers to his new, extremely hungry baby.

On August 29th, 2005, for example, the Drudge Report linked to Breitbart.com 48 times. On the following two days, it linked to Breitbart.com a total of 82 times. Over this single 72-hour period, it linked to Breitbart.com more times than it linked to Slate, The Huffington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, The National Enquirer, Rushlimbaugh.com, AnnCoulter.com, Rolling Stone, and Rosie.com, combined, in six years.

These numbers come from a database compiled by Kalev Leetaru, Coordinator of Information Technology and Research at the University of Illinois Cline Center for Democracy.While the Drudge Report has never maintained an archive, DrudgeReportArchives.com, an independent site, has been taking snapshots of the Drudge Report's front page since 2001. In July 2009, Leetaru analyzed every snapshot taken between January 1, 2002 through December 31, 2008 — 171,717 pages in all — and published a report of his findings.

According to Leetaru's report, 25% of all links from the Drudge Report in August 2005 led to Breitbart.com. Needless to say, Breitbart.com flourished. In its first month of operation, the new site attracted 2.64 million unique visitors.

Incredibly enough, his good fortune was about to get even better.

CODE GREEN ALERT: PAID LINKS AT THE DRUDGE REPORT

In the early days of Breitbart.com, Breitbart licensed content from the Associated Press and Reuters, as this archived page shows. But according to documents generated in a 2005 legal dispute between Breitbart and two other parties, Reuters terminated its contract with Breitbart.com in late September.

In October 2005, however, Reuters approached Breitbart with the kind of offer that generally occurs only in the less believable tales in Penthouse Forum or when a Nigerian vicar is planning to rip you off. To wit, Reuters wanted to pay Breitbart "a fee for traffic to driven to Reuters [sic] own website."

Typically, newspaper sites pay newswires to license their content, and that's what Breitbart was doing until Reuters cancelled its original contract with him. Now, it wanted to switch things up.

Under the terms of the new proposal, Breitbart would not be able to publish complete Reuters stories on his own website. Instead, he'd merely publish headlines and summaries that would link to Reuters' own page.

Breitbart agreed to the new deal on October 14th, 2005. Six weeks later, on December 2, 2005, Reuters returned to Breitbart.com with a splash. Indeed, before December 2, Associated Press headlines occupied the most prominent position on Breitbart.com's home page. In the wake of the new deal, Reuters became the house brand.

At Breitbart.com, Breitbart's goal is to present the latest news stories as they break, regardless of their importance. If it goes out on the AP wire, or the Reuters wire, it goes on his site: Breitbart aims to carry every story the wires are producing, with the newest stories getting top billing. Thus, in his function there, he's not so much a news editor making judgements about what stories are most important as he is, say, a news grocer, assembling the widest, freshest stock of journalistic produce available.

In privileging Reuters stories over AP stories simply because the former was paying while the latter was charging him, Breitbart was merely bringing the values of the grocery store world to onlines news distribution. Supermarkets across the nation charge companies like Kraft Foods and Procter & Gamble a slotting fee to reserve the most desirable shelf space and floorspace for their products. At Breitbart.com, Breitbart was doing the same with Reuters. (Over time, the site's design evolved. In the current version of Breitbart.com, no one newswire receives favorable placement over any other. Stories from all newswires are combined into a single feed, with the most recently published stories at the top.)

At the Drudge Report, Breitbart isn't just a news grocer, however. He's a body double for the man the Daily Telegraph has dubbed "the world's most powerful journalist." Drudge enjoys this title because of his ability to direct millions of eyeballs to a specific story or issue. And since thousands of those eyeballs are attached to cable news producers, newspaper editors, White House correspondents, and radio hosts with hours of air-time to fill each day, Drudge can single-handedly turn a story into the story in a way that few others can.

Indeed, when Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza canvassed more than a dozen campaign strategists, communications directors, and other high-placed political operatives, each one agreed that "there is no single tool more powerful in the modern media for breaking a story or turning up the volume on a little-noticed comment" than the Drudge Report.

"[Drudge] serves as an assignment editor for the national press corps," Kevin Madden, former campaign press secretary for Mitt Romney, told Politico in 2008. "If he has a story up, you know the cable networks are going to cover it all day."

Thus, there are expectations – enormous expectations — that Matt Drudge and anyone working for him are not just amassing journalistic produce but are instead performing important editorial functions. Millions of readers believe the Drudge Report finds the most interesting, relevant, and entertaining needles of truth buried in the dull, biased, and sloppily reported mountains of journalistic hay the media dumps on us every day. Thousands of reporters and editors believe Drudge's nose for news is so sharp he can sniff out a scandal in the third paragraph of a story everyone else thought was so inconsequential they didn't get past the second paragraph.

No doubt Breitbart has a good nose for news too. After he made his deal with Reuters, however, a new scent began filling his nostrils-the sweet intoxicating aroma of easy money.

In a document arising from his legal dispute, Breitbart admitted that he had "at times, caused there to be hyperlinks to Reuters' website from the Drudge Report, and that some of those links have contained the same tracking code as links to Reuters' website from www.Breitbart.com."

Here, of course, would be a great place for Breitbart and Reuters to chime in with some specific information about the nature of their deal.

For example, were the Drudge Report links a formal part of their arrangement?

Was Reuters paying Breitbart a flat fee for the paid links he was placing on Breitbart.com and The Drudge Report, or was it paying him based on the amount of traffic he was driving to its site?

These questions, alas, remain unanswered, because Breitbart declined to talk about his deal with Reuters and Reuters has been nearly as silent.

If you examine the links to Reuters.com at Breitbart.com, however, you'll find that that they all contain a common feature — a string that reads "RPC=22" or "RPC=23."

On this single subject, Reuters did shed a little light. According to Erin Kurtz, PR Head of Thomson Reuters' Americas and Media Division, the RPC string in a Reuters.com URL is "a parameter that enables [Reuters] to track clicks from URLs on our newsletters, from/to partner sites, etc."

Examine the Drudge Report's links to Reuters.com links and you will see that the RPC string can be found in some of them as well. See, for example, the URL associated with the "Hope" headlines that leads The Drudge Report on December 15, 2005.

But how often, exactly, was this happening?

Kalev Leetaru's database of Drudge Report snapshopts reveals that before Breitbart agreed to his new deal with Reuters, the RPC string never appeared in any of the nearly 700 links from the the Drudge Report to Reuters.com that were published between January 1, 2002 and October 14, 2005.

After the new agreement, however, the RPC string began to appear, well, it was just like Breitbart said. The RPC string began to appear "at times." What Breitbart didn't say, however, was that the RPC string also began to appear at other times. And other other times. Which is to say, it basically started to appear in almost every Reuters.com link the Drudge Report featured. Meanwhile, the frequency with which the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com began to increase.

How much? The Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com just 29 times from January 1, 2005 to October 14, 2005. Then, Breitbart signed his new deal to drive traffic to Reuters.com for money. From October 15, 2005 to December 31, 2005, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 229 times.

In all fairness, it may be that this abrupt 2900% increase in Reuters.com links didn't have all that much impact on the Drudge Report's content.

Like most news outlets, Reuters produces a certain number of commodity stories — a summary of a White House press conference, a field report from a candidate campaign appearance — that numerous other sources are reporting on as well. If, suddenly, the Drudge Report started favoring Reuters' accounts over the Associated Press's or the New York Times', well, the Drudge Report's readers were still getting information about whatever events its editors deemed most important.

In addition, it's not as if Breitbart had struck a deal with a spammer or a lobbyist looking to promote a specific product or policy. The Reuters.com links led to news stories, not penis-enhancement ads or campaign talking points.

Still, it's pretty clear that with the new deal in place, Breitbart began to look at Reuters.com the way Sarah Palin looks at the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In his case, however, he had unchecked authority to drill, baby, drill!

In 2006, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 1888 times. At this point, it trailed only Breitbart.com as the Drudge Report's favorite destination. Meanwhile, 1852 of those links, or 98% of them, contained the RPC strings that Reuters was presumably using to keep track of how much traffic Breitbart was sending it.

Over the following two years, the Drudge Report linked to Reuters.com 2368 times, with 82% of those links containing the RPC strings.

While Kalev Leetaru's database does not include data for 2009, the Drudge Report still regularly features Reuters.com links containing the RPC=22 and RPC=23 strings. See, for example, the link associated with the IT'S UNDER$900,000,000,000.00 headline that appeared on October 20, 2009.

At Breitbart.com, all links to Reuters.com continue to use those two RPC strings as well. From all appearances, the synergistic three-way between Breitbart, Reuters, and the Drudge Report remains in effect.

From 2005 through 2008, the Drudge Report featured more than 4000 links to Reuters.com that included the RPC strings.

How much money did Breitbart make from them?

Don't expect an answer any time soon. But when you're single-handedly taking on what Breitbart calls the Democrat-Media Complex, every bit helps. And any money that actually comes from the Democrat-Media Complex itself must be extra appreciated.

"Newswires are, I don't know, 70% of the action, and I wanted to begin my business based on that platform," Breitbart exclaimed in a recent interview at Technorati. He then revealed that he's planning to hire reporters for Big Government and Big Hollywood, and buying up numerous domain names to expand his network of sites. "I've spent way too much money these URLs. Those guys have to be living on an island the way they're able to sell crappy URLs for $20,000," he joked.

He didn't provide any details about where the money to buy crappy $20,000 URLs comes from, but maybe the world's most powerful journalist, Matt Drudge, will eventually break that story. In the meantime, if you can't wait to see sites like BigClimate.com and BigNannyState.com, you know what to do. Every time you see a Reuters.com link at the Drudge Report, click on it at least a dozen times!

dear big bird,
how tall are you and i have been wondering are you gay, and what size shoe do you wear?
- keisha&ashley

Not to mention the obvious,

What do you like better: Ballet or Hip Hop and why?
- Rose Sue

And of course,

Ask Bird congratulations for your program!

How's your best friend?

Thanks!
- Francisco

Glenn Beck survived his appendicitis surgery and issued the following real statement:

Glenn and his wife Tania are so thankful for all the kind words, prayers and support from everyone. Well, almost everyone. Those compassionate loving liberal bloggers were bummed things didn't end differently for Glenn.

We hear the microchip-implanting portion of the operation went just fine Fuck, that was supposed to be a secret.


A tipster sends us more on the layoffs at Essence we heard about yesterday: "Essence relaunched their digital services last week via the re-design of its new website. 18 of the 20 people who worked extensively on this until, the day of launch (10.29), were let go yesterday without previous notice. In addition to digital, essence laid off several within their sales division. Severances were extended to those who had been there over a year, however, no warning or notice was provided to senior staff members.Their method was distinctly different compared to People and Sports Illustrated, for example. It was calculated and underhanded... Apparently a lot of pissed off people there."


Keith Kelly says that the hardest-hit magazines in the Time Inc. layoffs with be Fortune and Sports Illustrated, with about 40 layoffs each. Idea for avoiding this: ... ah, we got nothing. Sorry.


"Weird," "Bizarre," and other synonyms come to mind as we inform you that, starting Monday, the dying San Francisco Chronicle will be printing on "magazine-style glossy paper." What the fuck? I really don't know.

Near-retiree Washington Post editor Henry Allen punched writer Manuel Roig-Franzia in the face after Roig-Franzia called him a "cocksucker." Hank Steuver, a WaPo colleague whose editor is Allen, thinks the man may have some issues:

What made Henry snap was that a writer called him a naughty word, an epithet that rhymes with "coughstucker" and is playfully or spitefully reserved as a way to insult a man, by implying he's gay.

Being an enthusiastic coughstucker myself, I would someday like to ask Henry if it was the insulting delivery of the word, or the subtext of gayness that the word implies that angered him most?...Was it about the person who said it? The way he said it? Or that it was said at all? If another person in Style called me a coughstucker, I'd just have to shrug and use the Popeye retort: I am what I am.

You're totally missing the point, Hank. Imagine how you would feel if someone called you a vagina sucker! It's a slur because it was meant to be a slur. Why not ask Manuel why in the world he would use "cocksucker" as anything less than a term of endearment? Outrageous! A slur is not rendered moot to the average testosterone-filled male simply because it's true. I may be ugly, but I don't want it pointed out to me.

[And be sure to watch that dramatic re-enactment video of the fight, performed by Washington City Paper employees. A+. It does make Henry Allen appear somewhat unstable though! Via Romenesko]

Of course this all came in the midst of news that the Yankees were better with their baseball racquets than some other men, and an election happened yesterday that is still pretty meaningless (though all the papers seek meaning). Luckily bored editors spiced things up with some intrigue and orginality.

The New York Times: like most of the papers today it's all baseball and politics. You know, man things that ladies don't understand. The lead picture is of Hideki Matsui hitting a ball somewhere for some purpose. Bloomberg is mending fences, that previously he just would have bought and had coated in diamonds, following his slim election victory. We're all going to die of swine flu, and regular flu too, because there's not enough vaccine. New Jersey's new governor tries to prove he's more than just not Jon Corzine. And Mickey Mouse is to be reimagined as a crack-smoking, pistol-wielding badass. Or something like that.

The Washington Post: well done Washington Post, for leading with a completely different story about Iran. Apparently people took to the streets to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the seizing of the American embassy in Tehran. Other people took to the same streets to protest against the government. I did not know this had happened. Now I do. Journalism in action! Digital readers are poised to break through over the holidays, maybe. Computers went wrong and stuck 750 traffic lights on red. And then a lot of politics stuff that is too similar to yesterday's election analysis to summarise without destroying my very soul. Here, here and here.

The LA Times: in the 'it's not really interesting but we wish it was because it's a good piece of reporting' column on the left is a story about native Americans rebuilding after a feud. Toyota lied to people about a safety defect. There's a report on Italy's trial-in-absentia of 23 Americans for kidnapping (rendering, whatever) an Egyptian man on their soil. They have to worry about water in California, apparently. And again, the same dull anlaysis of the nothing that happened yesterday in politics here. Finally a story about the Senate extending credits for homebuyers that is notable mainly because I am Facebook friends with the reporter but had forgotten. Must poke him.

The New York Post: before you comment on the tiny image - I know. The Post goes with (see if you can guess) the headline 27th Heaven, referring to the Yankees' 27th World Series victory last night!

The Daily News: before you comment on the tiny image - I know. The News goes with (see if you can guess) the headline 27th Heaven, referring to the Yankees' 27th World Series victory last night! Great minds etc.

The Wall Street Journal: has also gone with a Native Americans story on the front page. Apparently Mexican pot growers are sick of smuggling bundles of weed across the border and are sneakily growing it on Indian reservations. Police seized 233,000 plants on Indian lands last year. I'm just disappointed they didn't use some kind of smoke signals based joke in the headline.

The Guardian (UK): frankly I just really liked this headline. Here someone shouting 'you lie' at the President is a big deal. In Europe, politicians get to impugn people with mental disabilities and accuse colleagues of cutting a country's penis off. Also Patrick Wintour, bylined on the story, is the brother of Anna.

The Parisian magazine magnate has long been a fixture on the Manhattan scene; he even sometimes gets his own area at high-end parties in which to take pictures. But, apart from his own musings on nightlife in the city, has mostly avoided doing press. Now Blackbook has picked up on this Japanese magazine interview with the indoor sunglasses-wearer.

"People recognise him," says the unnamed journalist, "by his signature tousled hair and stubble, a pair of tear-drop sunglasses, a tight-fitting leather jacket, pointy boots, a gold wristwatch… an intriguing mix of sexiness and discretion."

"This is a disguise," explains Zahm. "Five or six years ago, I decided to wear this kind of outfit and behave as if I were a celebrity. It's not out of narcissism. It's for the magazine. For an independent magazine to exist, I had to incarnate it personally,"

Take a look at these pictures, from Zahm's blog, and judge for yourself. There are plenty more if Thursday morning is a pensive, French, black-and-white kind of time for you.

A naked lady in Paris:

Terry Richardson leaping:

A naked lady in Paris again:

Paul Sevigny with a surfboard:

But would she dare leave the world of touchy-feely daytime syndication that made her?

Oprah's contract with CBS expires in 2010, the same year OWN is scheduled to launch, and she's certainly taking her sweet time deciding whether or not to renew it. Lady O has repeatedly given up supporting roles in major media outlets in favor of lead roles in the outlets she singly controls—like her magazine, which features the only cover shoots she's appeared in since its launch in 2000. (Then again, once you've got Vogue out of your system and Anna Wintour's begrudging respect, do you really need magazine covers anymore?) Her partnership with the Oxygen network scaled back considerably when she discovered she couldn't exert enough control to make it "reflect her voice." The lady likes to be in charge.

Since CBS owns rerun rights on Oprah's syndicated show until 2011, if she wants her familiar, couch-sitting, tear-jerking format to be on OWN, she'll be forced either to contrive a way to divide her schtick into two shows—thereby competing with herself, risking becoming redundant, and probably irritating the hell out of the powers that be at CBS—or ditch CBS entirely to start broadcasting her show by herself.

One question is whether OWN can succeed without The Oprah Winfrey show, which has always anchored the disparate branches of her high-consumption universe. She already has plans to outsource some of the personality-driven portions of OWN's programming to her proteges (god knows the Oprah-lite army is big—and greedy—enough) and relegate herself to a man-behind-the-curtain role. Erspamer's presence at OWN could help orchestrate that (the press release calls it an "injection of Oprah's DNA into OWN"), or it could be a signal that Oprah wants OWN to bear the mark of Harpo, which could just as easily mean melding the two. The others question is whether the Oprah Winfrey brand exists without Oprah's physical presence—and whether she would want it to.

Time Inc. layoffs: People magazine is looking for eight buyout candidates. The memo below went out to staff today:

From: Larry Hackett
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 2009 10:02:00 -0500
Conversation: Staff announcement
Subject: Staff announcement

As part of a broad Time Inc. cost savings initiative, I regret to announce
that People magazine will be making cuts in its editorial staff. We are
looking for 8 volunteers to accept severance packages among the
following Guild-covered job classifications:

Staff Correspondent
Reporter-Researcher
Writer-Reporter
Writer-Editor

I strongly urge each of you to contact People's human resources
representatives... for details regarding your
particular package.

The call for volunteers expires on November 19th. If necessary, we will
then follow the guild contract procedure for conducting involuntary layoffs
in these Guild categories.

If you have any questions, please see me or your department heads.

A tipster tells us the Time Inc. layoffs struck Essence today. We're told the mag had a total of 18 layoffs, including "the entire web team." If you know more, email us.


Oh, and Time Inc. has decide to fold Fortune Small Business, a spinoff mag that was actually owned by Amex and sent directly to cardholders. Eleven layoffs there, reportedly.


Did you know that Al-Qaeda is bucking the current media trend, by publishing magazines? It's true. And the latest one has a nice grenade on the cover, proving they know how to move copies. Read all about it here, then explain why you did so to the NSA.


Hello, Vogue has a new publisher! Her name is Susan Plagemann, and Conde Nast lured her away from Hearst. John Koblin says that her hiring—and an accompanying broadening of Tom Florio's responsibilities—follows the recommendation of McKinsey, to ensure "a clearer bureaucratic structure is now in place." Everything is different now.

We invited both Danny Hakim and Jeremy Peters, the reporters whose e-mails to Spitzer and David Paterson flack Christine Anderson we published, to explain or defend themselves in our post. Both declined. They didn't refuse to talk to us—in fact, they each bent our ear for quite a while, occasionally loudly. But they refused, after repeated invitations, to grant us leave to memorialize their explanations, emendations, arguments, and defenses in the post. After the post went up, one of Hakim and Peters' colleagues at the Times sent us a (friendly) e-mail explaining what, in his view, was wrong with it. The first three words of the e-mail were, "off the record." Not long after that, we got another e-mail from a Times e-mail address that opened with, "this email is not for publication."

We won't violate their sourcing conditions. But we can say there has been a common theme in the responses so far, encapsulated by New York's Jessica Pressler, along the lines of: "So what? This is how it works." Indeed. What the e-mails do in fact demonstrate is that one of the ways in which journalism is traditionally practiced is that reporters communicate deferentially with flacks in an off-the-record capacity. That was kind of the point, and we understand that there are differing interpretations of the value of that sort of arrangement. For instance: We've never asked a flack for permission to call someone that we wanted to speak to, as Danny Hakim did when he wrote to Anderson, regarding David Paterson's former mistress, "Can we put out a call to her to see if she wants to talk?" We find that sort of request to be at odds with the Times' public image of itself as a titan of journalistic propriety and check on government malfeasance. But, as the e-mails we published clearly indicate, Anderson responded to Hakim's request with the ex-mistress' cell phone number, something that could have been quite helpful to him. So yes, he asked for permission. But he got what he wanted.

That is an interesting and valid argument, and may or may not have been made by people that we may or may not have talked to in the course of reporting the post. But for some reason, none of the people at the Times whose e-mails we published, or their colleagues who want to defend them, are willing to put their names on it. We suppose that there are perfectly good corporate reasons for Hakim and Peters and their defenders to refuse to speak on the record, and we actually love people who tell us things we want to know under cover of anonymity, which we routinely and freely grant to our sources, including Times staffers. But for employees of a newspaper whose sourcing policy begins, "readers of the New York Times demand to know as much as possible about where we obtain our information and why it merits their trust," it's just a strange way to go about reacting to the publication of undisputed documentary evidence of the way some Times reporters do their jobs, especially if there's ostensibly nothing noteworthy about those e-mails.

In any case—yes, we know a little bit about how journalism is done, and what Pressler calls the mundanely "deferential, even sycophantic" stance that many reporters take when it comes to "valuable sources," which in the case at hand means sources paid by the state of New York to manage those deferential and sycophantic reporters. And we're learning more about it as we continue to go through the 1,000 or so pages of e-mails we have left to go through.

November 4, 2009

To: Time Warner Colleagues

From: Jeff Bewkes

Subject: Innovating for Future Success

We've had a lot of good news this past quarter, despite the tough economy. Our financial performance exceeded expectations and kept us on track to post solid results for the full year. So we have raised our business outlook for 2009. We also expect to spin off AOL by the end of the year and become a more content-focused media company. In addition, we're making strong progress on our key operating objectives. Our financial and strategic successes give me confidence that we'll be well positioned to drive steady and attractive returns to shareholders next year and into the future.

In the third quarter, our overall adjusted OIBDA was 9% lower than in the same period last year. But, importantly, our Content Group businesses that will soon make up the new Time Warner – Turner, HBO, Warner Bros. and Time Inc. (along with TWX corporate) – generated adjusted OIBDA that was about even with the year-ago quarter and up 2% for the first nine months of the year. In light of these relatively strong results, we increased our business outlook for 2009 adjusted earnings per share (adjusted EPS) to at least $2.05, up from our previous outlook of around $1.98. Also, for the first time, we provided a full-year adjusted EPS outlook for our Content Group – at least $1.75 in 2009, compared to $1.42 last year. (Please click here to read the press releases.)

As I've mentioned before, we have four operating objectives to drive the profitability of our core content businesses:
· Leveraging our scale and brands to deliver compelling content consistently;
· Continuing to improve the efficiency of our operations to maintain our competitive advantage;
· Expanding internationally; and
· Developing new business models to capitalize on shifting technologies in a way that both benefits consumers and builds on our successful business models.

Let me highlight that last objective here. Time Warner has a long tradition of building businesses on new technologies to provide consumers with the choice and convenience they want – from pay television at HBO and CNN's around-the-clock news to the leadership at Turner and HBO in video on demand (VOD) and Warner Bros.' launch of DVDs.

We're extending that record of innovation throughout Time Warner. For example, we're advancing TV Everywhere even faster than I expected. As you know, TV Everywhere is an industry initiative to allow those who subscribe to TV in their homes to watch their favorite programs at no extra charge on a wide range of other devices. Consumers get more for their money, and the industry benefits from expanding its current business model to the Internet. There are several trials underway with major distributors, with additional distributors and programmers planning to join. We're also developing the technological tools to ensure TV Everywhere is a seamless user experience.

Looking ahead, we'd like to develop a similar model for the publishing industry. As e-readers and other mobile technologies become more sophisticated and popular, consumers will want magazine content available conveniently on a range of these devices. So it's an exciting opportunity for Time Inc. and the rest of the industry to give consumers the content they want, when and how they want it – while growing both circulation and advertising revenue.

Among other innovations going on around the company, Turner last month launched the new CNN.com. It's been totally redesigned to make it more visually compelling and to integrate more video and such features as a new opinion section and partnerships with Oprah.com, PEOPLE and Entertainment Weekly. The press reviews have been very positive, and we look for CNN.com to extend its leadership as the #1 destination for online and wireless news.

Another example is a recent VOD trial that Warner Bros. conducted with Comcast in Atlanta. In a first for a major studio, Warner Bros. released two films – Observe and Report and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – on VOD for cable subscribers several days before they were put out on DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. This VOD trial not only offered consumers more options to see the movies, but it also helped promote the sale of their DVDs themselves.

These are challenging but exciting times for Time Warner. As a content-focused company, I believe that we'll be better able than ever to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies. At our core, of course, we're about great content. So I'll close by congratulating the winners of our 34 Primetime Emmys at Turner, Warner Bros. and HBO, which won the most of any network for the seventh straight year. As always, I appreciate your dedication and hard work.

Summary of what's going on in newspaper industry stocks in the last couple of years: They're finally tanking, and rationally so. Warren Buffett—partial owner of the Washington Post!—declared this year that he wouldn't buy a newspaper at any price. The last bits of hopefulness have left investors, even the contrarians. The newspaper industry is the buggy industry during Henry Ford's time, and other cliches.

But! Here in the muddy, mythical end of the recession, it's become fashionable (primarily amongst newspaper company executives) to say that a comeback is in the offing! The worst is over! The New York Times' recent $35 million quarterly loss, for example, is a sign of the great progress the company's making. Get in while the getting is cheap!

Well, as the WSJ ably points out today: What's really happened is that newspapers saw momentarily more encouraging numbers thanks to vicious cost-cutting across the board, and a somewhat less horrific economy at large. But there's not a whole lot of cost-cutting left to do before you cut your paper down to nothing. And the newspaper advertising business isn't looking up.

The reality is that newspapers are suffering severe declines in ad revenue this year on top of the double-digit percentage declines they suffered last year.
Compared with the first half of 2009, their recent performance doesn't appear to be getting much worse, but it has yet to show any real recovery.

The print ad business is in an irrecoverable dive, there's no comparable replacement revenue source, quality will likely continue to decline (unto death) at many old-school newspaper companies, and the internet still exists. Sorry.

To: TIME Edit staff
From: Rick Stengel
Date: Nov. 4, 2009

Time Inc continues to look at ways to reduce costs and lower operating
expenses. As a result, there will be an opportunity for a limited number
(up to 12) of Time Edit staffers to volunteer and depart with a severance
package. We will entertain volunteers from all Guild-covered categories in
all geographic locations. The call for volunteers will expire on the close
of business November 18th. Anyone interested in knowing more details and
having a confidential conversation about a severance package should contact
Peter Vincent at x7294. Let¹s all meet in the bullpen at 9:45 this morning
before the regular 10 o¹clock meeting. Thanks, Rick

And a rumor from Editorialiste on Twitter: "Top Time Inc. editors willing to take salary cuts to save jobs." Admirable.

Because once Carter (and his wife Marilyn, who now says he's innocent of abusing her) got onto that flight, they went to Kansas City for a little R&R, just to get away from it all. Apparently it did not go so well. According to the New York Post (which is gleefully pursuing this story, which is another problem for Dominic Carter) the following things happened after the Carters arrived:

1. Dominic Carter was supposed to give a "motivational speech" to the NAACP in KC. He canceled, because "he wasn't feeling well."

2. The next day, a relative called the cops and told them they feared Dominic was suicidal.

3. The Carters' daughter calls KC cops shortly afterwards, to say her mother seemed to be "under duress," and that the family has "domestic violence issues."

4. It becomes clear that Marilyn has disappeared.

5. Police later locate her at the KC airport. She'd abruptly decided to leave, buy a plane ticket, and fly home.

Next time, the Bahamas?

Chris Rovzar (who's been on fire with the media stories this week) says that McGeveran might have quit over a takedown of the Newark Star-Ledger that Kushner insisted be more vicious. The Star-Ledger, remember, reported, with some relish, the scandal that put Jared's dad Charles behind bars five years ago. NY Mag also point out that the newspaper is a competitor to Kushner's website PolitickerNJ.com.

Last month this piece appeared; a musing on the woes of journalism state-wide, that featured the Star-Ledger. Sources told Rovzar that "what came back was not satisfactory to Jared," who wanted more blood. The ethics conflict over a publisher out for revenge added to McGeveran's woes as an interim editor who had to cut staff while his boss interviewed for his replacement. "It was the straw that broke the camel's back," another co-worker added.

Kushner's reps did not comment, but McGeveran denied the story. You can't help but feel sorry for the guy. Maybe he'll land a cushy job as part of the Wall Street Journal's new New York section, outed today in the Times. For which the paper is apparently making subtle headhunting enquiries to journalists.

Most of the front pages focus on the fact that New Jersey and Virginia statehouses went Republican while a congressional district in upstate NY went Democrat for the first time in 100 years despite (or perhaps because of) the interference of Sarah Palin. The New York press go big on the news that Bloomberg didn't win by as much as you would have thought considering he spent a bajillion dollars and handed out dubloons from his sedan chair. The story that Warren Buffett decided to fulfill magnate cliches and invest in trains makes a splash too. And apparently there's also some baseball game later.

The New York Times: above the fold it's all politics - an election round-up and two stories about Bloomberg's narrow margin of victory dominate. Below the fold it's fun time! Iraqis are using a useless stick to try and find bombs! Police are using dogs for sniff-test lineups!

The Washington Post: here it's all politics, all the time (except for a cursory tale about a high-school football star benched for chest-bumping). They go big with the local story; that the GOP has reclaimed Virginia. They hit Obama twice - once with a story saying Democrats aren't doing the hard cost-cutting work on the health bill and another saying it's not 2008 any more and that he should watch out. They preface the latter with the caveat that you can't tell anything from off-year elections. Then proceed to conjecture anyway.

The LA Times: perhaps understandably for a newspaper thousands of miles away from most of the elections last night, devotes one corner to the GOP 'comeback' (my inverted commas), and gives the main splash to a story about the machinations over the choice of the new LA police chief. Warren Buffett's $34bn purchase of Burlington Northern Railroad is seen as a harbinger of recovery, and there's also a piece on peaceful protest in Palestine.

The New York Post: the Post never misses an opportunity to unleash Photoshop for a sporting event. And today is no different. Inside they cover the big three political stories - Corzine's loss in Jersey, Upstate going Democrat and Bloomberg's narrow win.

The Daily News: wins the stating-the-obvious award in pointing out that it is Bloomberg's last chance to deliver as mayor. As he's unlikely to roll back term limits again and run a fourth time, this seems somewhat obvious. It does ask the intriguing question, also posed elsewhere, of what might have happened if the Democratic machine had thrown its weight behind their official candidate, Bill Thompson.

The Washington Times: It's always fun, when politics is big news, to see what the right-wing nutjobs have to say. The other Times says independents "fled" back into the arms of Republicans, saying it never meant anything and begging their forgiveness. Meanwhile those grass-roots (as in stoked by the conservative media) tea-partiers say they're now ready for 2010 after agitating for the upstate New York congressional race. That their guy lost. Also, environmental regulation is bad for business and the EPA is very naughty for pursuing unorthodox means to ensure it.

Aripaev: I do not speak Estonian and have no idea what this says. But this Talinn daily is laid out by legendary newspaper designer Jacek Utko, and highlights the fact that for some reason US broadsheets all have an aesthetic straight out of the 1890s. Utko thinks that good design can save newspapers. It's worth a try!

CityFile reports that Newhouse paid $20 million for this fancy spindly-looking sculpture, "L'Homme Qui Chavire" by Alberto Giacometti, and now he's selling it at Sotheby's, where it's estimated to go for about half that. This, after he tried and failed to sell it at $20 million and $16 million.

Regular Americans know this move as "Desperately taking shit to the pawn shop, to pay the bills."

Conde Nast! Glamor!
[Cityfile]

From: Hackett, Larry - People
To: +TI-PG-WEEKLY-EDITORIAL-WORLD
Subject: Important Staff Meeting 10 a.m. TOMORROW

There will be a general staff meeting at 10 a.m. TOMORROW in the 30th floor
conference room. All People editorial team members are encouraged to attend.

• Rupert Murdoch is still willing to pour money into the New York newspaper wars, "decline of the newspaper industry" be damned. He will not rest until he can claim superiority over the NYT as a general interest paper in the NYC market. Or he will die trying, literally!
• People most likely to be angry about this: The WSJ's Boston bureau, which was recently closed.
• People who should be most worried about this: New York Post staffers. Every dollar Rupert puts into the WSJ is a dollar that he's not putting into the Post. Which already has very good local coverage, in a vile tabloidy way.
• People who may view this news with keen interest: The 100 New York Times newsroom staffers who have to be gone by the end of the year. "Hiring," you say?

Gene Weingarten's nomination for Worst WaPo Styles Piece of All Time: This thing. "The Light and the Labyrinth." I read it but do not understand it? It has to do with a labyrinth *apparently*. Full analysis in the comments, please. And the conceptually worst Styles story of today is "Rich Kids Like Heroin, Surprisingly."


How is the media in Russia making money, these days? Sexy nude women and bloody murder. They've surpassed us already.


Hey, it is a story about The Onion, in the New York Times. The funny thing about The Onion is how boring its writing process is: "It's a very specific, regimented format...We spend hundreds of hours in the room deconstructing the jokes. I don't think there's anything comparable to the amount of material we generate and reject just to come up with the week's headlines." Actually that's the unfunny thing about The Onion.


The most important issue currently facing television viewers: Whether voiceovers in commercials next year will say "Two thousand ten" or "Twenty ten." Or maybe "Two thousand and ten." Regardless, as long as they remember to say "no homo" afterwards they'll be okay.

THE BEST: The Texas Tribune just launched. It's a nonprofit Texas journalism dealie led by perpetual Ellie winner editor Evan Smith, and funded by millions of dollars from public-minded rich Texas dudes, as well as public donations. Paid Content reports:

it can be a little hard for those of us who came out of a post-1999 start-up environment to grasp the salaries being paid by the Tribune out of the gate: Smith's $315,000, three others at six figures. The reporters make competitive wages-up to $90,000.

All you J-school kids flocking to NYC, pack up and move to Texas immediately! Quick! It gets no better than that.

THE WORST: Once upon a time there was a music magazine called Billboard that was very respected. Now there is this: "Billboard Magazine presents: Billboard Discoveries." Pay a fee and get a totally impartial review!

What You'll Get from a Billboard Discoveries Review:

* The Billboard brand and reputation as one of the most recognized and respected authorities in music. A review by Billboard Discoveries offers a credible, powerful voice to your work.
* Unbiased, professional reviews by experienced reviewers who specialize in certain fields. Country music is reviewed by experienced country reviewers, for example, and reggae is reviewed by reggae experts.
* A review on all the songs in your Sonicbids Electronic Press Kit (about 150 words for "albums" and 130 words for singles) in the same quality and style of writing as standard Billboard reviews (Discoveries reviews do not include ratings). Reviews can be used in their entirety or excerpts for marketing and advertising purposes.

What You Won't Get from Billboard Discoveries:

* Any guarantee of a positive review. Billboard Discoveries reviews are honest and impartial and run the gamut from glowing to scathing to everything in between. By upholding Billboard's rigorous editorial standards, we ensure these reviews retain their integrity and remain meaningful.
* Publication or exposure in Billboard Magazine or Billboard.com. Reviews you receive from the Billboard Discoveries service are yours only: discretion over how they are shared or promoted is exclusively yours, and neither Billboard Discoveries nor Billboard will share them publicly or with any third party.

See, kids: Stay around New York and end up writing paid reviews for Billboard Discoveries ("Joe Arnold Sings the Bee-Gees is an upbeat crowd pleaser sure to have a crowd dancing, whether a crowd of children or a crowd of lemurs"). Or, hop a Greyhound to Texas and make your fortune doing real journalism. Leave now!
[Pic via]

Erik Wemple reports that Allen and Roig-Franzia had been beefing for days before the incident, ever since Henry questioned one of Manuel's stories and Manuel called him a "dick." Then, last Friday, Manuel allegedly "reached across the table and grabbed Allen's notepad, tearing a page from it."

Cruising for a bruising, Manuel. Selling woof tickets. Your mouth is writing some pretty big checks. Can your ass cash those checks? Subsequent events indicate your ass cannot.

Fast forward to the battle in question later that day, when Manuel called Henry a "cocksucker" after he criticized another story:

At that, Allen leapt into action, shoving Roig-Franzia. He then popped him in the cheek [Ed. note: We hear there's still some question as to whether it landed on the cheek or the back of the head]. According to an eyewitness account, Roig-Franzia didn't try to match the 5-11, 200-pound Allen punch for punch, instead opting for more of a civil-rights-movementy kind of stance.

We think you get the picture. Allen was told never to return to the newsroom, the CP says, but guess what: he already took a buyout and was retiring this month anyhow. Haha.

Henry Allen wins. And incidentally—Allen reportedly told Roig-Franzia that the "charticle" that got him so mad in the first place was the second-worst story he'd seen in 43 years. The worst, according to the CP: "a mistake-ridden profile of Paul Robeson that never saw the printed page." Paul Robeson was also a badass.

Violence is wrong, etc.
[Self portrait by Henry Allen himself]

The Detroit Free Press ran a series of articles about Medicare on the suggestion of the health care company Humana, which also bought ad space to go with the series. Incredibly, the Detroit media situation just got slightly more wretched.


Mika Brzezinski says that when she was canned from her CBS gig a while back she tried to act all brave and happy for her kids but then one day her daughter got really upset about her losing her job because she knew mommy loved that job so much and ever since then Mika resolved not to lie to her kids about how she felt about being fired. Not sure what the point of all that is.


Sportswriters at the Denver Post are no longer allowed to make predictions about sporting contests they're covering. Sez their editor: "It is an ethical move. Sports writers are no different than other news-beat reporters. We would not have political reporters picking sides in a political contest." Huh. Cause I could swear that sort of horse race coverage is the majority of what political reporters do? Reporting on who's winning. With polls and things like that? So you have a good idea, by election day, who's going to win? And also I could have sworn that you just made sports beat writing 50% more boring? Ah well. You don't want sports beats writers changing the outcome of a game by predicting one team will win. Which always makes that team win. So.


The Washington Post's ombudsman brings back the ol' throwback question, "Does Howard Kurtz have a conflict of interest because he's a WaPo media reporter and also has a show on CNN, which he covers?" The answer of course is "Yes." Jesus. Please stop discussing this face-smackingly obvious "question." A better question is, "Why doesn't Howard Kurtz ever have anything interesting to say?"