Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa, has won a [settlement in a] libel case against the Guardian UK, which published "an article that mistakenly claimed he was a rapist." Helluva mistake! The newspaper ran an apology but Zuma felt it wasn't big enough. We're usually not sympathetic to these UK libel cases but if you "mistakenly" call the president a rapist, no correction is too large. [Which is not to say Jacob Zuma is a nice guy.]


Alt-weekly chain Creative Loafing borrowed $30 mil in 2007 to buy alt-weeklies in Chicago in DC, in one of the worst-timed media deals of the past decade not involving the Tribune Co. Now there's fear that the hedge fund that's the company's largest creditor could sell off its parts for scrap. That's what you would do if you were that hedge fund, too.


Reed Business Information is putting Publishers Weekly, Broadcasting & Cable, and several other trade magazines up for sale. And RBI CEO Tad Smith is leaving the company.


The latest idea for saving the New York Times, courtesy of Michael Arrington: the "top 10% of the writers" at the paper walk out and star their own new version of the NYT, which investors would shower with money. Hmmm. Problem—the percentage of current New York Times writers who consider themselves to be in the top 10%: 100%.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Rumor is that international playboy (wait for the joke to reveal itself) Richard Branson is interested in buying Playboy Enterprises (there it is). Last week the rumor was Hef might sell for $300 million and 72 blonde non-virgins. We cannot think of a more appropriate owner than Branson, so go for it! (Although David Carr says it's not happening).

This is a photo of writer Michael Idov originally taken for the aborted Russian rich-people magazine Snob. Bask in it.
UPDATE: In fact, Michael Idov informs us that Snob is not dead at all! He writes:

The shoot was justly discarded because I had a story running in the same issue as the story that mentioned me. You'd agree that having both would be a bit too much. Even for a publication called Snob.

It's also not a rich-folks magazine, incidentally (it's a kind of solemn scuppie post-glossy along the lines of Monocle and Good; the title is ironic), but everyone makes that mistake, and they've certainly set themselves up for it.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Observer has more on NYT Social Media Editor Jennifer Preston, solidifying the impression that, while she is clearly an enormously qualified journalist and newspaper editor, she perhaps is not so up on this "social media" thing. "Jennifer is extremely enthusiastic," says NYT digital guru Jonathan Landman. "She's not an expert to start with, but I don't think that's a terrible handicap here in real ways. Nobody's an expert." Really, nobody?

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Hartford Advocate, an alt-weekly, decided to outsource an entire issue's worth of writing to India, for fun. It didn't save them money, and they're not advocating it as a media strategy; it was just kind of a goof. If management likes it too much, they may come to regret it.

Sam Zell now admits that his hugely leveraged purchase and subsequent destruction of the now bankrupt Tribune Co. just before the definitive crash of the newspapers business was "a mistake." No shit! So was hiring Lee Abrams, dude. If it makes you feel any better, Sam, Chicago's homeless paper is doing bad too. And New York magazine can't even afford large font!


James Renner, a reporter for the alt-weekly Cleveland Scene, got fired, apparently for sass-talking the paper's owner after the owner decided to spike a story about an affair-having state senator. Now the writer says he's going to file a wrongful termination suit, and, more importantly, he sent the entire spiked story to a blog, which published the whole thing. Streisand effect!

Spotted at the Grey Gardens premiere in NYC last night: NYT publisher Pinch Sulzberger commiserating with PR man Dan Abrams! "They were all smiles and buddy-buddy touches," reports Choire Sicha, spy. He also overheard recently canned Fox gossip columnist Roger Friedman "telling people that the firing was entirely News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch's doing." Parties are a great place to spy!


This whole "the Boston Globe may be closed" situation: what does Ben Affleck think about it? The best actor to ever come out of Boston gave this actual quote to a Globe reporter: ""I fundamentally misunderstood what was going on. Boston.com has 5.6 million readers a month, and yet this hugely successful news gathering operation is going out of business." Which is immediately followed in the story by this parenthetical: "(For the record, Boston.com had 5.7 million unique visitors last month.)" Once again, Ben Affleck has ruined everything.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: "I'm absolutely sure each of the Time Inc. brands I work on will be standing after we're all gone." We'll all be gone next week.

PR trade mag PRWeek (my former employer) is scrapping its weekly print edition and going monthly, starting in June. They'll keep putting out daily news and weekly newsletters online. No, they're not changing the name.

Alt-weeklies are having trouble selling ads, naturally. The Creative Loafing chain is cutting executive pay up to 15%, a decision that was live-blogged by Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple under the honest headline "Shit— My Pay Just Got Cut!", which immediately triggered a comment from a laid off Creative Loafing staffer saying "At least you are still employed, you ungrateful whinny bitch." The internet is truly enabling a wondrous new age of communication.


Recently deceased environmental magazine Plenty has former writers angry about the lateness of their paychecks, but now they'll have somebody new to complain to: The Rolling Stones! Keyboardist Chuck Leavell's 'Mother Nature Network' just bought the Plentymag.com website, for some reason. He surely won't be the one responsible for paying the old writers, but still, good excuse to write a letter to the Rolling Stones.


Staffers at the University of Oregon's independent student paper The Daily Emerald decided to go on strike to protest a plan to hire a publisher affiliated with the school who would have had oversight powers over their content. Which led the proposed publisher to withdraw his nomination. They point is, hey, a college student protest that actually worked! Cheers to everyone involved.


CBS does not want to merge its news operations with CNN, okay? Just forget it.

What's this, jobs? HDNet's Dan Rather Reports is hiring correspondents. That's like an actual reporter job, in the media, now hiring! Any fewer than 6,000 applications means the media doesn't understand economics.

A late-breaking plane crash leads to an unfortunate juxtaposition of covers for the New York Post. They fixed it online. These things happen. [EV Grieve]

Chuck Todd, NBC's goateed new White House correspondent, is already burned out on this White House press corps bullshit! Even new president Change O'Hope has no use for the reporters: "Today, it was so bad that we were kept behind closed doors so that these CEOs and other business leaders could leave without accidentally mingling with us poor press peons." Today is the day Chuck Todd realizes he should have kept his old job. That was quick.


Hard times: the Connecticut state government cancels all of its magazine subscriptions, saving the state $40,000. That's a lot of magazine subscriptions? How many copies of Bridgeport Living do you really need?

Oh, come on now: the Phoenix New Times wrote, edited, and published an entire cover story based on a satirical blog post saying the NBA was going to limit how many tattoos players could have. Not some meta-deconstruction, but a story about this tattoo cap and how it's going to affect, you know, NBA players. The NBA itself never called them back, so they just went with it!


Conde Nast cancels plans to launch a Japanese edition of Glamour, sending Japan spiraling back into a purely agrarian lifestyle, based upon barter.

The New Yorker was Conde Nast's biggest ad page loser last year, and now their publisher is leaving! Drew Schutte came to the NYer last year from Wired—now he's leaving to be "chief revenue officer" of Conde Nast Digital. He's being replaced by Lisa Hughes, publisher of Conde Nast Traveler. Which did better than the New Yorker last year. Needless to say. [NYP]


Last fall Time Out NY had some trouble paying its bills, but fearless president Alison "you can sign my name to that" Tocci assured staff that they'd pull through the tough times. Today, we hear, Tocci announced a new 5% across the board pay cut at a staff meeting. Allow our shamefully anonymous tipster to take up the story there:

[She said it's the] only way, they've done every single cutback possible and had instituted a hiring freeze. We were then invited to a pizza party — do you know how much money 50 large pizzas with toppings must cost? This is a week after they proudly sent an allstaff e-mail announcing their annual sponsorship of yet another NYAMBL bowling team, because god forbid we don't get back against Rachel Ray's team.

Oh, and that hiring freeze? Not ten minutes before she brought it up, she had introduced our ten new hires to everyone.

But she did so while using her real name, presumably. So cut her some slack.

Whoa, Philly Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, whoa! "Should Google 'pick up' (steal) our stuff, if we successfully sued them for $1 billion, two good things happen: 1) Our money problems are solved; 2) everyone else will stop stealing our content." And should Stu Bykofsky suddenly shit gold, his money problems would be solved as well. Whoa now.


Some dude from Tennessee wants to buy the six-paper Creative Loafing chain of alt-weeklies for $13.3 million. Sell. Sellsellsell! Quickly!

Finally, Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby is Twittering LIVE from the high-powered TED conference. What can you tell us, Laurel?

Thanks, Laurel.

Media earnings news: Time Warner posted write-down losses of more than $24 billion in the fourth quarter, thanks to plummeting values at its cable and magazine businesses, and at AOL. 1,250 layoffs TK. And Disney's disappointing earnings this quarter made its stock sink further today. But Bob Iger found a shiny nickel on the sidewalk!


The Washington Post will no longer pay employees extra for things like online chats, videos, and blogs. Eh.

The Daily Beast started out really strong! Now traffic is down. But Tina Brown still has millions of dollars to burn before they think about folding, so have no fear! This whole situation gives Michael Wolff an excuse to give triumphal quotes. For some reason!


Oh, we've located a sector of the media that's not doing horrendously: locally owned alt-weeklies in small markets. Congratulations to them! In contrast, the Village Voice is a non-locally owned alt-weekly in a large market, and we hear that there was a manhole cover explosion outside its offices today. This is all connected.



A tipster sends us this screen grab to point out: the LA Times now has no compunction about letting the New York Times plant ads all over its site. Where's yer ballz, Zell?!?!

The shortest bit of advice that smart PR people can take about bad press is to just suck it up. Nobody likes a negative review, but you have to take the long view of things. Cutting off news outlets for one story you didn't like is the equivalent of selling all your stocks as soon as the market has a bad day; a panicky way to ensure that you get nothing good in the future.

Jerry Portwood tells us that when he spoke to the PR guy in question,

He explained that [Meryl Streep's daughter] Grace hadn't seen the piece but the publicists were not pleased. Whatever, free tix are one thing, no big deal. If I want to see the show I'll pay for them like the rest of the world. But to invite and reserve tickets for an editor of a newspaper and then to rescind that promise because of a feature that runs seems like a bad precedent.

Correct! And as a public service on behalf of every reporter in the world, we'd like to remind flacks at large that NO freebie—be it free passes to an event, free product samples, or a free lunch—ever implies positive coverage as a quid pro quo. If you want a guarantee of positive coverage, only represent things that are great, or try handing out cash-filled envelopes to the shadier members of the journalism profession. [Media corollary: Do not sell your soul for freebies.]

Now: do freebies in practice lead to more positive coverage? Of course! Reporters are human, and being treated nicely engenders warm feelings in them, which are often subconsciously reflected in nicer coverage. That's why PR people give out freebies in the first place. But always, always, there is the understanding that the media is allowed to say you suck, if that's how they actually feel. We represent the readers first, and all that.

In conclusion, never pull back an offer and tell a journalist that you're doing it because you didn't like something they wrote. That is sure to make them hate you more, and, if they are less than perfectly professional (which is the state of the vast majority of journalists), they will make a mental note to get back at you somewhere down the line. To all the flacks who can graciously swallow bad coverage and smile at the reporter the next day (even if you don't want to), the world—and the media—is yours.

[Disclosure: I've freelanced for the NY Press]

Eason has been holding up the Huffington Post’s Chicago website as a model. It has one employee, who essentially sifts through every media outlet in Chicago for the best stories and then links to them. He’s a filter of content, but not a creator of one. Eason is in awe of the model.

Eason sees his papers doing something similar, but it “doesn’t mean we give up on original content.” Instead, Eason wants his journalists to be filling their websites up every day with fresh content. And not just fresh content, but links to other stories written by anyone in the world.

So: Eason wants his alt-weekly writers to spend all week writing for the web—being bloggers, in essence—and then, at the end of the week, somebody pulls the best bits from the website and puts them together to create the print edition.

Problem: These cities don't need any more bloggers. There are already too many of us! What they need is more original content. Otherwise the bloggers just end up talking about each other, which is the most boring thing in the world. Shit, how much original content is left in Atlanta, anyhow? In DC, the City Paper has already stopped running cover story features. Is it raining pigs? I believe it is.

Again: we don't need more bloggers. Content is really much more worthwhile. Invest in it. Any asshole can blog, shit. You have reporters. Use them!

Solution: Fuck an alt-weekly. Become and Alt-monthly. Keep the features. Take your time. Consolidate. Save on printing costs. Save journalismism. And try not to go broke. Your cities will thank you. [Atlanta Mag via Romenesko/ Maura]

Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason tried to put a positive spin on the move as one that will allow the company to reorganize safely without hurting quality:

The move does contain good news for editorial departments in the chain. Eason announced that cuts to edit staffs at all the papers would be rolled back but stressed that all the papers should proceed with “Web-first” publishing strategies, in which writers and editors customize their content for the Internet and subsequently transfer that content into their print products.

Hmm. So the print editions will be old versions of the website? Alt-weeklies are in a tough place. They're being squeezed by the internet on virtually every front, particularly in large, cosmopolitan cities that have a lot of blog competition and heavy Craigslist use.

As for the Village Voice , we hear that it may have some layoffs coming in the very near future. We have a call in to the Voice. If you know the facts, email us.

• "It's been a tough hop for this caravan of sales crews, though. Winding their way down from California, they lost a few agents. Two were arrested in Albuquerque after they allegedly forced their way into the home of an elderly couple and beat them to death, raping the wife first. A few weeks later, another agent allegedly raped a woman in Claremont, California, so he got picked up, too."
• "In the eight months the Press investigated door-to-door magazine sales across the country, the industry has seen at least three murders, one rape, two attempted rapes, one stabbing, one attempted murder, one vehicle fatality and one attempted abduction of a 13-year-old girl."
• Crystal Mathahy (pictured), a 17-year-old in Texas, got recruited to join a magazine crew. An older cousin signed a "permission slip" for her to participate, since her mom was illiterate. She didn't make enough money to eat, and tried to leave the crew, but couldn't afford a Greyhound ticket. Shortly after, the crew's van plunged 80 feet off the side of a mountain, crushing Mathahy to death.
• "[In] Houston in 2005, a sales agent raped a 17-year-old mentally retarded girl who answered the door of the apartment she shared with her mother. To gain her confidence, that agent acted as if he had a disability as well."

Apart from the individual tragedies, the real scandal the story lays out is the blind eye that big players in the magazine industry—including the MPAA, Conde Nast, and many other top-tier publishers—turn to the well-known excesses of the subscription business. That's to say nothing of the financial risks to consumers, like being subscribed to magazines against your will. The whole thing is worth a read.

[Houston Press]

He gives up. So you pick somebody. From the altweekly's website:

"If we’ve learned anything in the last year, it’s that a vast number of New Yorkers believe they have what it takes to be a sex columnist. And so, rather than picking one from the surprisingly large pool of potential weekly contributors, we’ve chosen instead to open up the process—and, in the end, let the readers decide."

"While Christian says that the art at the New York galleries he critiques is in a separate sphere from the type of art that would appear in the fairs, we don’t want to put a reviewer in a situation that calls for an ethical juggling act. Since Christian has made it clear that he will continue to fill out the terms of his art-fair contract, we wish him great success, thank him for the excellent work he has done, and feel disappointment that he will cease writing for us."

Sources say Ortega was none too pleased by the revelation; according to one, Viveros-Faune was "working the phones" last night, spreading the word that he was getting some serious flak. We give the Voice plenty of flak ourselves, but we're impressed with how promptly they dealt with this one.

Previously: 'Voice' Art Critic Takes Heat For Conflict Of Interest

The intersection of the arts world and the journalism world is a tricky place. More so, or at least more often, than movie and book critics, reviewers of the arts tend to have had an academic or professional background in the industry. Viveros-Faune's predecessor, the brilliant Jerry Saltz, was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial, but then again, that was a nonprofit undertaking.

It's not all that hard to see why newspapers rely on critics with proven industry experience; Joe Schmo editor can usually (usally!) decipher if a book reviewer has no idea what he's talking about—if an editor isn't up on his art history, monitoring that critic is a bit thornier.

"I told my editor, so he knows, and of course I hope the paper is not going to care much." Huh! I'd wager the paper is going to care much—enough to look into the critic's work so far and to set down some guidelines for the future.