PR Man and Mediaite overlord Dan Abrams is taking a page from Gawker Media's weird website naming book, launching three new sites: Styleite, Geekosystem, and Sportsgrid, covering (guess!). Abrams tells us: "Mediaite will be connected to the other three sites in that they will share content and staff. Abrams Research is, and will remain, a distinct and separate business (much the same way so many other media companies have content arms separate from other parts of their businesses.)" We welcome new competition from Dan Abrams, because it gives us an undeserved feeling of virtue by comparison!


Uh oh: A new CPJ report finds that "At least 68 bloggers, Web-based reporters, and online editors are imprisoned, constituting half of all journalists now in jail." God damn bloggers already stole the hard work and the jobs from real journalists. Now they steal the imprisonment glory, too?


Some PR people were canned in the latest round of Conde Nast layoffs, but now the company has a job listing on Mediabistro for a PR director for the Fairchild Fashion Group and its CEO. Semi-related: We've heard from some recently laid-off Conde people that a contract clause says that if they're offered an "equivalent" job at the company and they refuse, they're out of their severance pay. So you could be enjoying a job at a great Conde mag one day, then be more or less ordered to go work on a different mag there that you hate. Not that they would ever do that! Anyhow, send us Conde Nast gossip, come on.


The New York Times Co. today said that they "currently project print advertising revenues to decrease approximately 25 percent in the fourth quarter," and that online ad revenue is projected to rise 10%, and severance costs to tally $50 million in the quarter. Also, the company is going to hang onto its paper in Worcester, MA, probably because nobody wanted to pay a decent price for it.

Speakeasy reports that the Regretsy mastermind is April Winchell, well-known comedic human. Notably, her new book publishers admit:

"We're not going to use everything from the Web site," said Jill Schwartzman, the purchasing editor at Random House. "The ones we're going to pick are the ones that work for a book-reading audience."

So read everything on Regretsy.com for free, or buy the book and read less, for a fee. Just mail April Winchell a check and continue to read her website!

According to the Washington Post's Jenna Johnson, Cooper posted an ad on a Georgetown jobs board last week looking for someone to do the wash, drive him to and from his part-time job at—wait for it—a financial services company, pay parking tickets, run errands, and schedule hair appointments.

A lot of Cooper's fellow students are aghast, and think entitled trust-fund twits like Cooper give Georgetown a bad name as a finishing school for entitled trust-fund twits, which it is. But come on—Cooper was raised in Bethesda, graduated from the Landon School, a private "boys' school" designed to turn out incipient entitled trust-fund twits, and his "Linked-In profile says he is considering jobs in finance, entertainment or both," so what are we really to expect of him?

Based on the ludicrousness of the wanted ad itself, which is posted in full below and says things like "tasks such as doing laundry that involve a lot of waiting around (time when you could be doing other tasks or doing your own stuff) will be counted for the approximate amount of time it would take to do the labor involved, [so] laundry will be counted for half an hour even though a laundry cycle takes 1.5 hrs to complete," we're pretty sure it's a prank. But it's in the Washington Post, so it's got to be true, right? Also, this YouTube video of someone named Charley Cooper's trip to Cancun during Spring Break 2008, which is posted on the same page as several other videos by a Charley Cooper who attended the Landon School and so almost certainly by Charley Cooper in question, presents independent corroborating evidence of trust-fund twit entitlement:

The Post interviewed Cooper for its story, but he insisted that it be conducted over Facebook—another red flag (that's his Facebook photo above). He said the need for someone to schedule his hair appointments was prompted by an illness in the family, and that "if I didn't already have a job, I would definitely be interested in a job that pays 10 to 12 dollars per hour and is flexible in terms of hours."

Hoax or no, the Case of Charley Cooper brings to our attention a serious matter: The increasing willingness of newspapers to appropriate the hard work of bloggers. Cooper was first reviled as a "prematurely self-important" by the blog of student newspaper the Georgetown Voice on Friday, and today the Post picked up the story in whole cloth, adding only an interview with Cooper and a wealth of background information and reporting on him. Isn't it a blogger's job to mock twits like these? And if newspapers are free to just grab instances of eyeball-exploding arrogance and unearned wealth from blogs and serve them up to their readers in exchange for a mere link, how are blogs supposed to survive? Just asking.

Here's the ad:

Job Description:

I am a Georgetown undergrad student and part time employee in the financial services industry. I am looking for someone to take care some of my everyday tasks for 1 hr a day, 5 hrs/ week, $12/hr. I live on campus which would make things very easy convenient for a Georgetown student. The normal pay per week will be $60 ($300/month), even though on occasion it will be possible to work additional hours and/or receive bonuses at my discretion.

The schedule is completely flexible because I do not need to be around when you do the work. You can even spread it out over the course of the day. As my PA you will receive an email once a day by 9:00 am with a task list for that day and a time estimate for each task. Important tasks will be bolded on the list and must be done that day (even though everything on the list should theoretically be finished on a daily basis). At the end of the day you will send me an email telling me what tasks are incomplete or that all tasks have been completed.

Tasks such as doing laundry that involve a lot of waiting around (time when you could be doing other tasks or doing your own stuff) will be counted for the approximate amount of time it would take to do the labor involved. For instance, laundry will be counted for half an hour even though a laundry cycle takes 1.5 hrs to complete.

Job Requirements:

PA example tasks -Organize closet -make bed -Drop off / pick up dry cleaning -Drop me off / pick me up from work -Do laundry -Fill up gas tank -bring car for servicing -schedule appointment for haircut -Pay parking tickets -manage electronic accounts -shopping and running errands -other random tasks.

Preference will be given to applicants who are comfortable with city driving (car will be provided) and who are available when I need to be picked up and dropped off for work. Preference will also be given to Georgetown undergrads for convenience.

Available Openings: 1

Hours: 3.0 to 7.0 hours per week

Compensation: $10.00/hour to $12.00/hour, Occasional Bonuses

Start Date: Immediately

End Date: End of School Year

Time Frame: Academic Year

Are these the "Free Love Cookies" in question? Or is that some sort of romantic literary reference that sailed over our heads? In any case: As you would expect, Min and Salman's modern friendship blossomed on the Facebook.

Llongots? We don't even know! And what else of Min herself—one doesn't get into Harvard just by loving models and going out with models and being way attractive, you know. It turns out she wrote quite a readable blog! It was called "Mongol Whored." Its most recent entry is from January of 2008, and it's now set to private, but the Google caches everything, you know.

"How do we know this is really Min's blog?" we asked ourselves. Well: "Here's how I roll: me: half Chinese, half Hungarian." And also, for example:

To: Hot Babe
From: Min
Subject: last night
Text: lovely to meet you last night—i had such a wonderful time. though am being punished for our revelry with a merciless hangover. totally worth it, though :) oh my god, smileys are so not my style (incredibly cheesy, no?), but i can't help smiling at some of the shit we pulled last night. we're quite a pair, don't you think?
love to see you again,
xoxo,
m

Steamy! We are fanning ourself—as, we expect, is Salman—over things like, for example:

In the graph of my (ineffectual) picking up men with lascivious intent, it's plotted with desire as the constant, and availability as the variable. There's no fucking mention of time, which I suppose is tied to ideas of decorum and the other things I missed when being raised at wolf-tit. I've had mixed success with my all-hours tactics...

I don't begrudge odd-hour requests of me, either. 19, taking the Greyhound back from Nova Scotia through New Hampshire I was stretched long in my seat, feet dangling in front of me. I woke, shoes and socks off, to the warm lapping on my toes. There was a guilty smile on the man sitting ahead of me, and I sized him up sleepily, not nasty. I thought briefly of the ripeness of my feet, nasty. And I mumbled, "do them evenly, yo."

We too would like 2 B Facebook friends 2 get 2 no U, gurl. Let's have one more.

I was writing, if you remember, about songs that make me wish I was in college again. The song of my senior year, of course, was Nelly's "Hot in Herre." The next year, the first year of my nostalgia, was "Hey Ya," and this year it's "Promiscuous" and "Buttons." I speak of this with my old college roommates, and we wistfully speak of the days where we mixed Red Bull, vodka, and champagne, and called it a cocktail, of dragging ourselves into an 11am sections and thinking it was early, of when scabies and self-loathing were the most serious STDs floating around campus. My musical tastes usually run to the more, well, good, but not in the case of these particular songs, these songs of if not love, then youthful experimentation and inexperience. And the rare moment when I'm walking past a homeless dude selling some acrylic gloves and pleather cellphone holders and I hear "Promiscuous," I think, damn, wish I were in college. But that I'm moved to undulate, grinding with an imagined partner on W 23rd street, reminds me, hey, maybe it's a good thing you're not in college anymore, maybe it's some sort of silver lining blessing kinda thing, maybe college Min couldn't have handled this kinda shit. Now I hear "Promiscuous," and think, damn, shame that I'm missing making out with 20 year olds to this song, but I probably saved myself an abortion or ten.

We totally like that song, too—and its message. Salman Rushdie, you are one charismatic fella.

The NYT reports that ASME is "adding 12 new categories [to the Magazine Awards] covering online media." But! Rather than present these awards at the already-interminable fancy magazine awards ceremony in May, they "will be handed out at a lunch during a March online magazine conference." At lunch!

In fact, that real magazine awards used to be a modest affair like that, before they started taking that "The Oscars of the Magazine Industry" thing too seriously and inviting random wack people like Jimmy Fallon to present awards (suck it, Jimmy Fallon). Now, the Ellies get to siphon the nerdy, unglamorous online media reporters such as ourselves off into a preliminary affair, saving the real awards ceremony for the Beautiful People. It's genius, really. But what do these categories even mean?

"The Huffington Post, if it defines itself as a magazine, we would accept the entry. If it defines itself as a newspaper, then of course it should enter the Pulitzers," he said.

Haha! But what if it defines itself as the most specialest Magazinemediainternet Thingamajig in the whole wide world? Will there be a special category for that? And what are we supposed to enter? I assume there will be several categories dedicated to fameball coverage? And make sure there's something for Julia Allison!

We're not really winning any awards. But we are going and eating a free lunch, so SCORE. The internet continues to suck the magazine industry dry, one way or another.

An announcement for a coming two-day FTC workshop called "From Town Crier to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" appeared on Wednesday in the Federal Register. The meetings, to be held in December, will seek to assess the "fundamental financial challenges to many news organizations" and how to address them using government policy. Here's what the FTC will be considering:

• "Proposals for new tax treatment for news organizations"
• "Proposals for changes in copyright law and doctrine, including the 'fair use' of news stories"
• "Proposals for an antitrust exemption applied to certain conduct of news organizations"
• "Proposals for greater public funding of public affairs news."

The idea of a bailout for newspapers has been gaining momentum lately, and the FTC workshop shows that it's not going away any time soon. It's a horribly bad idea, for reasons that have been rehearsed before: It makes an ostensibly watchdog press beholden to federal policy-makers for its continued survival; it interferes with a rapidly changing marketplace to the explicit benefit of established behemoths and disadvantage of emerging competitors; and it seeks to use the federal bureaucracy to encourage certain kinds of speech over others.

Would Gawker be eligible for a "new tax treatment"? Hell, we're a news organization—we even called an FTC spokeswoman for comment on this very blog post. What about TMZ? They break news every day. Do they need a tax break? Or does Andrew Breitbart's budding empire at BigGovernment.com, which recently broke a couple compelling stories about ACORN and the National Endowment for the Arts that certainly qualify as "public affairs news," need any public funding? How about Politico?

We presume that the answers to the above questions in any proposed FTC scheme for rescuing the newspaper industry would be no. But the distinctions and conceptual gerrymandering required to find a way to subsidize the lumbering giants at the expense of their upstart competitors—to find a reason that Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News Channel is firing on all cylinders as the Wall Street Journal faces secular decline, merits consideration while Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall doesn't—will, we suspect, render the whole project foul and reactionary. The simple fact that some news organizations are facing competitive pressure and shifting business models isn't an argument for government intervention into the content business.

The workshops come on the heels of the FTC's announcement on Monday that bloggers, Facebook posters, and Twitterers will be at risk of an $11,000 fine if they endorse a consumer product and fail to disclose compensation—including, potentially, receiving free samples for review. We certainly support full disclosure of freebies and deplore undisclosed paid shilling, but $11,000? For Facebook posts? It's a ridiculously out-of-whack expedition into online marketing. UPDATE: The FTC disputes the $11,000 figure here, and points out that fines are administered only after a hearing in federal court. But the new guidelines do clearly put bloggers who don't disclose freebies at risk of administrative action.

The FTC's argument for looking into the news business is premised in part on the special nature of reporting traditionally done by newspapers: "The reduction in news staffs raises questions over whether certain types of news are receiving less coverage as a result," reads the Federal Register announcement. "Some economists believe that public affairs reporting may indeed be particularly subject to market failure." Susan DeSanti, an FTC spokeswoman, explained to us that "it may be that there is less than socially optimal demand for investigative reporting," a circumstance that may require government redress.

The prospect of a federal commission bemoaning the demise of investigative reporting is howlingly perverse. First off: There has never been a "socially optimal" demand for investigative reporting. It's boring and expensive, and it has always been subsidized by the crossword puzzles and recipes that most people buy newspapers for. But we can think of one way the FTC can help out investigative reporters: Go back and release in full the results of the 354 Freedom of Information Act Requests that it denied last year. And pledge right now to fully cooperate with every reporter who requests information from the commission. While they're at it, maybe they could call the State Department and tell them to respond to the request for incident reports from each instance of contractors in Iraq fatally discharging their weapons that we've been waiting on for two years now. Or tell the White House to return the various calls and e-mails from us over the past nine months that they've ignored. Or tell the Federal Reserve to release the 6,000 pages of bailout-related documents that it has gone to court repeatedly to keep away from Fox News. Etc.

The federal bureaucracy exists to frustrate the efforts of investigative reporters, and the FTC's bizarre, romanticized sympathy for "public affairs" reporting strikes us as a proxy argument for their establishmentarian inclination to protect the status quo. DeSanti says the workshops are purely informational in nature, designed to "pull information together and have a discussion." The FTC routinely produces reports, with policy recommendations, assessing the state of play in given industries, and while DeSanti says "it's not at all clear" at this point that such a report will result from the proposed workshop, we suspect that they're not simply whistling Dixie.

If the Obama Administration wants to help reporters, and their employers, engage in public affairs journalism and investigative reporting, they should start by answering questions and providing information—like, say, photographs of what our servicemembers have done to Iraqi and Afghani prisoners—to anyone who asks for it, irrespective of whether they work for a newspaper or a blog.

[Via Cryptome.]

A tipster let us know that the concerned citizens on the block have started both a blog and a Twitter feed, both called "Nightmare on Jane Street." Both are very well designed in an NY Mag style with yellow backgrounds and a roach motif. Not only do they look great, but their bitchiness is pretty amusing as well. Some of our favorite tweets:

"Jane Hotel guards traded in the absurd orange hazmat trench coats for slightly less offensive, but still utterly ridiculous yellow jumpers."

"Wall St 2 filming has begun at Jane Hotel this morning. Perhaps they will be quieter than the hotel's usual crowd."

"Another night at Jane Hotel: 'No one got hurt….except that one girl who had to be carried out by security.'"

"Jane Hotel street patrol debuting their neon orange coats. Perhaps to celebrate Fashion Week b/c it certainly isn't helping with traffic."

"Looks like the Sex and the City mobs from earlier today have started sauntering west to the Jane. oh joy."

The blog is a little long-winded and sincere, but it gives a good account of what goes on every night at the club and just how loud it gets. Also great commentary on the nightly melee outside the front door which, face it, is all that most of us will ever see of the Jane. And, hey, if we're going to have to listen to complaints, they might as well be entertaining ones. @NightmareOnJane, consider yourself followed.

Not satisfied with being a kidnapping rapist, Garrido shot for the stars and took it upon himself to be a religious fanatic who believes "the Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world." Or that's what he writes on Voices Revealed, a blog associated with God's Desire, a "church" Garrido registered in June of 2008.

It's on this blog that Garrido posted a "declaration of affirmation" that insists he can control sound with his mind:

This document is to affirm that I Phillip Garrido have clearly demonstrated the ability to control sound with my mind and have developed a device for others to witness this phenomena. by using a sound generator to provide the sound, and a headphone amplification system, ( a device to focuc your hearing so as to increase the sensitivity of what one is listening to) I have produced a set of voices by effectively controlling the sound to pronounce words through my own mental powers.

He insists that he's been sent to earth to convey "the Creator's" message. It all began, he rambles, when God removed "a problem from my shoulders that behavioral scientist [sic] believe is not possible to remove." Well, that makes sense.

Though he was hellbent on spreading his message, Garrido — who goes by the handle "themanwhospokehismind" — insists he sought no controversy.

CONTROVERSY IS NOT WELCOME FOR I CHALLENGE NO ONES PERSONAL BELIEFS CONCERNING GOD. THIS IS TO PROVIDE A WAKE UP CALL THAT WILL BEGIN SAVING LIVES AND OPEN THE NEXT CHAPTER OF DEVELOPING HIS PURPOSE. THE OPPORTUNITY TO EXAMINE HAS COME IN PEACE THROUGH SOUND REASONING TO MATURELY ADDRESS HIS WISDOM IN AN ORDERLY AND KNOWLEDGEABLE MANNER.

If Garrido proves anything, it's that Americans do crazy just as good, if not better, than the rest of the world. So, thank you, Mr. G, for helping chip away our illusions of national sanity.

What do you get when you combine this dying meme with the other "Look At This Fucking Hipster" hating-hipsters-from-the-inside meme? You get Stuff Hipsters Hate, which is the type of Tumblr that you people will just keep sending us the link to until we write about it.

Here you are. Enjoy it while it lasts, because, god, [meta].

Concluding what has to have been the biggest waste of time in the history of the American judicial system, a Manhattan Supreme Court judge ordered Google to fork over the email address of the author of the now-defunct "Skanks in NYC" blog who once called Cohen a "lying, whoring skank." Armed with this information, the model did what models are renowned for doing: internet sleuthing! Says the New York Post:

Using various search engines, the clever cover girl came up with the person's name — and recognized it as a woman with whom she had a passing acquaintance.

She "was an irrelevant person" whom she'd bump into at events and restaurants around town, Cohen said. "She was always around."

Cohen, who for now is refusing to reveal her frenemie's name, said she called the girl out of the blue and surprised her.

The stammering blogger responded, "We shouldn't be talking . . . We should talk with the lawyers."

Cohen stopped her in her tracks. "I said, 'No more lawyers. It's OK. I said I forgive you. It doesn't matter anymore,' " Cohen told ABC's "Good Morning America."

"She told me we should talk in person. I said fine."

Wait, what? That's it?! What kind of bullshit melodrama is this? Where's the hair-pulling? The nail-scratching? Oh but wait, the lawyers aren't finished with this yet!

Cohen is not letting the matter drop just yet, and her lawyer, Steven Wagner, said he plans to file a defamation suit against the blogger as early as today.

Yes! A defamation suit in this case would be amazing, seeing as each side would be forced to provide evidence to show whether or not Liskula Cohen is or is not a "skank." How many men has Liskula slept with in the past five years? How many partners does a friendly lady have to bed to achieve skank status? Does blowing dudes in the back of cabs make one a skank? Unprotected butt sex? Oh my, this could be great fun. Yes, please. Ladies and gentlemen, we may have our new trial of the century right here!

Soon! The judge ruled that the blogger cannot remain anonymous, because calling someone a skank ho is actionable for a defamation lawsuit. Sez the NYP:

"The thrust of the blog is that [Cohen] is a sexually promiscuous woman," Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden wrote in her decision. That included references to Cohen as "whoring" and "ready to engage in oral sexual activity."

Is readiness to engage in oral sexual activity more defamatory than, say, readiness to "engage" in the butt? This case has truly been an educational opportunity for anyone interested in the nuances of skank law ("Big skank" is Constitutionally protected speech, for example).

The lesson is, when you call someone a "skank ho," say it to their face.

To summarize this little media controversy: reporter Ian Shapira profiled Anne Loehr, a consultant who gets companies to pay her to explain the mysteries of Gen Y. Our own Hamilton Nolan wrote an item about it in which he reprinted four of Loehr's most laughable quotes and ridiculed them. After initially being pleased that his metro profile got some play on a widely read blog, Shapira changed his mind when he got an email from his editor: "They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?" This led Shapira, in a piece for the Post's Outlook section, to conclude that his job is doomed. To quote steal, Shapira wrote:

The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it — the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others — but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.

Shapira is right. Blogs are killing newspapers. But it's not by mindlessly cutting and pasting from newspaper web sites. Gawker would go out of business if that's all we did.

The bigger threat is that blogs say the things that hidebound newspaper editors are too afraid to let their reporters write.

Rereading Shapira's nearly 1,600-word piece (Hamilton's post runs just over 400), the closest I can come to anything resembling a point of view is a tangled mass of clauses that takes Loehr and her consultant pablum at face value. Again to quote steal:

The collective fretting over Generation Y — also known as the millennials — has turned into an industry for entrepreneurs such as Loehr: The former Kenyan hotel executive, based in Reston, is a "leadership coach" and generational guru, one of several who market themselves to corporations, the military, and federal and local governments as anthropologists interpreting today's 70 million to 80 million 20-somethings or early 30-somethings — those who came of age with the kiddie dinosaur show "Barney," high-speed wireless Internet and Barack Obama.

Sounds riveting! Hamilton succinctly digested Shapira's piece and gave his post a headline ("'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job") and lede ("The fakest job corporate America ever created was 'Branding Consultant' — until now") that probably resembled what Shapira wanted to write but couldn't. It's hard to imagine that in the course of working on his piece — a process that Shapira describes as two hours of sitting in on one of Loehr's courses and what must have been four truly grueling hours of transcribing the session — he didn't have a chuckle or two at lines like, "I want to touch 500,000 lives this year. I am going to touch 500,000 lives this year. I do have spreadsheets that mark how many people I am touching." He suggests as much in his Outlook piece, complaining that Hamilton got to "cherry-pick the funniest quotes." (Emphasis mine.) So why wasn't there an ounce of humor in the profile?

Now confronted with existential threats, newspaper people rarely look at the failings of their own editorial product. After all, it's tough to criticize something when you're arguing it must be saved at all costs. Last week at an event in Dallas, This American Life host Ira Glass gave some gentle suggestions and painted an interesting picture of some future newsroom "where you would have the tone of The Daily Show — talking in normal language, but they would be real reporters."

So, it's unsurprising that Shapira's piece has been used by the newspaper navelgazers to kick around the idiotic notion that their work should enjoy some sort of special super-duper copyright protection. We'll leave that discussion for others, except to note that a more stringent copyright regime would probably be a bigger threat to newsgathering than that of any blog. A less cumbersome way for newspapers to head off the threat of blogs would be to beat us to the punchline.

But if you're going to fixate on blog links as the death knell of the industry, we have a lead for you: The threat is coming from inside the building. Nearly every day — 26 times in July alone — a Washington Post staffer not only sends us links to its expensive reporting but even pulls out the most interesting quotes so as to make it easier to pirate. I have strong feelings about revealing the identity of any Gawker tipster, but in this case it seems the public interest is simply too pressing and we must reveal this threat to journalism:

Maria Cereghino
Manager, Communications
Washington Post Media

In an email sent out to their daily email subscribers, two-time Gawker editor Choire Sicha revealed a backdated post that wouldn't appear on the front page of the site to otherwise uninitiated readers.

So this is a special Weekend Edition Email to thank you for your patronage. Why? Well, this week, on July 30, 2009, a person residing in (or visiting!) the glorious town of Austin, Texas clicked through from somewhere (perhaps from one of your Twitter accounts, dear reader!) to view a post (and then depart for Internet places unknown) and, in doing so, became our millionth visitor:

http://www.theawl.com/2009/07/one-million-served

(That's a backdated secret post, so that it didn't appear on our front page.)

This lucky Windows user, wrapping up the end of his or her workday at 5:30 p.m. local time, or perhaps just waking up, and getting ready for the roller derby, or maybe, well, who knows: who is shim? What time does hermself wake up? We may never know....

Now, Sitemeter is notoriously wacky as a traffic counter, as you probably know, so, don't worry, we don't attach too much significance to this number. But it's a big round number! How exciting! It kinda makes me feel like Ray Kroc.

The Awl launched to much excitement a few months ago: an interview with Vanity Fair's site, and posts from MediaBistro, like this one, in which Choire talks about how he doesn't look at his own traffic!

Has the press' lovefest led to strong traffic?

Sicha, for one, has no idea. "You know, I have actually *never looked* at our traffic," he emailed FishbowlNY.com this morning. "I leave that in David Cho's capable hands; he's our business guy, and that stuff is his problem. I am just trying to have a good time, and that itself is our stated goal."

Balk, Sicha, and their numerous contributors - who count plenty of Gawker Media past and present writers as among their numbers - look to be enjoying themselves, as they recently called this company the "Goldman Sachs of the Internet," (which is funny, because I'm still broke) and reportedly had their site crash due to an overwhelming influx of traffic. In the aforementioned email, they also announced a special new contributor who's "much better" than Ed Koch.

Meanwhile, this blog took note of nearly anti-celebrity-beat site The Awl's Michael Jackson-911-call link in a passive swipe, and before that, Nick Denton once took note of their content layout.

The Awl's now at a million hits and Denton's busy minting his own currency or something, and unlike Sicha, doesn't own any pets. Yet. "Congratulations" to all parties involved.

One Million Served [The Awl]

The blog's explanation for pulling the post:

Basically, we believe that parties who are the subjects of an extensive and sensitive post like yesterday's should know they are being written about. This is both the neighborhood-y, Local thing to do and simple journalistic ethics.

In this case, the author of the piece identified himself to several climbers but not to the people who run the space. We were unaware of this lapse. We had concluded, based on the author's initial pitch, that he planned to be upfront with everyone, and we neglected - our bad - to confirm this after the piece was filed.

Well that's all well and good and friendly, but it's really the type of thing to decide before you publish the extremely extensive post about "this bizarre hybrid of subterranean climbing gym and hippie speakeasy" in Fort Greene. Because the entire thing is, of course, cached by Google. All anyone has to do is click here to read the whole thing, or visit AnimalNY, where they put up a screen shot of it. Now, Jed Lipinski's post on "one of the best kept secrets in Brooklyn" is going to get far more readers than it would have had you simply left it up.

See: The Streisand Effect.
[The Local's 'Why We Unpublished" statement and the original post, via Animal NY

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.In January, one media entrepreneur got an idea so crazy it just might work: Why not start a publication called "The Printed Blog," consisting of various blog posts from around the internet that you print out and distribute like a newspaper? Alas, now The Printed Blog is folding, just like we said it would, because it was a terribly backwards idea, business-wise. But points for trying. "It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all." We should keep that in mind!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Mayor Mike has announced formal initiatives to save the media industry, right here in the Big Apple! The most interesting: 20 "fellowships" (that means money!) for tech or media entrepreneurs. Such as yourself, if you have an idea! Apply while they're hot.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Washington Post is still engaged in hand-wringing and self-flagellation over that fucked up memo about selling access to lobbyists. They have launched an "internal review," which is the type of typical thing that media companies do after all the facts have already come out. This has also forced The Atlantic to explain why its own 90% identical program is okay.

News of the newspapers, to-day: The NYT Co. postponed its deadline for accepting bids for the Boston Globe, perhaps in hopes of getting an actual good big; in positive NYT Co. news, "The New York Times announced today it has launched its international weekly news supplement in La Razón in Bolivia"; and, in your Crushing Numerical Reminder of the Dying Nature of the Newspaper Industry of the day, "Profits fell 100.1% since 2004 at newspapers with circulation greater than 80,000." That is more than 100%.

A good example of just one of the newspaper industry's problems: Macy's has cut its newspaper ad spending in half since 2005. That's a decline of about $600 million. And even after the decline, Macy's was the second-biggest newspaper advertiser in 2008, behind only Verizon. That money is never coming back. To newspapers.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Vogue's July issue proves that it is totally catering to hobos now, because it features "a 'Steal of the Month,' and a section with all items under $500." Why not just go to a garage sale, in the slums of Detroit, then? Outrageous. [SPOOF pic via]

This Daily Beast story on the release of a $1,000 coffee-table book on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing is apparently not a paid advertorial. Despite that, it still features this paragraph:

If the price is steep, what it offers is nothing short of a family heirloom in the making. Moonfire is a gloriously imposing tome, large enough to require a degree of exertion just to flip it over. Inside, in addition to a reproduction of Mailer's book, are scans of his original manuscript, and photographs that, decades after that Space Age began to feel dated, still boggle the mind. Taschen will print only 1,969 copies of the book-each will be signed by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and the final 12 will contain a chip of extremely rare moon meteorite. As a package, the project is an achievement worthy of the subject it celebrates.

Odd.

Media (unpaid) job opportunity! Write for, haha, "The Ennuist,"—a blog just as easy to pronounce as "Mediaitieite" but more pretentious better.

The Ennuist aims to provide a witty, irreverent look at pop culture and current events. Sometimes pretentious, sometimes controversial, often relevant, though sometimes not. Think Gawker when it was good, The Awl with a younger focus, or Radar Online before it turned pink and sparkly.

Haha, "The Ennuist." Haha. The good Gawker would have had a helluva line for that one.

Oh but that is just one of the eye-shuttening comments from the famous shouty internet guy and former important talker-about-powerful-people in this wonderful WWD profile of Wolff.

Wolff used to be a beloved and serious New York magazine writer and book author. (This amazing portrait of Wolff as a young porn star dates to the 1979 publication of his serious novel about disaffected '70s youth.) And now he runs a website, and is sometimes on Page Six because he had an affair with an intern. No matter, though! He was right, back in the day, that newspapers and magazines were in trouble. But nowadays he tends to be wrong about things much more often than he is right, and in fact he does not really seem to care about being "right" so much as he cares about GRABBING SOME EYEBALLS. The internet has destroyed him again!

For him, grabbing eyeballs in an accelerated, competitive news cycle has meant the cheap high of a provocative headline and choosing a hot-button subject based on its momentary buzz, not on whether he has an argument about it. And if he lacks the command he had when opining on New York power players, well, the old days of cocktail party chatter as feedback are mostly gone. The noisy post on David Carr got 1,000 pageviews, but "Is Barack Obama a Bore?" got 80,000. That few care as much about the media as it cares about itself is now measurable.

He would've gotten 800,000 views if he'd written "Is Barack Obama a Muslim Bore." Does he know?

Critics point out that even as Wolff is dancing on newspapers' graves, Newser relies on their content. He responds the site is increasingly relying on native online sources like Politico, though it overwhelmingly features newspaper content summarized by paid writers.

And, hey, what is Politico again? It is a money-losing website attached to a possibly profitable little local newspaper. Not that you would know this if you read his Vanity Fair piece about how revolutionary Politico is. The one that ran months after Wolff said no one cared about Politico and it would never make money. We guess over the course of a couple months he came to see how good they were at grabbing eyeballs with provocative headlines and such!

These days, Wolff lives in the East Village, and he doesn't have a doorman anymore, and he is rude to waitstaff, which is actually pretty much unforgivably assholish, we don't care what you wrote.

Also he is very proud that he totally knew that John Edwards slept with that lady and he is mildly embarrassed at totally being positive that Gary Condit killed Chandra Levy, and he would like an apology from anyone whose recollection of the latter might've colored their response to his insistence on the former.

And he is kind of sorry that he totally thought Bush would be a wonderful bipartisan president back in 2000, but he points out that Gore would've probably not been very good either so whatever, get off his back.

(Of course if it hadn't been for Bush's terrible unwillingness to send all the Mexicans back to Mexico and then build a wall, Mickey would never have realized how terrible Bush was, years after everyone else did!)

[In response to some vague, inane questions from us]:

Yeah, the book deal is really exciting. I'm not really at liberty to discuss how much the deal was worth (but let's just say I'll finally be able to buy the entire Criterion Collection). "Aggressive" is definitely the right word to describe the negotiations. During our meetings, everyone at St. Martin's Press kept staring at me and telling me to take my shirt off. It was kind of uncomfortable at first, but after a while I caved in. We're together now.

Obviously, I'm pleasantly surprised that this book deal happened. It wasn't my goal when I started the blog a few months ago, but I think it'll be a fun thing to do and I'm sure all the Gawker commenters out there will really like it. Whoops, no they won't.

The book will hopefully be out by Spring 2010. Unless people suddenly stop doing cocaine during the day, in which case it may take a bit longer.

See how graciously he handled your unexpected outpouring of disdain for his blog! Come on now. You know that blog has funny pictures. Come on.