Chris Anderson will generate plenty of chatter with his "The Web is Dead" Wired cover, foretold here previously. Fair enough; that's what a smart magazine editor does. But all the more reason to note the rich ironies in his eulogy.
The iPad looks futuristic, but in some ways it keeps old media rooted in the past. Condé Nast, for example, will offer some magazine content on the Apple tablet before its release on the open Web.
Dell kept hanging up on Chris Anderson; Neel Shah mounted a pro-Shake Shack counterattack; and Irin Carmon worried about the "invasion" of SXSW. The Twitterati were dealing with true offensives.
Brandee Barker couldn't use her competitor's search engine; Brad King was called a 'nerdy dipshit;' and Karl Lagerfeld got tired of having to defend himself. The Twitterati were wryly war weary.
In retrospect, Sarah Silverman—queen of the rape joke—might not have been the best pick to speak to the nerds at TED. But now that it's done, Steve Case and Chris Anderson should back down before things get ugly.
Must've been good, because Chris Anderson thought it was "god-awful," and one blogger wonders if she "took a dump on stage." The TED website describes her talk as "a new perspective on the number 3000." But...what perspective? Update: Wow.
Chris Anderson has plenty of distractions from editing Wired, including a lucrative sideline on the global lecture circuit and a tour to promote his new book. Anderson's prior commitments even removed him from the office on Wired's layoff day. (Updated)
For a digital bible, Wired has been turning surprisingly analog over the past year. The latest regressions: The publication just fired two top editors from Wired.com and may soon lose the founders of Reddit.com.
• Time Warner sucked wind in the second quarter as profits fell 34%. Newly-independent Time Warner Cable, however, posted a profit. [AP, Reuters]
• McKinsey has set up shop at Condé Nast. What it is the consulting firm's actually doing (or recommending), however, remains a mystery. [NYO]
• Barry Diller's IAC posted a…
Wired editor Chris Anderson has fully morphed from a journalist, who knows what it's like to have to interview other people, into a celebrity, who has no time for these fucking reporters and their boring questions. "Journalism," what's that?
Big Ideas Author Malcolm Gladwell, a Manhattanite of the New Yorker, has issued a smackdown review of Free, the book from Big Ideas Author Chris Anderson, a Berkeleyan of San Francisco's Wired. If that's not provocative enough, Gladwell sounds downright grumpy.
• ABC and NBC will face off on Thursday night with competing tributes to Farrah Fawcett, who died today. But you probably expected that, no? [NYT]
• David Letterman beat out Conan in the ratings last week, the first time the Late Show has dominated the weekly ratings since 2005. [THR]
• Rosie O'Donnell will debut a…
How did the Virginia Quarterly Review connect Chris Anderson's book to Wikipedia, thus unraveling a plagiarism scandal? A strange use of parentheses.
Chris Anderson's plagiarism scandal is still unfolding; Brooklyn writer Ed Champion has found instances where the Free author copied material he was supposed to be summarizing. But there was grumbling about Wired's editor long before his book scandal.
Chris Anderson has been caught lifting huge chunks out of Wikipedia for his book Free. The irony speaks for itself. But it's worth noting that the Wired editor's excuses are disconcertingly clichéd.
You can put Tina Fey on Twitter but you can't make her tweet. Chris Anderson, though? Don't even get the Wired editor started.
• Monthly mags continue to suffer: Ad pages have dropped by 23 percent on average, although the situation is particularly dire at Condé Nast. [NYP]
• Maureen Dowd landed in a bit of hot water after it was revealed she'd "borrowed" from blogger Josh Marshall for her op-ed column yesterday. She's since offered a…
For magazines, the first quarter of this year was hell. Particularly for Conde Nast. Now, ad sales figures for the first half are out. They're hell. Particularly for Conde Nast!
As the recession takes a toll on print media, magazines have been busy looking for new ways to drum up cash and stay in the spotlight. Sadly, they don't have much to show for their efforts. The once unmalleable line between art and advertising has been getting blurrier by the day, leading purists to point their…
If you have no idea what people on Twitter are talking about, fear not. They have no idea what they're talking about, either. The latest mutterings from Chris Anderson, John Byrne, and other online twits:
