Now Flickr's copy of the image is deleted forever. Photographer and outspoken Flickr-watcher Thomas Hawk has seen the name and reports the surname has no Google hits and looks "like someone just typed random characters on a keyboard." Hawk also wonders, "If... 'Bob Xjibtstruytubopluy' claimed copyright over images in President Obama's stream, would [Flickr] simply remove these images as well?" Given the interest in this story among the president's critics, it probably won't be long now before we find out.

(Photo illustration via Thomas Hawk)

There is no ambiguity about the facts now: In response to an FCC inquiry, Apple has released a statement absolving its carrier partner, stating, "Apple is acting alone and has not consulted with AT&T about whether or not to approve the Google Voice application." AT&T confirmed, "AT&T had no role in any decision by Apple to not accept the Google Voice application for inclusion in the Apple App Store."

For users, the death of Google Voice on the iPhone — via the removal of some iPhone apps and indefinitely delay of another — meant more expensive text messages and international calls, and more snafus in trying to get friends to use the Google Voice phone number. It kept them locked in close to Jobs and his software, a relationship the Apple CEO guards jealously, some say anticompetitively. Jobs, for example, tried to lock Palm out of Apple's iTunes music jukebox; apparently tried to lock employees out of lucrative offers from competitors like Palm and Google; and tried (successfully) to lock competing browsers and podcasting software off the iPhone.

And yet blame was consistently placed on AT&T over the past few weeks. A Wall Street Journal op-ed, written by a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager, explained excatly "Why AT&T Killed Google Voice" (because "AT&T is dragging down the rest of us... and stifling innovation"). TechCrunch, the Valley blog that broke the Google Voice news, immediately declared that "it's not hard to guess who's behind the restriction: our old friend AT&T."

Prominent Mac-news writer John Gruber was the most certain on his Daring Fireball website. "Trust me," he wrote, "it was AT&T's decision." Gruber cited "an informed source:"

A reliable little birdie has informed me that it was indeed AT&T that objected to Google Voice apps for the iPhone. It's that simple.

Of course, it wasn't. Gruber did not respond to our emails, but so certain did the well-connected indy blogger sound that we can't help but wonder if he wasn't snowed by Apple itself. The company would not necessarily have anticipated that a swift, aggressive and public FCC investigation into the Google Voice incident would have proven AT&T blameless. And it's not like the company's flacks haven't been down this road before; Jim Goldman's sometime source and former CNBC coworker is an Apple flack, and Goldman's Apple sources had him reporting for weeks last fall that Jobs' health was "fine," before Goldman was suddenly forced to acknowledge it was very much not fine. (Gruber pointedly trumpeted CNBC's party-line reporting at the time while pissing on ultimately-vindicated posts from our colleagues at Gizmodo; in the interest of disclosure, we should note that this trend continues to this day, and that we find Gruber as reliably entertaining when he's wrong as when he's right, albeit for entirely different reasons.)

No matter how Apple's defenders were rallied this time around — we suspect, as a rule, that it had more to do with anti-AT&T bias than some pro-Apple whisper campaign — one can only hope this incident will further erode the myth that Apple is fundamentally any less inclined toward spiteful self-defeating authoritarianism than any other corporation of its size, be it AT&T, Google or, only slightly larger these days, Microsoft. Apple is uniquely molded to the whims of a single man, it is true, and already apologists have begun to excuse the Google Voice decision as fallout from Jobs' well-intentioned obsession with control. But Jobs, like his competitors, must be judged on actions, rather than intentions. And this one is pretty disgraceful.

UPDATE, Aug. 26: Gruber responded to our email:

I saw your post, and I think it's great. Totally fair.

My source (a) was wrong, not lying; and (b) from the enlisted ranks at Apple, not an officer. I am strong believer that when anonymous sources go wrong, readers deserve to know as much as possible about why, so, based on a few emails today exchanged with this same source, I plan to write about it briefly on DF. [Summary: The Apple source had his own Apple source, who he misunderstood.]

* * *

As for Goldman, I do not believe that he was spun back in December. Here's the nut paragraph Goldman wrote in December:

"I can tell you that sources inside the company tell me that Jobs's decision was more about politics than his pancreas. Sources tell me that if Jobs for some reason was unable to perform any of his responsibilities as CEO because of health reasons, which would include the Macworld keynote, I should "rest assured that the board would let me know.""

Clearly, we now know, wrong. But wrong about what? It was wrong that there was nothing seriously wrong with Jobs medically. But I am not convinced at all that anyone at Apple or on the Apple board was aware of how dire his condition was at that time, other than judging by his gaunt appearance — which at that point had been obvious for 8 or 9 months.

My hunch is that it is far more likely that Goldman's sources were unaware of Jobs's medical condition in December than that they lied to him about it. Think of it this way: Apple didn't benefit at all from December's "Jobs is fine" coverage, other than in the very short run. Come January, when he was forced to take his medical leave, these reports from just a few weeks prior made Apple's PR situation far *worse* than if they had said nothing at all to Goldman.

I suspect Jobs himself was not aware of the life-threatening magnitude or specific cause — his liver — until January.

It's not entirely surprising that Jobs wanted to strip his employees of their right to seek market wages; for all his talk of disruptive nonconformity, he has a notoriously nasty and authoritarian management style. And he reportedly had a similar "no poaching" deal in place with Google. What is eye-opening about Bloomberg's report is the frank manner in which then-Palm CEO Ed Colligan pushed back:

"Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal," Colligan said to Jobs, 54, according to the communications.

Palm had just hired iPod executive Jon Rubinstein away from Apple and surely knew it would soon embark on an epic Apple hiring spree; Rubinstein's blunt response was no doubt intended to be part of a library of evidence of Apple's behavior, should one ever be needed. But Jobs was not cowed. According to Bloomberg, he stated that "Apple had patents and more money than Palm if the companies ended up in a legal fight."

Who leaked these "communications" — emails, presumably — to Bloomberg? The obvious bet is Palm, which has been engaged in a back-and-forth war with Apple to allow its Palm Pre mobile device, which competes with Apple's iPhone, to sync with Apple's iTunes software. Apple's attempts to stop such syncing have been the object of deserved ridicule online, and Jobs' threatening message to Palm might have been leaked to drum up further outrage and put more pressure on Apple to open its platform .

There's also a chance someone involved with the Justice Department's ongoing investigation into Silicon Valley hiring is the source of the leak. That probe involves not only Apple but Google and Yahoo, as well, according to a Washington Post report.

Whatever the source of the information, the bottom line for Apple is that it faces a mounting perception that it is a bully, between this, the Palm Pre issue and the two federal investigations into ties between Google and Apple, to say nothing of its exclusionary policies concerning the iPhone app store. That's not going to dent, say, iPhone sales anytime soon. But it's going to hurt Apple's ability to pose as the Valley's corporate iconoclast, which will have a real, if intangible, effect on the company long-term.

[via Business Insider]

It originally looked like Firas Alkhateeb, a Palestinian American University of Illinois student, had removed the caricature himself. But it turns out Flickr "removed the Joker image due to copyright-infringement concerns." Because that doctored Time cover (above) could totally be confused with the copyrighted original, as opposed to, say, a transformative political satire!

As the Slashdot crowd has been quick to point out, there are all sorts of copyrighted and often doctored images involving George W. Bush (and others - NSFW) on Flickr. Meanwhile, Obama has opened the door to lucrative government contracts for the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site.

Yes, it's easy to refute that conspiracy theory; the CEO of Yahoo has donated to Republicans Bush, John McCain and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, as photographer Thomas Hawk has pointed out. And yet Flickr's explanation remains completely ludicrous; as ludicrous as, say, nuking photos of paying customers with no warnings and no backups, or allowing someone to irreversibly delete an account because they can guess the account-holders birthday or other security-question answer.

There's no need, in other words, to chalk up to political favoritism that which can just as easily be explained by corporate arrogance and the willful disdain of paying customers.

Something like this has happened before. The last time we checked in with the Yahoo-owned site, it had irreversibly deleted 1,200 of a paying user's photos for posting excessive comments on the White House Flickr stream. To console the user, Flickr offered a $25 gift card, but that was it; Yahoo customer service VP Heather Champ told the user it was impossible to retrieve old photos, implying the site had no backups.

Now comes Morgan Tepsic, a photographer and soon-to-be art student in Taipei, Taiwan who said he spent "thousands of dollars" developing the photos in his paid Flickr account. A hacker — sounds like an old flame, perhaps — somehow joined a hotmail account to his Flickr account, then nuked his photos. Tepsic aruges, persuasively, that Flickr should have done more to protect his account, at the very least emailing him to confirm the Hotmail account or at least the account termination. Instead, he says he woke up to these three emails:

1. [redacted]@hotmail.com has been added to your account!

2. Your password has been changed!

3. Your account has been terminated!

Flickr support was a nightmare; at one point Tepsic was told Flickr had no phones, an assertion quickly disproved using Flickr itself (in a photo captioned "Too many phones... at Flickr HQ"). Last weekend we sent Yahoo questions about Tepsic's case and more generally about its backup procedures. Monday a Yahoo spokesperson said the company was looking into our query; we still haven't heard back.

If the struggling internet company wants to retain its paying Flickr customers, and compete with photo-saturated Facebook, it should be more careful with customer data. And Flickr users, of course, should emphatically back up their stuff. Keeping data in "the cloud" isn't all its cracked up to be.

(Pic: Taken at Flickr HQ, by Daniel Catt)

Such an agreement would mitigate the most high-profile battle within contemporary media, a feud that hearkened back to the newspaper wars of the early 20th century and which offered heartening — ever so slightly heartening — evidence that, in an era of 500 channel television sets, corporate media didn't have to be toothless or dull media.

But it's last chapter is all too predictable: A powerful, suited overlord got embarrassed by all the boat-rocking and called things to a halt. The suit, in this case, would be GE's Jeffrey Immelt, a frequent target of Fox shouting head Bill O'Reilly and his professional stalker Jesse Waters; according to the Times, Immelt sealed a deal with News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch this past May, "with a handshake" at Microsoft headquarters.

Details were left to underlings Jeff Zucker, at NBC, and Gary Ginsberg, at News Corp:

[They] agreed that hosts on Fox and MSNBC would resist lobbing mortars at each
other or their parent companies, according to an employee with direct knowledge of the agreement.... "For this war to stop, it meant fewer headaches on the corporate side," the employee said...

Then the orders went out to the troops — meaning, to journalists, now being told what true things they should avoid saying or investigating, because it was not in the interests of their corporate parent companies. Or at least that's what the Times' sources say:

Phil Griffin, said on a daily conference call with producers that he wanted the channel's other programs to follow Mr. Olbermann's lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees. At Fox News, some staff members were told to "be fair" to G.E.

The feud between the two corporations dates back at least five years, to the first of MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann's relentless attacks on O'Reilly, who uses his highly-rated Fox News show to attack various lefty targets, including an abortion doctor, "Tiller the Baby-Killer," who O'Reilly railed against some 28 times on his show, until someone finally murdered the guy.

O'Reilly attacks ginned up Olbermann's ratings, but the feud spread; O'Reilly, who refused to utter Olbermann's name, lashed out at General Electric and NBC News; News Corp.'s New York Post was enlisted to repeatedly jab at Olbermann.

Olbermann can be an insufferable blowhard, and there was no small amount of ego and self-interest behind his O'Reilly slams, a point emphasized in the Times' story. His attacks could go too far; Olbermann once wore an O'Reilly mask and gave a Nazi salute, on air. "It was time to grow up," a source told the Times.

But it's out of a swamp of impure motives and foolish mistakes than good journalism must arise, and for those who distrusted Fox News there was something comforting in the idea that MSNBC was ready to jump on the network's misstatements, tasteless moments and overreaches. Fox-lovers no doubt relished monitoring of the liberal media housed at 30 Rock.'

Olbermann protests to the Times that "I am party to no deal," but the paper documents how he appears to have led the way on this one. Our jaded hearts twinge only slightly for those NBC News staff who consider themselves journalists but swallow these sorts of orders from above; far more upset is our id, at the prospect of relinquishing the great fun of a vigorous — and vigorously cleansing — media feud.

An unrepentant Yahoo won't say what, exactly, Johnson did wrong. His comments were about Barack Obama's support of a bill allowing the government to suppress torture photos. They were attached to seemingly relevant images from the president's recent trip to Cairo to ring in a new era of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations.

"I thought, this is an opportunity I can use to let the administration know how I feel about some of its policies," Johnson told us in a phone interview.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Virginia man's initial 10 or so comments, which went up Wednesday night, were deleted without explanation by Friday. That night, Johnson posted roughly ten more to different White House photos, this time linking in another Flickr user's Abu Ghraib picture, as allowed by Flickr's comment formatting (see Johnson's reproduction of his comment, left, taken from his post to freedom-of-information hub Cryptome).

In the midst of this second round of commenting, Johnson found his account was gone. There had been no warning of any sort from Yahoo, he said. Johnson would later work his way up Flickr's customer service tree, eventually leaving a message for the vice president of customer service and other bigwigs. He even left a message for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz — a noted fan of frank discourse — on Bartz's home answering machine.

Johnson, who lives outside Richmond, still has no answers. More crucially, he also doesn't have access to any of the 1,200 pictures he uploaded to Flickr under his paid "Pro" membership. Many of the pics, he said, were "completely irretrievable — I didn't back them up on any disks, I just spur-of-the-moment loaded it up and deleted the flash" memory originals.

Asked about all this, Yahoo issued us a statement (see below) saying its policies prevented it from discussing Johnson's account and pointing us to Flickr's community guidelines.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But if the company expects people to move their data to its servers, via sites like Flickr and Yahoo Mail, it's going to have to do better than that. Users won't feel safe moving their data into Yahoo's "cloud" if it can vanish without a trace with no warning.

Similarly, Flickr's user base of photographers is notoriously sensitive to any hint of censorship, so the company would be well-advised to come up with a coherent explanation for why the most powerful man in the world needs to be so ruthlessly protected against a slightly aggressive internet commenter. Where's Carol Bartz's straight talk when you need it?

[via Cryptome] [top image by vanson on Flickr]

Flickr statement:

In accordance with Flickr's policy, we cannot disclose information to third parties concerning a member's account. However, in joining Flickr, all of our members agree to abide by our Community Guidelines. These guidelines require that all of our members be respectful of the community and flag content that may not be suitable for "safe" viewing. Our members have always done a great job of identifying inappropriate and offensive content on Flickr and bringing it to our attention. We encourage all members to continue to make Flickr a safe place to share photos and videos.


Flickr is a very large community made up of many types of members from all over the world, and we respect the viewpoints and expressions of all of our members. In crafting the Community Guidelines, Flickr weighed the rights of the individual vs. the rights of the overall community, and built a system that would enable members to choose what they want to view. As with any community, online or off, there are members who may disregard the Community Guidelines. When this happens, Flickr may have to take action accordingly towards building a respectful community. For more information: http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

In February, MTV told "permalancers," who it has historically screwed over in a slavey caste system, they'd have to leave at the end of nine months so MTV wouldn't have to provide them costly benefits like health insurance, a tipster told us. Supposedly they could get rehired three months later.

But it doesn't look like that's going to happen, thanks to the economy; staffing levels, especially on the dot-com side, are being sliced, often (we hear) by half.

The freelancers just laid off by the cable network — if you know how many, we'd love to hear from you — have another month to go and have been asked to train their replacements, a tipster informs us. MTV presumably won't have to pay benefits to those replacements, since they're new hires (yes, MTV is hiring while it's firing).

The sloughed off temps might not be able to come back in three months, due to the reduction in positions, but something tells us they might have some luck in nine. Mark your calendars, permalancers.

Friedman is set to meet tomorrow with Fox News chief Roger Ailes and John Moody, the news network's executive vice president for editorial, the source said. Friedman will have a chance to plead his case, but the meeting could well end with the columnist losing his job.

Friedman is in hot water for posting to FoxNews.com Thursday a review of the forthcoming movie Wolverine. The freelance columnist based his comments on an unfinished version of the movie that leaked onto the internet last week. "It's so much easier than going out in the rain!" he wrote. "I was completely riveted to my desk chair in front of my computer."

You can imagine how this went over at Wolverine producer 20th Century Fox, which last week called in the FBI to find out who leaked the film. The studio complained corporate sibling Fox News, according to Nikki Finke, and parent company News Corp. publicly condemned the review and requested its removal. Fox News promptly deleted the piece.

Finke wrote that Ailes then fired Friedman, a development seemingly confirmed by a statement News Corp. supplied to the New York Times, reading, "Fox News… terminated Mr. Friedman."

But Fox News' only statement on the affair (also given to the Times) is that "This is an internal matter that we aren't prepared to discuss at this time."

And in fact Friedman has not been fired, according to the Fox News source, although he could well be terminated during tomorrow's meeting. The delay in firing Friedman (despite News Corp.'s announcement) could be read as a play by Ailes to assert the news division's independence from film studio 20th within the News Corp. empire.

The meeting also gives Fox News time to reconcile its own definition of journalistic ethics with 20th Century Fox's. The film studio says Friedman shouldn't have broken the law in the service of a story. But Fox News seems more comfortable with such mischief. Network anchor Shep Smith wasn't fired after he was arrested for running over a competing reporter with his car so he could snag parking space, even though the incident resulted in felony battery charges (later apparently dropped without explanation).

When Bill O'Reilly's former producer accused the Fox News host of sexual harassment, producing lengthy conversation transcripts O'Reilly never denied, sibling publication the New York Post slammed her in a story headlined "'Lunatic' O'Reilly Gal Went Nuts in Bar." O'Reilly settled the suit and, of course, retains his job.

And Fox is unrepentant about stalking a liberal blogger, sending a camera crew to tail her from her apartment across state lines to Virginia.

Fashion writer Glenna Goldis has gone public, posting to her Tumblr the sad saga of her attempt to get the $700 she was promised for two pieces she wrote for a Nov. 16 Observer Style insert. Spoiler: She's still stiffed.

But she's been a valiant pest! Here's what she learned along the way:

• Style editor Nancy Butkus was told to pay only $22,000 of $29,000 in invoices for the section. "What I'm being asked to do is immoral," she told Goldis.
• Managing editor Jesse Wegman said no one who worked on the section had been paid. He first called it a "budget screw-up," then later "unconscionable."
• Observer Media Group president Bob Sommer, who is blamed for the mess, just took a job flacking for the New Jersey Devils. It is unclear if his duties there will include blocking contract workers from getting the money they are promised.

The Observer was also stiffing people two years ago. So screwing over freelancers is a grand ole Observer tradition that should obviously be retired, but will probably continue forever. Sort of like "Sparrow."

The Obama campaign knew all along — so for like a year now — that the poster was based on a copyrighted AP image, reports, uh, AP, which is why they never used his original poster. Instead, they had Fairey design a separate poster based on a picture they had rights to.

But AP didn't act until now, two weeks after a photojournalist blogger identified the wire service's shot as the basis for Fairey's work. So Fairey's theft of AP's intellectual property was so obvious and atrocious that AP didn't notice it occurred until it was pointed out to them, one year after the fact.

Fairey said he didn't make money off of the image. And it's hard to see how AP lost any money off his use: the wire service's usual customers — newspapers, magazines and television stations — would generally be loath to substitute partisan iconography for a straight photograph.

Also, the poster was enough of an artistic advancement on the original to be featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and, in a different format, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

All of these factors would be considered in determining whether Fairey's use of AP's image constitutes fair use, as his lawyers are stating.

AP's ridiculous whining about Fairey extends its tradition of acting like a condescending, sanctimonious tool when it comes to copyright and the internet and of having no clue what the hell it's doing online, with whom, ever.

Among the contingent is business columnist Justin Fox, whose ski report is excerpted in the video at left. It's already firing tempers back home, and no wonder: Fox skis right up to the camera before admitting there is no one but Swiss people around. Hence, no news to justify his early arrival.

Fox promises to keep everyone posted when real news happens, after he's done skiing. We're sure his shell-shocked, penny-pinching New York colleagues take comfort in that.

Even more obnoxious, somehow, is a Davos report from Michael Elliot, the Time second-in-command already reviled by some within the company for blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in airfare.

"Anxious readers will want to know that my bags have finally arrived," it starts.

Writes a tipster, "Gee, Michael, all the hundreds of laid off Time Inc. employees have been soooooo 'anxious' that your bags finally arrived. Fuck you, douchebag."

What else will "anxious readers" want to know, according to Elliott?

that the rosti - an artery-clogging local dish of potatoes, bacon, and fried egg - is as good as ever. I had a great one tonight with my German friends Joe and Christine Joffe, then dropped in to the drinks party hosted by Israeli high-tech entrepreneur Yossi Vardi at the Belvedere. And then the long trudge through the icy streets - it snowed off and on all day, and I was told that the skiing on the Parsenn was spectacular, dammit - and so to bed."

Elliott's dispatch was sufficiently irritating that it was subtly mocked — in public! — by national political correspondent Karen Tumulty.

Not surprisingly, readers have been largely indifferent to Time's Davos "reporting," produced surely at great cost to the cash-strapped magazine company: In the course of 20 posts, Time's Davos blog has attracted all of four comments.

With corporate executives making decisions like these in the midst of a severe economic crisis, is it any wonder executives like Richard Parsons — former overlord above Time Inc. — get adulatory coverage for an act as basic as taking the train?

"There's nothing on the dolls that refers to the Obama girls," Lundeen said. "It would not be fair to say they are exact replications of these girls. They are not."

Dan Akroyd's Irwin Mainway couldn't have said it any better himself.

We're certain Ty Inc. will patiently deny that these "TyGirlz Collection" dolls are at all related to the Obama family as many times as it takes, in front of as many reporters and cameras as necessary, possibly thousands upon thousands of times. For the sake of accuracy, of course, so that no one gets the impression these are OBAMA FAMILY DOLLS, despite the remarkable similarity. Since that's not what these are. Not SASHA AND MALIA OBAMA in doll form. Nope.

On Friday, Dickey was telling dozens of Tucson Citizen staffers they'd be out of jobs in March, unless someone steps forward to buy the paper. That was after making all Gannett staff go one week without pay this quarter.

This week, the newspaper division president is competing in the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, in which he will be paired with professional golfers to help improve his swing. His entry fee is either $12,000 or $25,000, reports Gannett Blog, to say nothing of travel costs, expenses for fellow newspaper division exec Michelle Krans, or costs for honchos from Gannett's Desert Sun, which is sponsoring a pricey hospitality suite.

Obviously, Gannett insists the whole thing is for charity and business development and whatever, not to give ole Bob the chance to play with the likes of golf pros like Bubba Watson, Wes Short and Martin Laird.

This is the same excuse corporate execs have been using for their perks — it's for the good of the company! — since forever, regardless of whether it's true or not. In this case it seems pretty obvious the newspaper chain doesn't need two national executives, including one on the course, plus the Desert Sun people, to butter up advertisers in Palm Springs, California.

The takeaway for newspaper executives: Don't let your employees find out about your fun "business" trips. Not because the scared-for-their-livelihood journalists will dare to write you up in their own papers, but because they might leak word to one of those parasitic, good-for-nothing bloggers.

Headed by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies just issued a "special alert" promising hope-crushing carnage when Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. The thought of millions of their own constituents next to them in DC, drinking heavily, is clearly terrifying to senators and members of the House of Representatives. Everyone should just watch politics quietly on the TV!

Some highlights from the "advisory:"

• "Please think carefully about whether you can stand outside in cold weather in a large crowd for up to six hours, and whether you are ready for long delays getting home afterwards. "
• "D.C.’s subway system... is expecting 'crush-level' crowds. Be prepared to wait for space on a train for long periods of time, during which you will have to stand in close proximity to several thousand people."
• "The weather in Washington in January is usually quite cold and often rainy or snowy."
• "Persons in wheelchairs or utilizing walkers should be aware that they will need to move across bumpy surfaces, grassy areas, and possible icy areas (depending on the weather)." (That means you, John McCain!)
• "Getting to the swearing-in ceremonies that morning will be very difficult because of the large crowds."
• " Many Metro escalators will be closed due to crowding and individuals will need to climb Metro stairs or wait to utilize the small number of elevators at Metro stations. "
• "Public transportation is expected to be running at 'crush capacity.'"
• "We... recommend developing back-up plans."

See you at the Porta-Potties!

(Image via Library of Congress)

Rolling Stone

Now he can take his annual long vacation in Sun Valley without that "to do" hanging over his head. Asshole.

Wenner's Us Weekly alone throws off $75 million a year in profit. Wenner Media revenue is around $400 million annually. The company couldn't wait 10 days to fire some more people?

It doesn't matter how much severance the ex-employee sare getting. That's not the point. The point is that Wenner would rather enjoy a less stressful vacation, or save a few days vacation pay, than do the right thing and suck it up for another week and a half so these people can enjoy the holidays. The Dec. 10 round? Fine. But Dec. 19? You terrible jerk.

One of the layoffs was a writer Wenner hired away from Newsweek in October. Another layoff, an editor, came from GQ in March. Maybe you can ask for your old jobs back, guys! (Ha ha, just kidding, they're taken, forever.)

"It was heartbreaking, but we just had to make some tough choices," Rolling Stone Managing Director Will Dana told Keith Kelly of the Post.

Well, you guys certainly made some choices. The dick choices.

May yours gifts turn to coal, every last one of them.

(Picture via Scrooged)

MTV VP Ian Rowe called Sara Benincasa (pictured), a member of the Knight Foundation-funded "Street Team '08," to say "our bad:"

He called me to personally apologize for what he called their “mismanagement” of the payment situation, and to talk about how bad he felt that what had been a fantastic experience had turned out in so disappointing a manner.... Half the checks went out Friday, and the other half go out tomorrow.

Benincasa added that Rowe called the 50 other Street Team members to apologize for the fiasco, in which meager stipends for "grueling" work came late starting in the summer and were delivered even later as fall wore on. MTV accounting treated the nascent "Street Team" journalists with the same unfriendliness as all MTV's other unpaid freelancers.

Benincasa also sent us a nice note stating that coverage on Gawker (here, here) and the Huffington Post (here) "had a huge impact" in getting the team paid.

Not to wreck the positive vibes or anything, but we also got email from a former MTV News staffer familiar with the Street Team who shed some light on the network's attitude toward the experimental project:

I worked with some of the kids on the Street Team.

MTV is a big, mean company...but hey got paid to do ONE BLOG POST A WEEK! One. Uno. That is it. Every month they needed to post two text blogs and two "vlogs". Sorry, but I don't have much sympathy for people who get paid to do that. We were pretty rigid with our editorial standards,so there were a lot of requests for re-dos. That is because the Knight Foundation controlled the purse strings and they didn't want straight opinions (I can't tell you how many "Obama is awesome"-type posts were turned down).

When MTV stopped cutting checks for freelancers [[AHEM excuse us what's that?!]] our VPs hauled ass trying to get these kids paid since the money was already there from a non-profit. And they made it happen. Our Street-Teamers got paid before any other freelancers. I'm not going to defend how MTV dealt with their freelancers, it isn't my place to do so...but these kids had a sweet deal.

Maybe! But, hey, MTV wrote the grant, won the grant, and took the grant money. It literally wrote the rules. Then it hired the workers. And it can't just decide it feels like keeping all the paychecks in its bank account, in violation of its commitments. Come to think of it, the network can't do that with any of its contracts. (Except when it can.)

Anderson, identified by name here, boldly posted an account of her experience to her personal website, EricaAmerica. And her coworkers bravely chimed in, names attached, to confirm her story in the comments.

Yes, they said, MTV has been severely dragging its heels paying contract workers — including, amazingly, for the philanthropic Knight-Foundation-sponsored election "Street Team," which helped MTV win a community service Emmy in November. Hoarding money until the end of the quarter may help the network meet its financial targets.

And by Anderson's telling, the network has long been willing to stretch boundaries in achieving its goals (emphasis in the original):

I, very fortunately, had another job that was more than understanding of my late hours and commitment to the network. What I didn’t have was more than four hours of sleep a night. But when you want something enough you make it work...

We were under tremendous stress to meet deadlines and produce quality, Emmy-award winning work. (The program won an Emmy last month.) One of our colleagues lost his job because he updated a MTV post at his office. Another quit (well, many quit), because the time requirements were so enormous and the pay was hardly enough to cover expenses. Soon, the resignations began to pour in.

Each time a Street Teamer resigned, he or she was replaced and an email from our Producers would follow. To be honest, I did not blame any of them. It was a grueling 11 months, one that required us to hold down other jobs, work late into the night and wearily try to use the MTV Brand to land unbelievable interviews and opportunities.

It's one thing to push a team of vastly underpaid (less than $1,000 per month) young people hard in order to win awards and provide a valuable learning opportunity. That's par for the course in the media industry, if too often taken to the extreme.

But to do so while not even doling out the meager wages on a timely basis, on a project funded with $700,000 in charity dollars, is reprehensible. The whole Street Team stipend disaster is an embarrassment even to the notoriously-exploitive managers at MTV. It would also be a shame, if the network had any left.

If you have any more information on Street Team working conditions or pay, we'd love to hear it. (Emails are presumed anonymous unless you say otherwise.)

(Disclaimer: As noted previously, I applied unsuccessfully to the same Knight Foundation funding program as MTV. This scandal came to my attention, however, from unsolicited emails arising from a non-Street-Team-related post.)

The Knight Foundation, a philanthropic journalism nonprofit, gave MTV $700,000 to "make possible" a "Street Team" of 51 "citizen journalists" to cover the 2008 election. We've already heard from three of them. They aren't getting paid!

The citizen journalists were supposed to each receive a stipend below $1,000 per month for the 11-month duration of the "Choose or Lose Street Team" experiment.

One wrote that paychecks used to be paid promptly, but got cut later and later as 2008 wore on. Then, "I wasn't paid for two months. Anytime I contacted payroll, they always gave me a run around response that blamed ME for being impatient." Contracts stipulated payment every four weeks.

This matches the stories we heard from other MTV freelancers, including at least two not involved with the Street Team experiment. It looks like MTV is treating workers on its Knight Foundation-supported project the same as people it hired entirely with its own money.

Another Street Team source said MTV was more than two months behind on pay by the fall, and confirmed that MTV accountants were uncommunicative and unfriendly about the delays.

A third Street Team member also reported being stiffed by MTV.

The most painful slight? Though the website where Street Team published, think.mtv.com, just won a Public & Community Service Emmy, members are not invited to MTV's upcoming Barack Obama party in Washington, DC. The reason? Community service and involvement is required for an invitation.

One would logically presume, then, that MTV brass won't be able to get in the door, either.

(Disclaimer: I submitted an application to the 2007 Knight Foundation News Challenge which was ultimately not selected. But I don't blame MTV!)

Invoices reportedly have been taking longer and longer to get paid, with checks cut only once per month in 2008. But supposedly things have gotten worse lately, per word from on high that October invoices shouldn't be paid until 2009. That's an awful holiday gift for the many freelancers who have formed their own paper companies (like LLCs) — people like editors, freelancers producers, camera operators, sound recordists and others.

Our tipster even claims that production accountants are told "to be 'wishy washy' when it comes to answering questions from disgruntled workers who have been waiting more than two months to get paid."

The greedy television executive played by Bill Murray in Scrooged would be proud. If you're affected or have any other information, send it our way.

UPDATE: A freelancer editor on an MTV show wrote in to say "my last few paychecks have been s-l-o-w. I still haven't received my paycheck from a bit more than a month ago. They used to be prompt, as in, less than a week after submitting an timesheet."