Newspapers
Forget it. Really. This is the worst place of all to either be employed, or be looking for employment. An easy rule of thumb: only the very top and the very bottom of the newspaper industry even have a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel. National papers—NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, USA Today—at least have strong enough brands to possibly pull through and prosper in the future. Tiny local papers are okay, since they have no internet competition to speak of. But every city paper in the population range from Spokane to Chicago is going to get slammed hard for the forthcoming future.

Not the best job prospect. (Except in India. Print is exploding there! If you like naan as much as journalism, buy yourself a plane ticket).

Business and Tech Titles
These had a good run once upon a time in the tech boom days. No mas. These titles will be some of the hardest hit in the upcoming downturn. As you can deduce, by their target audiences. So while they're a fair prospect today, they won't be for long, generally speaking.

Alt-Weeklies
Alt-weeklies are great. I started at an alt-weekly! But they're a little like newspapers: big, chain-owned alt-weeklies are getting decimated. Smaller, independent, more far-flung ones have a slightly better outlook. A good place to get some clips. A bad place to build a career.

The Trade Press
Safer than mainstream news outlets! Though not totally safe by any means! Trade magazines, etc. thrive in relation to the industry they cover. When the industry gets slammed economically, the trade magazines get slammed even worse. So everything from advertising to finance to media (heh) trades: rough. Real estate trades: still have ad revenue for now, as developers try to clear all these suddenly unpopular properties off their books. Once they do that, though, ad revenue will crater. Trades are only a safe haven when compared to, say, newspapers. Choose with care.

Cable Networks
Many cable networks are doing quite well! Hey, CNBC will surely be popular for the foreseeable future! Cable news is a niche far less damaged by the internet than print media. And specialty cable networks like the Sci Fi channel or National Geographic seem to be doing fine. So if you can broaden your idea of "journalism" to include, say, being an assistant producer for some nature show, you just might be in luck!

"Good" Magazines
Oh, these are the jobs everybody wants. You want to write for the New Yorker. Or Vanity Fair, or GQ, or Vogue, or Wired, or SI, or the 50 or so other big splashy magazines that, you know, everybody wants to write for.

These jobs were always driven by connections. And guess what: they're still driven by connections, but there are even less jobs to go around now! So your chances are even worse than they would have been historically. These good jobs are never advertised, so you have to be well-connected enough to hear about them from an insider. Big magazine companies are cutting budgets and instituting hiring freezes. And every veteran magazine writer has a huge ego, so forget trying to cut in line ahead of them. Plan on getting to one of these places later in your career, as the icing on the cupcake of many years of experience, and you'll save yourself a bunch of heartache. Build up to these magazines from other, nonexistent entry-level writing jobs.

Online Ventures, new and otherwise
These are a mixed bag. Once upon a time young people worked for blogs as a way to gain exposure and land a good magazine job (Elizabeth Spiers). Now, in some cases, the two are viewed as roughly equivalent (our new editor is coming from a real magazine!). So you actually have to evaluate the specific title now to determine whether you're moving up or down. For example:

Editor at the Huffington Post > Police reporter at the Newark Star-Ledger
Writer for Slate = Writer for Washington Post
Writer for Tina Brown's new Daily Beast < Reporter for the New Republic, because Tina Brown's thing might fold in six months.

Use discretion.

PR
Oh, did you say you want a well-paid job involving the media, with good benefits and stability? One current well-established journalist says, "Here's some advice: take a job at a PR company. I was offered one recently and would have made more than 2x what I'm making now. And wouldn't have had to worry about whether the job would even EXIST in six months."

See, as the number of journalism jobs shrink, much of the work that reporters used to do gets de facto outsourced to flacks! So PR firms can offer harried, overworked, underpaid journalists near-complete story packages—ideas, angles, sources, art, photos, etc.—in return for a wee bit of client placement. Lots of laid-off editors and reporters go into PR, just like ex-soldiers sign on with private contractors and get sent back to Iraq with better guns and better to pay to do the same job they were doing before, but without any inherent "public service" element.

Still, we would never advise anyone to go into PR on general principle. If you want to be in journalism, be in journalism.

The takeaway from all this: the outlook is grim. If you're just getting into journalism, the job market is already flooded with people with far more experience than you who've been laid off, and are competing for the same jobs. If you're employed, moving up is treacherous—you never know when the new job you just took could disappear for reasons unrelated to anything you did personally.

But there's still a huge news hole to be filled with crap. Somebody has to do it. It might as well be you. It's mostly shoveling coal for Satan, anyhow.

• Be desperate. Gorgeous George got into wrestling, which was fake, but also offered the very real assurance of getting injured. He risked getting his ass kicked on the street by adopting such a pansy-ish persona. He once took a match in which, if he lost, he'd have to cut off his beloved hair. Why? He needed the money!
• Be feared. It's impossible to survive long as a villain if people don't have a fundamental fear of you. Otherwise, you'll be torn to pieces (literally, in the olden days; now, just your reputation is at stake). George weighed 215 pounds, was a good athlete, and scared the yokels with his weirdness, besides.
• Have a talent. You can't just be hated. You have to be hated for doing something you're good at. George was actually a good wrestler and a showman. Julia Allison is actually talented in charm. Being a villain without talent makes you, for example, the Son of Sam.
• Get a good outfit. Oh, this is key. Be memorable! Gorgeous George had long hair, which he died blond and curled before matches; toted around a tea set to indicate his upper-crust persona; and had "a man-servant who attended him in the ring and sprayed perfume wherever he would walk." That's style. Kim Kardashian wears booty shorts. Every successful villain has their own thing.
• Drown your sorrows. Upside of being a famous bad guy: Fame. Downside: You're a bad guy. Being a villain can be hard on the soul. Gorgeous George ended up as an alcoholic who "literally drank himself to death." But you can say that for lots of non-famous jerks too.

[WSJ]

Recording Phone Calls

Federal law allows recording of phone calls with the consent of one party on the call, meaning you can legally record any phone calls you're a part of. State laws vary, however: in some states you must have the consent of both parties (not New York, though). See here for a full guide.

You can record phone calls on normal handsets with a cheap recorder hookup, like this one from Radio Shack. You can also record calls onto your PC, either with an adapter, or, more simply, by using Skype. There are also services that will record your cell phone calls for you, and allow you to access them when you want.

Other Recording

A simple little digital recorder is a great device that can be slipped into a pocket or left in a corner and record ambient conversations for hours. For long-distance audio recording, you'll need something more powerful, like a parabolic microphone that can amplify sounds 300 yards away. Works great for hearing bird calls; if you're using it to listen in on people, you may be a creep.

For visuals, there are plenty of discreet, handheld digital camcorders that should meet most video recording needs. To secretly record what's happening in a room, you can buy camcorders that are hidden in everything from plants to smoke alarms. Again—if you are using these to be a creep, you will and should be locked up.

Researching People

Google! It's a wonderful tool. Nexis People search is a quick and efficient way to categorize your searching by what the person does, where they're from, their company name, etc. Paid search services like Intellius can take small bits of information about people and search for public records and contact info for a nominal fee. Names can be parlayed into phone numbers and email addresses, and vice versa.

Public records from these and other similar sources are broader than you think. Recent Nexis upgrades, for example, can give you everything from a person's cell phone number to info on their gun licenses. You never know what you might find.

The Freedom of Information Act is designed to give you access to government records that don't have a good reason to be private. This is largely political; under the current administration, lots of stupid things are private. Obama should be more open (one would think). Get your FBI file, why don't you? Better yet, get someone else's! A government guide to FOIA is here, and a citizen's guide to the process is here.

Also legal: searching through someone's trash, if it has been placed out for disposal in a public area. Although this may get your ass kicked.

Tracking Movement

A small GPS device like this placed in someone's car can help you track them for days. If you're not in law enforcement, this is probably illegal, so never do it.

Modern cell phones have built-in GPS devices, which would theoretically make them a great way to track the movement of individuals. But that's generally impossible without the assistance of the carrier, unless the person is using an opt-in tracker and posting their movements themselves on Dodgeball or something. So this one requires great hacking skills or a mole at the phone company, and is illegal besides. A useful overview to cell phone tracking is here.

For observation purposes, digital binoculars combine a camera, video recorder, and binoculars in one product.

Final Thoughts

Are you spying for a righteous cause? If not, give the world some privacy, why don't you? Either way, you might consider learning Krav Maga or carrying a Taser. Those being spied upon tend to object.

No Cliches

An expat in Beijing helpfully lists all the major cliches that you intrepid foreign correspondents should avoid. They include the following phrases:
“Coming out party”
“Beijing is a city of stark contrasts”
“A city of startling juxtapositions”
“A city of yin and yang”
“There is an ancient Chinese curse that says, 'May you live in interesting times'"
“The Chinese word for crisis includes the character for opportunity and the character for danger”
“China’s rising middle class.”

Also to be avoided: Blade Runner comparisons, quoting taxi drivers, stories about "Chinglish," stories about weird Chinese food, and making fun of the Olympic mascots. Make a note of these restrictions.

Watch Out For Cops

Chinese cops will beat up journalists. Watch out for that.

Remember Your Fake Credentials

The system for the media hordes in Beijing, apparently, is this: Yellow badges go to the important media people who get to be close to the center of the action. Blue badges go to unimportant stragglers who are stuffed into an auxiliary media center away from the action. Therefore, if you know you are unimportant, bring some yellow paper and a laser printer.

Bring Bribe Money

This tends to make things go more smoothly in savage lands like China. Also helpful for the cop situation (see above).

Cover Whatever Pops Off

The best story of these Olympics will happen when the inevitable activists pull off whatever big public stunt they're planning, and the Chinese government responds by either rounding them all up to be shipped off to a secret location, or crushing them right there in the streets. NBC certainly won't focus on it. All the really important journalists will be off covering the sporting events, to which they were able to score tickets. This will be your chance, unimportant marginal reporters! Make the most of it.

Forget The Masks

Yes, some of the athletes are wearing masks because of Beijing's dirty air. It was on the cover of the Post (bit of a stretch, we must say). But if you can't think of a new angle on this—maybe see how long you can hold your breath?—then just leave it alone. And for god's sake do not wear a mask yourself.

Find Some Poor People

They should be available all over Beijing, ready to share their colorful tales of urban life for a nominal fee. For a larger fee they may be willing to gripe about the Olympics, anonymously. Take advantage.

Find A Villain

The Olympics are the source of a neverending stream of grating, soft-focus profiles of athletes who overcame hardships to achieve their dream. Fuck that. Anyone watching the NBC broadcasts will have had a vomit-inducing amount of that schlock by the second day. What you need to do is find the evil athletes who have risen to the top despite being unmitigated assholes. The weightlifters who shoot designer steroids; the BMX bikers who bring their stash of Ecstasy to Beijing; the equestrian star who beats her kids. These are the profiles that will propel you to fame.

Find A Good Chinese Restaurant

Don't be a sucker who eats in the media village every day. Don't be an even worse sucker who eats at all the tourist restaurants. Be that guy who plunges into the heart of the urban jungle, finds an "authentic" Chinese restaurant, and then annoys your friends with repeated tales of your quest to ferret out that "authentic" Chinese restaurant. In years to come, this will be a great way to bring overlong dinner parties to a close.

Fuck Michael Phelps

Ha yes, we know some of you would like to do this literally. But we speak of a metaphorical fucking of Michael Phelps only. Everybody knows the motherfucker is going to win every race and be on a fucking Wheaties box. Do we have to hear hour upon hour of minutiae about his white-bread lifestyle, which consists mainly of going to the pool and possibly downing a few brews and being fellated by a sorority girl on the weekends? For fuck's sake. He seems like a nice guy, but really. He's a good swimmer. Go find those villains.

• "And lastly, business (and life) isn’t an “academic exercise”. It’s real – not theory or concept… not a fictitious name posted on a blog, but instead something very real and measured. Real business – real life – real dollars and cents. There are many who can criticize and nitpick which is easy… but working hard every day and building is a hell of a lot harder."

  (Is that an apology for this? Probably not.)

• "What is it that a brand can do to create enough mystique that there are pre-orders? Clearly Steve Jobs seems to have figured this out… I had the question myself this past Saturday during my 7 AM morning jog, when I saw tens of people lined up outside my local UWS movie theatre waiting for Batman."
• "Clients who need global reach can and should indeed get it, but not as a cooker cutter, but instead on a case by case basis."
• "The cure-all for the inflation problem in the ‘70s was that women went to work to supplement family income.

  [A client] said that, today, with 80-90 percent of women working, we no longer have a solution as simple as the one 30 years ago. So now, how can the economy get better; by sending our children to work? Surely not!
  Hence, the crisis facing today’s families as the economy struggles"

• "Every day of the week, I tell employees go out, create and do. It’s ok to occasionally make mistakes. Be passionate, care and try. Don’t over think. Do."

And our bonus tip for success: Learn how to write.

[Counterpoint, from Ronn's blog: "With very, very few exceptions, to say that I vastly disagree would be an understatement."]

#1: Be late with the reviewer's reservation.

He returned at 9:02 with something less than disaster relief. Our table, he said, should be ready in 10 minutes. Never mind that we'd been told at 8:45 that we had five minutes to go. Never mind that Ago has some 110 seats, giving it more flexibility than many restaurants have.

We waited. And waited. One of the hostesses finally fetched us at 9:22. I'll do the math: that's 52 minutes after our reservation.

#2: Spill wine on the reviewer or his friends.

I'm talking about the "Poseidon Adventure" of wine spills. Shelley Winters could have done the backstroke in it. I'm not sure how the bartender set it in motion, and neither was he. He kept marveling at its fury and aftermath: my friend's wine-splashed chin, her wine-soaked skirt, her wine-sopped entirety.

#3: Put the reviewer at the worst table in the house.

She led us to a round table little bigger than a bike wheel. When our four appetizers later arrived and claimed every square millimeter of it, the waiter audibly contemplated balancing a fifth, communal appetizer that we'd ordered on top of our wine glasses.

The table was pressed so close to a column that I couldn't lower my right arm all the way, and if my wine-drenched friend leaned back in her chair, the column obstructed her view of me and mine of her.

#4: Have bad food.

This restaurant isn't in the hospitality business. It's in the attitude business, projecting an aloofness that permeated all of my meals there, nights of wine and poses for swingers on the make, cougars on the prowl and anyone else who values a sort of facile fabulousness over competent service or a breaded veal Milanese with any discernible meat.

The one I had one night was pounded so thin that the breading on top met the breading on the bottom without pausing for much of anything in between. A vegan could have made peace with it.

#5: Have waiters who are jerks.

Then came an entree that perplexed us, a pale slab of meat with one long bone.

"What is this?" asked one of my friends.

"The special veal chop," said the food deliverer.

"But I ordered rack of lamb," my friend said. I had heard him.

"Yes," said the deliverer. "That's rack of lamb."

My friend pressed: which was it?

"It's the special rack-of-lamb veal chop," the deliverer said, at which point we sought deliverance from him and searched for our frequently vanishing waiter, whom I had come to think of as the bucatini Houdini.

[NYT]

The phenomenon of (always) stupid (usually) young men—often bored graffiti writers from the outer boroughs—surfing on the outside of subway cars has been admirably covered by the New York media. It's one of those evergreen, slice of life stories that publications can recycle every few years, as events warrant. Every so often, somebody dies riding on top of train, and the populace of the city remarks to itself, "My, how stupid. And possibly tragic."

And the, um, "sport "isn't confined to America. Not by a long shot! The Japanese enjoy surfing on trains and dodging oncoming bridges:

In South Africa, kids like to boogie on top of trains, duck for their lives, then continue to boogie:

In Barcelona, some kids ride on the back of the subway, which is relatively safer. Very relatively:

And to answer my original question, who would be stupid enough to ride on the side of the train? Some guy in Manchester, England, for one! His trip ended as you might have guessed:

In conclusion: Kids, if you want to go subway surfing, keep your activities confined to the inside of the car. There's really only one safe way to do it—as performance art:

[pic via Subway Blogger]

In one sense, yes; the latest circulation figures showed almost no big gains among the top 25 magazines, and Time and Playboy even took double-digit dives. The biggest winners were AARP's in-house publications, which is not a good sign for the youthful vitality of the industry.

Magazines aren't in as bad a situation as newspapers are in terms of the "death of print," but they're on the trailing edge of the same phenomenon. One difference is the demographics of the readerships—an area in which magazine companies should have a theoretical advantage, because they are much more well-positioned to tailor their publications to suit them to desirable demographic groups than newspapers are. People also value magazines more for their production values, which gives them an advantage over plain old news, which can be easily replicated for free online.

Also, trade magazines and other super-specialty publications are the sector of the magazine market that should be the safest in these crazy times. They will be much slower to suffer declines, generally speaking, than the consumer market will be (just like small, community papers will be slower to see the internet eat their profits than national papers have been). So if you have hundreds of millions of dollars laying around, buying up Reed Elsevier's magazines might not be a bad investment.

Of course, if the overall economy declines, trade magazines can be a dangerous place—when their industry subscribers see their own revenue fall, high-priced trade mag subscriptions are one of the first nonessential expenses to get cut.

So, magazine industry: Fun place to work, semi-poised for a slow decline, and no longer looking for "editors." Possibly a good contrarian investment, but subject to be punished by broad market fluctuations.

A better sector of the media to put your money on? Janitorial services.