1. Be a Book Publicist—It worked for Melissa Broder, Sloane Crosley's publicist. Extend this chain ad infinitum. Crosley's book was called "I Was Told There'd Be Cake," and Broder's book will be called "When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother." The titles grow more impenetrably twee with each generation. Broder's publicist's future book will be called "Banana Karenina Sings the Blueberries, Or: The Indubitably Odd Presidency of Cherry True-Man."


2. Tumblr—Hey hey, Tumblr-of-the-minute Shit My Dad Says is the latest hot literary property! The hottest since This is Why You're Fat. Or Look at This Fucking Hipster. Even that Twitter book, which is almost like Tumblr or whatever, (internet buzzwords here). The point is: If you want a book off your internet crap, get it before the meme collapses.


3. Be a Celebrity—No matter how bad the economy gets, America will never tire of reading about celebrities and who they fuck. Which reminds us...


4. Fuck a Celebrity—Writing about Bernie Madoff's penis size will get you lots of press, but it might obviate the public's need to actually buy the book. Beware.


5. Latch Onto a Huge News Story and Ride It Straight to Book Hell—It must seem like common sense to hand out all those fat six-figure book contracts for books about The Historic Financial Crisis of 2008 or The Historic Election of 2008 while those things are happening. Then the book comes out a year later and nobody cares any more, plus **everything** has already been said. Be sure to get a good advance on a book deal like this. It's all you're gonna get.


6. Puppies—Quiz: You're a high-ranking editor at one of America's most prestigious news outlets. How will you get yourself a book deal. Answer: Write a column about your puppy! "Write a column about your puppy" is always a good answer to most of the aspiring author's daunting questions about the publishing industry. Motherfuckers just love puppies.

[Crosley/ Broder pic: Ron Hogan]

In a sort of open letter essay to the publishers of the Times and Post published by the Columbia Journalism Review, Simon pleaded for the newspapers to blatantly defy federal anti-trust laws and just blame it all on him when the FBI shows up on their doorsteps.

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future-let's say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it-both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-on-the-dollar fees. Either you believe that what The New York Times and The Washington Post bring to the table every day has value, or you don't.

You must both also individually inform the wire-service consortiums that unless they limit membership to publications, online or off, that provide content only through paid subscriptions, you intend to withdraw immediately from those consortiums. Then, for good measure, you might each make a voluntary donation-let's say $10 million-to a newspaper trade group to establish a legal fund to pursue violations of copyright, either by online aggregators or large-scale blogs, much in the way other industries based on intellectual property have fought to preserve their products.

And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive, briefcases in hand, to ask why America's two national newspapers did these things in concert-resulting in a sea change within newspapering as one regional newspaper after another followed suit in pursuit of fresh, lifesaving revenue-you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word. We read some rant in the Columbia Journalism Review that made the paywall argument. Blame the messenger.

Yeah, we're sure that'll fly really well with the feds.

And of course, Simon couldn't resist taking another of his patented shots at the internet on his way out of the door.

In the newspaper industry, however, the fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished-some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover-day after day-the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations. And until new models emerge that are capable of paying reporters and editors to do such work-in effect becoming online newspapers with all the gravitas this implies-they are not going to get us anywhere close to professional journalism's potential.

Detroit lost to a better, new product; newspapers, to the vague suggestion of one.

In other words, the internet may look like a Toyota, but it's really a Hyundai. Or something.

Now, I agree with Simon that some sort of payment model for newspaper content needs to be developed, but as my colleague Ryan Tate pointed out so well back in May, Simon, who hasn't worked as a journalist since the mid-90s and is clearly staggeringly ignorant about many aspects of the internet, is, simply, a "dead-wrong dinosaur" in his assertions about the inability of the web to cover "the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations." There are numerous websites doing incredible work covering society, culture and politics on a national level, and in his post, Ryan cited a few examples of individual citizens using blogs to shine light on issues in their local communities, something that continues to happen more and more all over the place. Hell, a group of plugged-in Alaskan citizens just about drove Sarah Palin to the brink of insanity with their pesky meddling, and as inexpensive, high-speed access to the internet continues to proliferate and the cost of the computer equipment necessary to create online content continues to drop, this sort of thing will become more and more commonplace.

As a collective source of news the internet is certainly not yet on par with newspapers that have been around for decades, but personally I've become much more comfortable getting my news from passionate individual observers than I am with getting my news from an institution forced to play politics with other institutions in order to maintain its oh-so-sacred "access" over the passage of time. If anyone should understand this feeling and sympathize with it, you'd think it'd be David Simon. After all, The Wire was a show about the corruption of American institutions, one of which was a newspaper! And frankly, let's be brutally honest here, the stuff taught in journalism schools isn't exactly, well, rocket science. Is it helpful and advantageous to have such an education if one chooses to embark on a career in media? Yes. But is it an absolute prerequisite? No. Because the lack of a journalism school education is nothing that can't be overcome with sheer determination and simple common sense. Period.

Look, I don't want newspapers to die. I love newspapers. They've been an integral part of my daily life since I was a kid. Ideally, in a perfect world, some happy medium can be reached, some middle ground can be found where newspapers and internet news sources are both able to survive and thrive. But in the course of the natural progression of things, sometimes things just die. Yes, it's sad, but it's just the way it is. Accept it.

The irony in all of this is that The Wire, the television show David Simon created/produced/wrote, owes a lot of its success to, wait for it—the internet! The Wire was, and continues to be, the darling of internet people. Web buzz played a huge part in the show's staying on the air for five seasons, not to mention how it's helped the show remain a part of the national conversation since going off the air. Hell, I personally rented and eventually bought the complete series on DVD earlier this year entirely because of the giant internet circlejerk over the damn thing. So, yeah, this is all so very, well, ironic.

Finally, I like David Simon a lot and he's someone that I and many others look up to, but really, it's time for him to just shut the fuck up.

Build the Wall [CJR]

The Observer reports that Abrams has been talking to some of the best media writers in NYC about coming over to start his "on-line Web property that will include some level of blogging of and about the media," as he puts it, all lawyerly-like:

But the Observer has learned the list of writers and editors who've spoken to Mr. Abrams includes Gawker's politics editor Alex Pareene, Advertising Age 'Media Guy' columnist Simon Dumenco, former New York Magazine senior editor Jesse Oxfeld, Portfolio's Mixed Media blogger Jeff Bercovici, and The Observer's own John Koblin.
So far none of the conversations have resulted in a hiring.

Ha, well the bright side is that all the good writers are now conflicted out of writing about it, so I can write about it! The description of exactly what Abrams wants here is a bit vague, but evidently he'd like a respectable media blog, run by respectable people, to confer a level of legitimacy upon his PR firm, which is decidedly not legitimate, because it pays active journalists to be consultants for things they might cover, or are already covering, which is the very DEFINITION of a conflict of interest.

Here's Abrams' own defense of his business model, which, we'll just note, assumes that you, the readers, are none too insightful.

But hey, sounds like he's trying to get some good talent ($50-80K salaries!), and assuming that he left them alone, this blog could be good! The downside is that it will be fronting a sellout factory. You can take that for what it's worth. Which, in this job market, is nothing. [NYO]

Just about every print media outlet—newspapers, in particular, but magazines too—has fewer editorial employees than it did five years ago. When these layoffs and buyouts come down, the usual pep talk goes like this: "We know this will be hard for all of you. It's not just here— the news business is facing challenges across the board. But we firmly believe that if we all buckle down and work hard and, I don't know, start some extra blogs and shit, we can do MORE WITH LESS, which will rescue us from this fucking financial quagmire, etc."

Stirring words, yes. But the only people who actually have to do more with less are the non-laid-off reporters: their bosses order them to pick up the slack of the people who are gone, and, since this internet thing seems important, to do some extra online work, too.

Does this actually mean that the publication is producing "more" for "less?" No. It means that quality declines, because you're devoting less time to each story. Employee satisfaction declines. And, because your advertising continues to decline, it's likely you're actually putting out a smaller print product. So the reader gets less (and less, and less) for the same price.

This is a formula that leads to a downward spiral (see Nick Denton's fancy graph). Here's a better idea: Do less with less. For success! For example, the Seattle P-I is folding its print edition, retaining a relative handful of reporters, and remaking itself as a sort of Seattle version of the HuffPo or something. The Christian Science Monitor is going online-only, with a print version once a week. The Washington Post is condensing its business section. And wisely. How many people buy the WaPo for business coverage? Only broke people!

These are "less." Less is cheaper. Which gives the enterprise an actual chance of success, possibly! Instead of clinging to its old model unto death, a newspaper could ask itself: How much of this crap in our paper do we actually need? How many papers need a food section or a fashion section? None, really, if they don't bring in ad money. The Seattle P-I is focusing on what it needs: Seattle news and commentarianism. Local papers could cut back to covering local governments, sports, and crime. The number of US papers that can truly justify publishing a book review, or a weekly magazine, or extensive movie coverage can be counted on fewer than one hand's worth of fingers.

Oh, you like those sections? So do we. Unfortunately they cost too much so you can't have them any more. Or you can, and they will bankrupt the paper, which spreads its dwindling editorial resources thinner and thinner until the entire product is just one big lump of suck. Which has already happened, in many places! So do less. Spend less. And stop lying about it. [Pics: Martin Gee]

Speculation during the last couple of weeks has been that Murdoch's #2 man at News Corp, Peter Chernin, could be leaving the company soon. That didn't seem to be based on anything solid, and besides, a management shuffle won't solve the fundamental problem that Murdoch's fondness for papers is hurting News Corp's profitability above and beyond what the economy at large is doing.

Murdoch's $5 billion payment for the Wall Street Journal was obviously far too rich. The New York Post has always been a money-loser. And on a more basic level, every newspaper in a company's portfolio these days is likely to be considered, at best, a time bomb by investors. Nobody thinks any newspaper anywhere is on the financial upswing; consequently, even a company stocked with some of the most influential papers in the world, like News Corp, pays a price for owning them. Murdoch adopts the Last Man Standing defense:

"I have great faith that if we continue the way we are going, we may even get lucky and not have so much competition at the end of it all," Mr. Murdoch said in a recent conference call with Wall Street analysts. "We are in good shape on the newspapers."

This idea has been espoused by various print titles recently—the New York Times and Time magazine, for example—asserting that the strength of their brands will carry them through the hard times, scathed but not dead, while weaker competitors fall away.

The problem with this: it's not an actual plan. It's just optimism. It's the media equivalent of WW1 trench fighting, betting that you'll finally break your enemy's lines because you have a greater number of soldiers to send to their deaths in front of the machine guns.

The result of this strategy is that everyone ends up crippled, and most end up dead. News Corp and Murdoch—and his competitors, for that matter—need to think smarter. [NYT]

Our expectation for Newsweek has long been that it will just continue its slow slide into total irrelevance and eventual bankruptcy, clinging to a weekly news model that the internet long ago made defunct. But maybe not! Because the top editors of Newsweek are apparently acknowledging that their model is defunct, and trying something else. Namely, they're targeting a smaller, richer audience, and ending their focus on reporting on the "News" of the "Week" in favor of thinkier opinionated pieces. In other words, they're mashing up The Economist and The Atlantic with a little dash of that trademark Newsweek bullshit for people who only read for five minutes per week:

Starting in May, articles will be reorganized under four broad, new sections - one each for short takes, columnists and commentary, long reporting pieces like the cover articles, and culture - each with less compulsion to touch on the week's biggest events. A new graphic feature on the last page, "The Bluffer's Guide," will tell readers how to sound as if they are knowledgeable on a current topic, whether they are or not.

This is really the only viable path to survival for Newsweek, so we have nothing bad to say about it. Unless it has a deleterious effect on the Historical Jesus reporting, in which case, HELL. [NYT]

Keller doesn't really give yes-or-no answers in these reader chats as much as he mulls possibilities. But it's still a nice look into the world of NYT executive thinking. Of charging for online news, Keller acknowledges that Times Select was a failure, but says:

The lesson of that experiment, however, was not that readers won't pay for content. A lot of people in the news business, myself included, don't buy as a matter of theology that information "wants to be free." Really good information, often extracted from reluctant sources, truth-tested, organized and explained — that stuff wants to be paid for.

"Wants to be paid for" is probably the wrong term, but generally I think he's right. Print ad revenues are going down, fast and probably permanently. Online ad revenues are rising over the long term, but are nowhere near enough to make up for what's being lost in print ads. So how do you plug that revenue hole? Either continuing, massive cuts in the newsroom and elsewhere—which may have to come regardless, but are always a matter of degree—or an increase in subscription revenue. That means more money from the website. If that can't be done through advertising, it has to be done through charging for online access.

Keller says that could either mean an outright fee to access the website (which would make sense only if it wouldn't cost them more in a loss of readers and ad revenue); a micropayment model for individual stories (which would require good, widely accepted micropayment technology, which doesn't really exist at the moment); or "New reading devices" for which the NYT could sell daily downloads.

All of the above could work. Micropayments would be great, if someone could set up a viable way to do them. Some smart people (here at this very website even!) think that it would be a terrible move for the NYT to charge for access to any of its website, because a huge portion of its readers would just abandon it and move elsewhere (here, for example! We'll have a subscription).

So here's what newspapers need: some collective action. What if, say, the 100 biggest papers in the nation all started charging for online access at once? That would make it much harder to track down quality news for free. People happily paid to read newspapers before the internet came along. Then newspapers started giving away all their content for free, and now people think that it should be free. But if a paper's website can't pay its own way through online advertising, and if it doesn't somehow bolster print ad revenues, then it has to charge for access. It's common sense. Millions of extra online readers are nice, but if they don't bring in more money than they cost you, they're no good for the paper.

Would people rather pay to read the current level of NYT journalism, or have it go away? That's the fundamental question.

Keller is lukewarm at best about a non-profit model. So paid access to NYTimes.com might be coming sooner than you think. The cheapskates among you, though, can always read about all the important parts right here.

Here's a video of Poster Boys just straight tearing a whole billboard the hell down! Left in the spot was a blank canvas, for the public. This is technically a crime but, hey, still nice. The process:

The result:

[Public Ad Campaign via Animal NY]

Sure! Hell, I bet you could pull the whole thing off for a billion or two, which is now formally classified as "pocket change." The FWP was a program that ran from 1935-39, where the government paid for writers to go around writing... lots of things! FWP materials are considered a great resource by historians, and even produced a few decent writers:

Gifted FWP alumni who went on to distinguished literary careers in literature include John Steinbeck, John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and African Americans Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. The recent death of Studs Terkel— a FWP veteran who went on to use the skills he developed in the program to chronicle the working- and middle-classes on his long-running radio show and in his Pulitzer Prize-winning books—is a reminder of how valuable this kind of experience can be.

Yes, but times are different now. What was the program's return on investment? Couldn't this meager amount be better spent by throwing it down the black hole of a failing financial institution? Can Obama afford to be seen as soft on writers? We'd be stunned if this program ever came back, because Americans are mean anti-intellectuals. [TNR; pic via]

*TOP 10. Number the stories. Give them a "handle" "In tonight's Top Ten: #1 Obama announces he's a Muslim; #2 Pirates sink US Sub; #3 etc......

Good thinking!

*CASUAL STYLE: What with the suits and ties? I'm not suggesting sloppy...but business casual...maybe even eccentric as the Crime expert could be in a Columbo styled rumpled sweater.

Excellent advice!

*CRIME CENTER. It's simple...we have a Weather Center and a Traffic Center, why not a crime center with a dedicated crime expert.

Simple but brilliant!

*QUALITY: All of this tied together with a level of seriousness instead of trying to be funny and cute. I'm thinking a 60 Minutes vibe.

Haha why not? And finally:

Are the above points valid? I don't know, but that's not the point.

Yes sir! [Daily Pulp via Romenesko; pic via]

[Howard Rosenberg, media columnist]: The media are not going to slow down. No one is going to dial back. The only possible solution is media literacy — educating people, not when they're 25, not when they're 13, but when they're really young, almost like toddler level, for them to really understand the composition of media, the motivations of media, the impacts of media — both the positive impact and the potential negative impact.

Yea, Americans already do this. It's called "letting your kids watch too much TV." [Mixed Media]

“Radiohead made more money before In Rainbows was physically released than they made in total on the previous album Hail To the Thief,” Music Ally reports. In all, there have been three million purchases of In Rainbows (including CDs, vinyls, box sets and digital sales) since the band began selling the album officially on New Year’s Day 2008.

They also "admitted more people downloaded the album for free than paid for it." Which makes sense. But overall? Big success, economically and otherwise. Of course, now this idea is so old that people may have come to their senses—next time everyone downloads it for free. [via RS]

An agency called General Projects launched a site called Schtock.com that basically shows cut little mashups of stock photos. Everybody assumed it was a viral campaign for Corbis, the stock photo company. But actually GP did it on their own, and then took all the attention it generated and went to Corbis like, Hey, hire us, we can get you attention like this! So far Corbis hasn't done it. [via Adrants]

So, waste of time, right? Unless you consider pics like these art, in which case, good job of making internet art. Ultimately the agency probably will get business off this clever stunt, but let's hope the idea doesn't spread. We have enough viral shit as it is without people doing it on spec:

Of course no one cares about Leigh Lezark and Cory Kennedy and Peaches Geldof and even Julia Allison and no offense but their "zero money down" strategy w/r/t talent! This silly idea of Andy Warhol's about everyone getting to be microfamous is just as silly as the idea that everyone in America needs to own a house when obviously they really don't have the "marketable skills" our society would deem worthy of that sort of security. But we invested then-valuable hours in their crappy fundamentals and look what happened: they and Lindsay and Paris and the pothead socialite tranche and the Kardashian tranche and the reformed rapper concubine tranche brought the WHOLE CELEBRITY MARKET crashing down with them. And now it is up to Us Weekly to make sure Sarah Palin doesn't get elected while we at Gawker educate you in the ways of the new communist regime. Look, it is not like people were paying us to give them "AAA ratings." We hated them all along, every one, but we get paid by the page view. That is how the free market works. Or doesn't, I dunno! Anyway thank you market for rallying in support of us trying to figure out complicated things such as "How fucked are the people who don't actually have any money?" Please celebrate the liquidity while it lasts this beautiful cold weekend!

*My roommate, who incidentally stole my October 'Harper's' but that's okay because if she hadn't bought the last like 90 rolls of toilet paper I would be using it to clog the toilet, is the subscriber.

1. "Magical Binder"

If you ever tried to write on a three-ring binder in your lap, you know how annoying it is when it keeps folding up, and possibly falling between your legs. Chuck's idea: "I don't have all the plans drawn up, you will have to spend the half hour figuring out the best way to make this a reality, but someone should produce a three ring binder that locks open, creating a rigid plane of productivity."

2. "Sex Sells Stuff"

The energy drink market is crowded with competitors, and the big players like Coke seem to have it on lock. How to even the playing field for smaller energy drink companies? Chuck's idea: "Product placement in pornographic films."

3. "Deep Fried Gold."

Fried foods offer restaurants a healthy profit margin, because a lot of their bulk is just made up of grease and fry material. Chuck's idea: "A restaurant that only sells deep fried nuggets/bite sized morsels of food. The nuggets are sold by the pound, and everything is the same price per pound. The customer wants a pound of deep fried okra or a pound of deep fried chicken nuggets, it costs the same."

If anyone does invent any of these, give us a cut too, for directing you to his site.

[Ideas By Chuck, first spotted at Adrants]

"Why doesn't David Geffen provide a proper amount of backing for an online newspaper out of LA and why doesn't he hire the staff of the LA Times en masse and let them keep putting it out under a different name? That way Geffen would have the pleasure of owning LA's paper of record, the staff might have the opportunity of doing their jobs without worrying if their names are going to come out of the hat at the next round of cutbacks, forests of precious trees would be saved and no one would get their hands or light suits stained with ink while reading about current affairs."

That's kind of a great idea! And then why doesn't David Geffen buy some closed steel mills and textile factories in Ohio and pay all the workers to keep making all that steel and those textiles too? Then he can give everyone welfare. Oh wait, did we say capitalism? We meant handouts! WHAT HAPPENED TO PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY?

"Spotted: Actor Who Plays Gay Overcompensating by Kissing Girls In Public," hisses Intel's headline for an event wrap-up. Paolo was apparently sucking face on the red carpet with some dizzy dame (pictured above) named April Alice, behavior that looked like "flaunted heterosexuality" to the Daily News. And, yeah, I don't know. I'm all for silly gay rumors, because they're amusing and fun and just might be true sometimes. But when a seventeen-year-old is making out with his girlfriend, is it really "overcompensating" or is he just, you know, a seventeen-year-old straight boy?

Yes, it was on the red carpet, and that's a bit of a "look at meeeee" PDA in a way that doesn't seem exactly organic, but he's definitely not the first celebrity to kiss someone in front of cameras. Maybe it's kind of a giddy thrill, you know? Maybe that's all it is. The idea that an actor who, whether he's gay or straight in real life, plays gay on TV must be grandly trying to shake off that image at any possible opportunity is a bit... I don't know, rude in some way. I'm probably being totally hypocritical and will double back on myself next week, but right now it just seems a bit like piling-on and over-analyzing the hormonal bumblings of a teenager. So, there.

But, on the other hand, we received a tip that Paolo's costar, Ed Westwick, was at a basement gay bar recently hitting on some mens. So, hah! Game on!!

Update: A Facebook-roving tipster tells us that the girlfriend's name is, in fact, Alice. And they had the photos (from Facebook, natch) to prove it:

[Image via Splash]

Reading Buckley's preface to the 50th anniversary edition describing the contempt heaped upon his book, I was reminded of the reception of my book criticizing racial preference policies, "Losing the Race." Stewards of "academic freedom" dismissed my reasoning as immoral rather than alternate, often having read not more than a chapter or two of the book. Melodramatic epithets flew thick, hurled by people blissfully unaware of the contradiction in upholding free inquiry while readily tarring people expressing certain views as "not with the program."

Visionaries always trod a rocky road.

[NYS]