The listing, preserved here for posterity, goes like this:

obama upper west side (West Village)
Date: 2009-11-20, 6:01PM EST
Reply to: job-ub4ww-1475290617@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

ATTN: I'm getting a lot of sarcastic emails. Don't bother sharing your wit with me: it's been done. And done. This is an UNPAID internship intended for a STUDENT and is a RESEARCH position that will give him experience and position on a prestige project. If you can't afford to work in a role that offers credit only, but no renumeration, this isn't for you. If you're the sort of person who has the spare time to respond sarcastically to Craigslist postings, this REALLY isn't for you. Thanks.

I'm working on a memoir, set in 1983, when I lived with Obama for a year.

The memoir is about my life and about what New York was like in 1983, and how we lived then, but Barack is obviously a player in the story. This is not a tell-all, it's a friendly, gentle and literate book.

I work full time in a highly visible career and would like to work with a research assistant to help me stay focused.

This is you:

You live in Manhattan and can visit the Village frequently.
Your living situation is stable, as is your personal life.
Your income is stable.
You can work with a six month window. (ok, maybe a year. it depends.)
You are a fantastic and empathetic listener.
You're creative and imaginative and a fine writer. You can shape material.
You don't drink or use drugs. No psychological disorders I have to deal with.
You are in a graduate writing program at NYU or Columbia.
You want an opportunity to work on a visible book.
You are dependable, timely, punctual and highly motivated to succeed.

This is an internship, not a paid position.

I have already begun, finally, this week, after thinking about it for a the last year. Now is the time. My agent is waiting on the first 100 pages. Let's go.

* Compensation: non-paying internship
* This is an internship job
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

PostingID: 1475290617

So: who do we have who needs an "intern" who is also in a graduate writing program? Or, otherwise: which Upper West Side asshole friend of Obama's hepcat days is now enough of a square to need an unpaid slave to help write their feeder-fish book and expect to be paid in the form of, maybe, a thank you in a book that has yet to be written on one year of Obama's life?

Have you applied for the job? You got any guesses? Shoot us an email or throw it in the comments. We'd love to know, 'cause, you know: we've got questions, too.

We have two separate (unconfirmed) staff change rumors today, from tipsters. First, at SI:

At the ever-shrinking Sports Illustrated, the magazine's #2, exec ed. Mike Bevans, has privately announced that he'll be among the staffers taking a buyout. This marks the second Time Inc. purge in a row that M.E. Terry [McDonell]. has lost his aide de camp: last year it was David Bauer.

Second, we hear that the New York Post has replaced veteran police reporter Phil Messing with relative rookie Kirsten Fleming. Indeed, Messing's byline does not show up in a search since last month. Out tipster says, "The fear, of course, is that the writing is on the wall for Phil who is one of the more reliable and experienced police reporters in the city. He's old school. But the Post is rumored to be wanting to get rid of 10 to 15 reporters so everyone over there is worrying that their heads are on the chopping block." If you know more, email us.
UPDATE: Actually, another search for just Messing's last name turns up lots of recent bylines, so he's still hard at work, for now.


Oh Anthony Kennedy went on and on about how his office's demand to pre-approve his quotes in a school paper was misunderstood, but now the WSJ says he did the same thing once at GWU. Whatever. Just don't outlaw abortion.


There used to be a dozen analysts covering newspaper companies for Wall Street. How many are there now? Not so many! Now it's just Rick Edmonds, a dude who works for Poynter, trying to figure out how bad the newspaper apocalypse is. "My conservative estimate is that there is $1.6 billion newspapers used to spend annually on reporting and editing that they don't anymore." Journalism! Related: An incredible graph about magazines, and the money they are no longer making.


BusinessWeek media reporter Jon Fine (a good reporter!), currently on a months-long round-the-world vacation with his wealthy wife Laurel Touby, announces on Twitter that new BW owners Bloomberg have laid him off. One thing he can take solace in: His months-long, round-the-world vacation.

[Note: All info is based on tips and is not verified by the AP. In some cases it's impossible to tell whether multiple tips refer to the same people, but we've synthesized as much as possible.]

New York City
Reported layoffs: One business editor, one business reporter, five multimedia staffers, one sports editor, several writers on the national desk.

Upstate New York
One correspondent and one editorial assistant reportedly gone.

Boston
Four staffers reportedly laid off.

Washington, DC
Reported layoffs: One business reporter, one research staffer, an "enterprise team" reporter (Rita Beamish), an assignment desk staffer, three broadcast staffers.

Pittsburgh
Reported layoffs: One business reporter.

Dallas
One reported layoff.

Jacksonville
Longtime AP reporter Ron Word reportedly laid off and bureau closing. [I remember Ron Word's byline from forever when I was growing up near there, very sad. Shout out to Ron Word!]

Kentucky
Reported layoffs: One news editor in Louisville, one editorial assistant, one state capitol reporter.

Central Wisconsin
One reporter laid off and bureau reportedly closed.

Oklahoma
News editing duties reportedly outsourced to Little Rock.

Michigan
Reported layoffs: One state government reporter, the only Grand Rapids correspondent (bureau reportedly closing), and one editorial assistant.

Dayton, OH
Reported layoffs: One correspondent and one editorial assistant, which means the entire bureau.

Berkeley, CA
One correspondent reportedly laid off and bureau closing.

Roanoke, VA
The only correspondent reportedly laid off.

Bismarck, ND
Only correspondent reportedly laid off.

Santa Fe, NM
One of two correspondents reportedly laid off.

National Staffers
Reported layoffs: A "high percentage" of all editorial assistants across the country, a national photo editor, as many as eight photographers, the AP liaison/executive director of the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME), a national writer, an investigative reporter/ computer-assisted reporting guru (Pulitzer winner Frank Bass),

San Juan/ Caribbean Bureau
Nine staffers reportedly laid off and bureau slated to close.

The Middle East
Reported layoffs: At least three newspeople. One reporter in Jerusalem.

Vietnam
One photographer reportedly laid off.

Beijing
Reported layoffs: One reporter and one other staffer.

View The AP Layoff Map in a larger map

And that's among so-called "movers and shakers;" life might be even tougher on the rank and file. On the one hand, they get copious and diverse free snacks, food from the likes of David Chang and a very competitive salary. But on the other, there's the chaos that results from Google digesting acquisitions like DoubleClick and losing top executives like former ad chief Tim Armstrong. Some of the purported fallout, gleaned from the gossip in Business Insider's post:

• Advertising VP Penry Price is said to have lost power when Armstrong left and to be "looking for a way out."
• Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms, supposedly lost an internal power struggle. One source told BI: "It wouldn't suprise me to see him leave after a while."
  
• Director of media platforms Eileen Naughton won that aforementioned power strugle but supposedly wants to leave because she "thinks it's a crazy place and wants to get the hell out of there."
  
• Google's first Gotham engineer, Engineering Director Craig Nevill-Manning, is so rich, presumably on Google options, that people wonder if he'd rather be "traveling around in Africa having a fun time."
  
• M&A guy Jason Harinstein is said to be "poachable."

So there you have it: Google is a tough place to work in part because of the distracting wealth you earn there and because the awesome job offers you get as a result of working there. Sounds unbearable.

(Pic: Google New York, by Eddie Codel)

Bartiromo wrote a Q&A column called FaceTime, which consisted of her asking questions of some business guy each week. She's not a bulldog questioner, but she's not incompetent either. Her strongest point was access: Hank Greenberg, Tim Geithner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg have all sat for her in the past month.

Her downsides: She's perceived as friendly to CEOs, which is part of the reason she gets that access. And whatever they pay her for that column is certainly inflated by her own celebrity, which is hard to justify when Bloomberg's getting ready to lay off a bunch of BW staffers. They'll be able to get good access with a much cheaper columnist, anyhow; who else will CEOs rattle off talking points to, bloggers? LOL!

Don't feel bad, Maria. Gurl U no Wall St luvs U no matta wut. Gurl let Jamie Dimon buy U a drank.

Dobbs would fit much more snugly into the right-wing stable of shouting heads over at Fox than he did at CNN, where he made an awkward lie of the cable network's attempt to position itself as a non-partisan straight-news alternative to MSNBC on the left and Fox News on the right. But Dobbs hasn't exactly been a ratings dynamo: He was recently losing not only to Shep Smith at Fox but Chris Matthews at MSNBC and even Jane Velez Mitchell at CNN's HLN (formerly Headline News). Burn.

Maybe once Dobbs is unshackled from his CNN overlords he can finally make a bright future for himself in a foreign TV land, one that believes in true opportunity for downtrodden and wandering émigrés like himself.

UPDATE: Video of the announcement is above. Dobbs' comments have observers speculating he'll make some kind of political move.

UPDATE: Maybe not; a CNN statement says "Lou has now decided to carry the banner of advocacy journalism elsewhere."

The UC Santa Cruz job is no accident; it was made possible by a donation from the Dead themselves. And it's not just drug bands spreading counterculture good fortune these days:

• Amid mass journalism layoffs, a new hippie-friendly type of gig has opened up: Pot reviewer. Denver's alt weekly went looking for just such a fellow, to serve the booming local market for "medical" marijuana.
  
• Grungy well-heeled young music fans made this year's Coachella music festival a "super happy" success. Far out for concert organizers who refused to grow up and get a "real job!"
• Vegan animal activist Jane Velez-Mitchell has a hit show over on CNN's Headline News and can now aspire to the even greater level of success attained by left-wing-radio-host-turned-MSNBC-anchor (and fellow lesbian) Rachel Maddow. (Maddow was a Rhodes scholar, putting her on the high achieving side of hippiedom.)
  
• The White House installed an organic garden under lobbying from Alice Waters, delivering a PR victory to the restaurateur derided as a hippie "dreamer" on national television just days earlier.
  
• In San Francisco, the sort of company that holds "naked" meetings and makes decisions through unanimous consensus is now showered with VC cash.
  
• A protest marcher from a hippie college changed his name to the militant "Barack" from the placid "Barry" and was soon elected president of these United States.
  
• If you advocate turning your cat vegan or making men pee while sitting down, for the environment, the New York Times will publish your op-ed, these days.

And all this time you thought "get a job" was the ultimate way to insult a hippie. Who's laughing now, straight edge??

(Pic via)

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky (pictured) is leading the way, according to LA Observed: The politico's website is overseen by former latimes.com editor Joel Sappell; contributors include another former Los Angeles Times editor and a former Newsweek correspondent.

The articles wouldn't be out of place in a local newspaper. You've got your anecdotal ledes; your "quiet" and "bittersweet" response to injustice; a quirky fish-out-of-water character shaking up a local organization; a followup on failed legislation; a listicle.

But said listicle gives the briefest acknowledgment of "critics" of a proposed subway line, and instead rattles off seven arguments in support of the plan, supported by such "proponents" as "Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member." A story on an anti-STD media campaign is sure to mention the "crucial infusion of $700,000... [from] Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky," who elsewhere is busy "warning homeowners to avoid solicitations from" certain con artists.

None of which is particularly scandalous since a politician's website is supposed to be filled with propaganda, and as far as propaganda type content goes, this "experiment" is very light on the dogma, and very readable. So cheer up, imperiled journalists: Dabbling in flackery might not feel so dirty, after all. And it pays!

Here's a rundown of some of the more promising names in child-labor media. Some of the names will probably look familiar to you, since these kids are famous. Far more famous than most media hacks. In other words, they're coming for your job, loudly.

The Dating Advice Kid

Name: Alec Greven

Age: 10

Summary: His dating-advice book How To Talk To Girls is supposed to become a movie; he now reportedly plans How To Talk To Moms, How To Talk To Dads, How To Talk To Santa and How To Talk To Grandparents. Original publisher HarperCollins is presumably working with him on all of the followups.

More: Here's video of young Alec.

British Blog Boy Wonder

Name: Scott Campbell

Age: 14

Summary: Started British news website, contributes to BBC and various newspapers

More: Campbell is CEO of Net News Daily; with co-founder and editor-in-chief Nathan Adam, he claims 100,000 unique visitors per month, and has scored freelance gigs with the BBC (left) and writes a regular column for the newspaper First News. Asked earlier this year in a Guardian profile how the economic downturn was affecting his business, he said, "I'm 13, so therefore don't have a lot to lose in the financial crisis."

The Lil' Food Critic

Name: David Fishman

Age: 12

Summary: Aspiring food critic profiled in the New York Times; his Upper West Side New York tablehopping has been optioned by Lorne Michaels for a movie.

More: "As I left, I knew that soon enough this would be one of the most ‘hip' places in the city."

(Image via Rachel Ray)

The Pint-Sized Political Pundit

Name: Jonathan Krohn

Age: 13

Summary: Talk-radio regular and self-published author became a smash hit when he spoke at the CPAC right-wing convention.

More: The home-schooled youth practiced public speaking at Christian Youth Theater plays and calling in to Bill Bennett's radio show. Has appeared on CBS News and Today. His endorsement was sought by a Georgia gubernatorial candidate.

Barack Obama's Journalist 'Homeboy'

Name: Damon Weaver

Age: 11

Summary: A successful quest to interview President Barack Obama made him the talk of cable news.

More: After ending an earlier interview with vice presidential contender Joe Biden with, "Senator Biden is now my homeboy," got permission from Obama to also be the president's "homeboy." Has completed such other White House Press Corps rites of passage as attending the inauguration on a media pass and dissing an MSNBC talking head.

The Teenaged Tech Titan

Name: Daniel Brusilovsky

Age: 16

Summary: Founder and CEO, TeensInTech.com; product evangelist for video-casting service Qik; writer for TechCruch; has 120,000 followers on his "Verified" Twitter account.

More: He's an adviser to at least two companies; his parents used to shuttle him to and from tech conferences; says you should be persistent to reach your goals. More here.

(Pic by Randy Stewart)

• Rupert Murdoch is still willing to pour money into the New York newspaper wars, "decline of the newspaper industry" be damned. He will not rest until he can claim superiority over the NYT as a general interest paper in the NYC market. Or he will die trying, literally!
• People most likely to be angry about this: The WSJ's Boston bureau, which was recently closed.
• People who should be most worried about this: New York Post staffers. Every dollar Rupert puts into the WSJ is a dollar that he's not putting into the Post. Which already has very good local coverage, in a vile tabloidy way.
• People who may view this news with keen interest: The 100 New York Times newsroom staffers who have to be gone by the end of the year. "Hiring," you say?

That's according to Peter Norvig (pictured), Google's director of research, former Google director of search quality and former head of the Computational Sciences division at the NASA Ames research center. Here's what Norvig tells Peter Seibel in a Q&A in the new book Coders at Work (emphasis added):

One of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success.

Small suggestion: Maybe Google can take these genius employees and have them, hmmm, we dunno, debug the frickin' broken interview process. Those who demanded they be hired should probably also be enlisted in the debugging effort. Writes Norvig:

Ninety-nine percent of the people who got a one in one of their interviews we didn't hire. But the rest of them, in order for us to hire them somebody else had to be so passionate that they pounded on the table and said, "I have to hire this person because I see something in him..."

Unfortunately, Google's had already done most of its hiring/rejecting and is now has been in layoff mode for much of this year. But, hey, there's always the next bubble.

UPDATE: A Goolge spokesperson disputed that the company was "in layoff mode," as we wrote, and stated: "To the contrary, we have been very explicit... that we are stepping our rate of hiring." Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt stated in a discussion of Q3 results that "we're going to invest in people. We're already stepping up our hiring." That's in contrast to earlier this year, when Google had three rounds of layoffs from January through the end of March.

(Pic: Norvig, by Mathieu Thouvenin)

The GDP numbers released this morning were better than expected, and were driven by a 3.4% increase in consumer spending. What this means is that everyone's expectations will be higher in the future about the strength and pace of the recovery, according to the Wall Street Journal:

"The data is suggesting that the economy does have some strength behind it, and that growth itself is going to be on the higher end of expectations," said Kent Engelke, chief economic strategist at Capitol Securities Management.

We're very happy for the economy and its excellent quarter. How did American human beings do last quarter? Let's have a look:

• Personal income decreased .5%, or $15.5 billion.
• Personal income taxes withheld increased $4.8 billion.
• Total personal spending increased .7%, or $20.4 billion
• Personal savings dropped 33% from the previous quarter.
• The number of new jobless claims last week was virtually unchanged from the previous week.

To recap: Your income decreased by $15.5 billion while your spending increased by $20.4 billion and your taxes increased by $4.8 billion, resulting in a 33% drop in "savings," which means the amount of money you have. And you still don't have a job. This recovery is going to be awesome.

On the upside, the total number of people on unemployment has dropped to 5.8 million, the lowest number in seven months, according to Bloomberg. That's great until you think of all the people who have dropped off the rolls because their benefits ran out.

Bloomberg also reports that Caterpillar has started rehiring some of its laid-off employees, finally fulfilling a promise that Barack Obama made about the stimulus package eight months ago. These things take time.

Through sophisticated reporting techniques that primarily involve Smokin' Smarties, the WSJ has found that America is "a country in a decidedly negative mood" about the economy, just weeks after we were in a great fucking mood cause the stock market was BACK BABY. Now we're all sad again.

It's called crack cocaine, America. Stop doing it, get some mood stabilizers, and pull yourself up by the bootstraps. That means take your ass to night school until 2:30 a.m. like the other knowledge-crazed poors. Sleep in the closet, then catch your 6 a.m. class before work! It's the American way.

And here's what's not the American way: trains. Spending money on trains! Did Henry Ford make all his money from trains, to make Detroit our greatest city? No, he made cars. Look it up. That's like the opposite of trains. Earlier robber barons did indeed make fortunes on trains, but that has nothing to do with Detroit, or the economic fact we are about to drop on your head from a lofty altitude: "Amtrak loses an average of $32 for every passenger who boards one of its trains." Loses, it says! If you ride Amtrak you are literally costing the taxpayers money. Just hitchhike, like a normal hobo. Print out this post and use it to explain to your night school teacher why you were late to class.

Stop sulking. Go to school. Get off the train and walk. Star in a mawkish music video by Ryan Star that plays your unemployment predicament for sympathy and inspiration. That's been the formula for getting a job in the USA ever since George Washington chopped down a neighbor's cherry tree and then demanded payment, while holding and axe. And it hasn't changed since then. So get with the program.
[Pic via]

The exact numbers of the NYT's departments aren't quite as cloaked in mystery as the New Yorker's masthead, for example, but it is hard to get up-to-date figures. Until now! The striking thing, of course, is just how many people it takes to put this paper out. ("Takes" is the wrong word. How many people they use). Some of the biggies:

Reporters at Metro: 50
Size of Business Desk: 85
Size of Washington Bureau: 45
Total size of Art Department: 113
Size of Metro: 103

The Metro desk appears to be the paper's biggest, as we've always heard. Fifty reporters. More than enough to put out an entire newspaper in a third-tier city. Think about that while also thinking about the meager size of Metro's space in the NYT Some of the paper's sections seem reasonable, or even shoestring—Dining and Week in Review both have staffs of five. So why does the Book Review—also a weekly section largely written by freelancers—need 14 editors?

It's a mystery. But we know 100 people will be gone from the newsroom by the end of the year. And we'll probably never see numbers this high at the NYT again.
[Full list at the NYO. Pic: AP]

In the average major American city, there are hundreds upon hundreds of teenage girls working as prostitutes.

In Los Angeles, two loan modification agents were lured to a house, tied up, and beaten for hours by several people. "The two allegedly sought loan modification assistance from the victims but believed that nothing was being done and wanted their money back," according to the district attorney's office.

In Iceland, you can no longer get McDonald's. The company is pulling out of the entire country after Iceland's currency collapse.

Any one of those facts could make you spend your last $1.37 on a piece of scrap metal that could be fashioned into a suicide implement using a little All-American gumption. But try to put things in perspective. You think teenage prostitutes, torture-charges soon-to-be-evictees, and McNuggetless Icelanders have it bad? It could be worse. You could get a job. Then you'd have to stop maxin and relaxin and going to the gym at noon and playing video games and all that good unemployed shit. People with jobs: the real victims.

When do we get our sympathy?
[Pic: Flickr]

We're hearing from multiple sources that a major round of layoffs will be hitting Forbes next week. So if you work at Forbes...um, just be nervous, I guess. And if you know more details, email us.


Danyel Smith was the editor of Vibe. Then Vibe folded. Then she got a job as editor of TheRoot.com. Now, after just six weeks on the job, she's quitting "because of issues related to her commute." Huh. Well I was coming home late one dark afternoon/ A reporter stopped me for an interview/ She said she heard stories and she heard fables/ That I'm vicious on the mic, and the turntable/ This young reporter I did adore/ So I rocked a vicious rhyme like I never did before/ She said 'Damn fly guy I'm in love with you'/ And the Casanova legend must have been true/ I said: TELECOMMUTE.
Hip hop has a message.


Details from a tipster regarding this week's cutbacks at Conde Nast Traveler: "A majority of the full-time research staff was 'severed.' Although, purportedly, there will be an arrangement in the coming weeks for those let go to remain as freelancers—a mitigating demotion, ostensibly. But the axe also fell on some editorial and copy edit staff, and several other senior editors, while not fully terminated, will see their work weeks shortened to two or three days only." That's marginally better than being laid off!


An 80 year-old man who retired as Baltimore's AP bureau chief in 1991 killed himself last weekend after being charged with molesting two young boys.

I got a lot of impressive applications (I apologize if I haven't been able to respond to you individually yet) and I've asked a few to be guest night editors. There'll be a few more over the next week or two. If you'd like to be one of them, the new #openmicnights tag page (I tried to explain our open forums here) is the place to show off your talents.

So, here's the plan for the #openmicnights forum: First, you need a commenter account. (If you don't have one, register for one and leave a comment below saying you'd like to try out and I'll approve your account.) I'd like to see you write your best example of a Gawker post using the "Share" box on the #openmicnights tag page: a snappy headline, compelling lede and sharply written item. Also, since there are tools to upload images and video, I'm looking for an eye for visuals. Lastly, be sure to include the #openmicnights hashtag so that your post appears on the tag page.

You will be graded based on quality of writing, timeliness, copy editing and ability to follow these instructions. In short, I'm looking for writing polished enough that we could run it on the front page.

The stage is yours. Have a blast.

Image via Thomas Hawk's Flickr