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journalismism
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journalismism
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Why Playboy Is In Decline
Doesn't quite understand its audience: "'People don’t come to us for explicit content,' said [CEO Christie Hefner]. 'In fact, they’d be very disappointed if that’s what they were looking for and they bought Playboy magazine or went to Playboy.com.'" [Times]
journalismism
journalismism
Times' Lavish Coverage Of Own Executive Infuriates Newsroom, Says Tipster
Alyse Myers, a Times vice president, recently published a book about her cruel mother. Perhaps you heard about it last week in the Times, where it received a glowing if stilted and end-spoiling review. Or perhaps you missed that review but caught Myers' essay in this past Sunday's Times magazine, in which Myers revisits the topic of her mom, and gets another nice plug for her book. Granted, it was Mother's Day Sunday, so the book was topical. And, granted, Myers' employ at the Times was disclosed in both articles. But so much kind coverage so quickly on a Times executive lends at least the appearance of favoritism. And according to one email tipster, Times staffers are upset not only at appearances, but at Myers' behavior, as well: More »
grand theft auto
Moralists Decry Video Game Without Playing It
The Parents Television Council—the shrill right-wing arbiter of entertainment morality last seen reprimanding companies for associating with rappers—is now busy condemning the brilliant, violent, and controversial new video game Grand Theft Auto IV. Unfortunately for the forces of purity, the Council decided to do its condemning primarily by making things up: More »
art
New NYC Banksy Piece: Confirmed?
Animal NY street chronicler Bucky Turco took the bait of our sighting this morning of the elusive British stencil artist Banksy. Bucky traipsed over to Thunder Jacksons in the West Village and captured THE FIRST PICTURES of this new Banksy piece, which have just increased the value of the building 25-fold [UPDATE: Or have they? Gothamist says this work is by Nick Walker, not Banksy. We're investigating. More to come.]. Click through for some larger pics of the three-part work, and then go over to Animal NY to read some more clues that Bucky gleaned about the artist . Journalism in action: More »
shouters
The Loudest Mouth At The New York Times?
This week Susan Edgerley, an assistant managing editor, is answering questions from the public on the New York Times' website. Her job, according to her, is "to listen to the career aspirations of the people in the newsroom and help them realize them," and to help the paper integrate its web and print operations more closely. But according to a tipster with a grudge, Edgerley's real title at the Times should be Shouter-In-Chief!: More »
cartoons
US Newspapers Remembered As Cowards
Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper editor responsible for publishing the controversial Muhammad cartoons that caused a global Muslim fundamentalist uproar in 2006—and which still threaten the life of one of the artists, who has been condemned by Osama Bin Laden— has a message for all the American papers that refused to publish pictures of the cartoons even as they were writing news stories about them: thanks a lot, pussies. More »
race-baiting
Post Reporter Sues Cops, Post Editorial Defends Cops The Same Day
Yesterday the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a federal suit alleging police racially profiled Leonardo Blair, a black New York Post reporter who said he was arrested and harassed for simply walking down the street with his fiancée. The same day, his bosses at the Post ran an editorial saying there was too much fuss made over racial profiling: More »
journalismism
5 Years After Jayson Blair, Newspapers Too Broke to Care About Ethics
Superstar MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman remembered recently that there was this young fellow who worked for the Times once who got in trouble for making things up and lying. It was a bit of a scandal! It happened five years ago this... season, so Friedman asks a couple folk what they think of the current state of media ethics. Salon's Joan Walsh says the Jayson Blair (for that was the fabricator's name) scandal forced writers and editors to remind themselves not to lie, or to maybe fact-check once in a while. Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell says the scandal encouraged more papers to issue corrections more often and not plagiarize so much. But a couple critics note that Jayson Blair is really the least of the newsmedia's woes in 2008. More »
bright ideas
"Seeking A Candidate? Vote For A Journalist"
The headline of this post is also the actual headline of a story in the New York Sun today. We didn't even change it, because it was already funny! The peppy little broadsheet reasons that since London just elected an ex-journalist as mayor, hey, why not here? And the neocon paper rounds up the very cream of the city's third-tier columnist crop to explain why such a feat be might hard for a member of the embittered, self-important writing class to pull off: because columnists "have too much integrity." More »
journalismism
OMG, I Was Totally On The Uma Thurman Jury, Says WSJ Reporter
There are so many possible stories for the front page of a national business newspaper this morning. The new Democratic primary votes, for example, or the UBS banker detained amid a tax evasion investigation, or the multi-billion-dollar loss at home loan giant Fannie Mae. And The Wall Street Journal made room for some of that today, but it also decided its cover wouldn't be complete without a first-person account of the trial of Uma Thurman's stalker. Reporter Emily Steel was lucky enough to be allowed on the jury in the movie star's case, and as you read her story, you can just see Rupert Murdoch, head of Journal owner News Corp. and frequent presence at the newspaper, rubbing his hands together in glee, his taste for the sensational and drive to broaden the WSJ beyond business both satisfied. More »
media
Newspaper Ad Jobs Going Straight To India
Overseas outsourcing of newspaper jobs started years ago as a slow trickle, mostly from IT departments and the like. As the financial prospects of the newspaper industry have declined, outsourcing has come to be viewed as more of a necessity. Even news jobs have been sent to India, although that is still a relative rarity. More common—and more threatening, if you happen to be a US newspaper employee—is the large-scale outsourcing of advertising department work. People in India can assemble newspaper ads just as well as people here, and "many sources agreed that a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that metro newspapers can realize a savings of about $500,000 a year when ad production work is offshored." More »
journalismism
Hillary Clinton Should Have Eviscerated This Interviewer
In the following clip, Hillary Clinton is asked to choose between celebrities Ellen DeGeneres, Simon Cowell and Jimmy Kimmel as a vice president. "Who would you pick and why?" asked Mary Alice Haney, of MomLogic.com and TV channel Extra. The only appropriate response, of course, would be for Clinton to use the lasers behind her cyborg eyes to set Haney's hair on fire, but it's 2008 and the Democratic presidential candidate needs to out-cool Barack Obama and John McCain, so she just laughed (at the sad future of our country) and said they'd all be on her short list. I really wanted her to snap and live up to her reputation as a caustic bitch, but she didn't, not even when asked about inane advice from Cowell. Clip after the jump. More »
journalismism
Washington Post Reports: Powerful People Are Powerful
David Rothkopf, a highly educated scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, penned an explosive op-ed for the Washington Post that could upend the global power structure and spark revolution across the earth. Because it seems that our world—far from being one in which each of the 6 billion humans shares in an equal portion of the political, economic, and cultural power, as you had believed—is actually run by a "superclass" of people who control everything. Rothkopf reports, in direct contradiction to everything that your third grade social studies teacher promised you, that very powerful people are, in fact, very powerful. Bummer! More »
working 'with' the press
How To Tap Someone's Phone
Here's another reason to finally cancel your landline telephone and just use your cell: home phones are "really, really easy" to tap, according to a Times digest of lessons from the wiretapping trial of Anthony Pellicano, the Los Angeles private investigator of journalists and movie moguls. Anyone tapping my line would mainly just hear me calling my own mobile phone to determine which pocket I left it in. But in case you actually conduct secure communication from home, or like to indulge in the occasional Raymond Chandler fantasy, here are the key attack vectors: More »
the strand
Famous Bookstore Run By Jerk
The Strand, the humongous New York bookstore by Union Square that is like one of the biggest used book stores ever of all time, has always attracted lots of young workers who take the low pay in exchange for the cool factor of working at the place, and the chance to be around books all day. One negative: the store is run by a despised woman named Nancy Bass Wyden (trivia: she's married to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden). I've known several people who worked at The Strand, and they universally agree on her tyranny. Now, the New York Press has actually done some investigative work on the claims, and it's found evidence for allegations of racial discrimination, callous disregard for pregnant women, and—most terrifyingly—"fungus from rats." More »
stalky
Times' Uma Thurman Report Heroically Creepy
Sometimes a brief, seemingly casual line in a news story can set it head and shoulders above the competition. That was the case with the Times' coverage of movie star Uma Thurman's testimony against her alleged stalker yesterday in New York State Supreme Court. A trembling Thurman told a jury about a disturbing card that included "a picture of a headless bride" and the inscription "My hand should be on your body." The defense tried to paint the alleged stalker, Jack Jordan, as crazy "in love" but benign and compliant. Jordan carefully avoided looking at Thurman during her testimony — important when you're accused of being her stalker, presumably. But one detail, which eluded the Post, Daily News and People, among others, indicated Jordan was still more than a little obsessed with Thurman: More »
scandal
