The Wall Street Journal reports that in-flight magazines are still profitable. A British company, Ink Publishing, now runs 40 airline mags in 17 countries, made $4m last year doing it and are on target to make a similar amount this year while everyone else tanks. The reasons are pretty straightforward:

You have very few places with such a captive audience," says Tony Cervone, chief communications officer at United Airlines. Even with seat-back entertainment and wireless Internet service becoming standard, he says, passengers must unplug during take-off and landing.

Advertisers like that and pay lots of money because they feel strongly that if people see Keira Knightley or Mikhail Gorbachev wielding their products in a nice magazine picture we'll all go and buy stuff.

POLITICO EXPOZAY: Our archnemesis Martha Stewart('s magazine, Martha Stewart Living, along with several other home decorating magazines) is involved in a scheme to "decorate" various rooms in the US State Department building. In bed with the warmongers, eh Martha? Why don't you just go over to Afghanistan and start kicking over mud huts one by one, yourself? Eh? We dare you to respond. Dare you!


Hey, that breakthrough new "iTunes for magazines" online magazine store thing that the world has been waiting for is close to happening, and Conde Nast, Hearst, and Time Inc. will all put their magazines in there, so you can buy them, on the internet. I am "going rogue" and saying that not too many people outside the magazine industry will care about this, at all.


Keith Kelly has this short week's layoff tallies, so far: 25 at Time Inc., some of whom we mentioned yesterday, and the prospect of up to 100 layoffs coming to Playboy following their deal to outsource non-editorial duties to AMI. Also, nearly 80 edit layoffs at the Toronto Star. This holiday season is shaping up to be just as merry as last year's, for the media!


The Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are reportedly considering joining the Search Engine Media Wars and pulling their content off of Google. This would have an even more minimal impact than if News Corp. does it, so no biggie.

Dean Meminger is a 62 year-old former New York Knick and dad of Dean Meminger, Jr., a reporter and anchor at NY1. Police found discarded crack pipes at the scene of a fire in the Bronx that put the elder Meminger in critical condition last Sunday, and proceeded to leave 16 families homeless. Meminger has been battling cocaine addiction for much of his adult life, according to the NYDN.

Two's not quite an official trend. But if Pat Kiernan so much as stubs his toe any time soon, we advise everyone at NY1 to flee while you still can.

The stories of the day:

• The New York Times sends a reporter to bankruptcy court. He finds it's full of people who lost everything because they got sick and insurance companies are scumbags.
• The paper also report on the anguish of those who have had to fly home to their families early, to save money, and spend more time with them.
• The Washington Post says they'll probably be doing the same next year — the economic recovery will be slow.
• The LA Times looks further afield and sends a gripping report of refugee smuggling in North Korea.
• The Wall Street Journal straps a journalist into a pie-proof vest to examine the California bakery that has had to hire a bouncer because people fight over its goods.
• And the New York Post applauds a judge who decided to wipe all mortgage debts for a couple because the bank were so terrible. Happy Thanksgiving!

Disclosure: I freelance write and report for newspapers that are included in this roundup. Where there is a direct conflict of interest I will make it clear.

The New York Times: leads with the Afghanistan story, but gives equal prominence to a piece of news that may cause as much anxiety as Obama's decision - that people will be spending longer with their families over Thanksgiving because they're flying earlier to get cheaper fares. There's a great look at the personal cost of the current healthcare system, a follow-up on the New York Post's story yesterday about suspected scammers at the United Homeless Organization and new that the Atlantic Yards development will move forward. Finally there's a somewhat sickening look at the dangers of The Biggest Loser. It involves someone peeing blood.

The Washington Post: in what might be a deliberate decision, the Post has no front page stories that are not local or politics — the two areas that it is cutting back other newsrooms to concentrate on. There's the Afghanistan decision, with analysis, and a report that the economic recovery will be slow. The obituary of Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin is the main story above the fold, and a continuation of the murder story that began yesterday below it.

The LA Times: is showing off a little today. They have correspondents in Seoul, to report on the smuggling of refugees from North Korea, Kabul to report on the intelligence battle there, Minneapolis to investigate the terror cell that made news yesterday and DC for the Afghanistan troop levels. It's like they're reporting in 2000 or something. There's just one local story - about a probe into the giant California pension fund.

The Wall Street Journal: is the only paper that runs a front page image to go with the Afghanistan story. Another battle — to save Swedish carmaker Saab — is covered underneath that. There's some positive news too: the Obama administration's push to solve America's energy problems is reinvigorating science. And some negative a bakery in California has had to hire a bouncer to avoid fights over Thanksgiving pies.

The New York Post:has a heartwarming Thanksgiving tale: the homeowners who got a $525,000 mortgage wiped out by a judge because the bank were mean.

The Daily News: also leads with the Afghanistan news.

Ventura County Star: says santas, including this cuddly fellow, will not wear anti-swine-flu masks while children sit on their knees. They are, however, guzzling Emergen-C and going down doctors' chimneys to demand vaccines.

Star (Malaysia): among entirely serious news is the bizarre headline, under a picture of Adam Lambert: 'I'm the sexy man.'

The Washington City Paper broke the story, and has the full internal memo on the bureau closures. Key graf:

At a time of limited resources and increased competitive pressure, it's necessary to concentrate our journalistic firepower on our central mission of covering Washington and the news, trends and ideas that shape both the region and the country's politics, policies and government.

Total economic move. The Post is smart to protect its core competency, but this is pretty...sudden. But they may look smart for it, eventually, by not sucking themselves dry covering shit WaPo readers can get elsewhere, better, if they actually want it at all. The NYT, meanwhile, recently expanded its coverage in San Francisco and Chicago, so we have a nice little dichotomy to see which strategy looks smarter a couple years from now.

The most popular story on WSJ.com today has been their semi-exclusive about Joe Lieberman saying he's never going to vote for a health care bill with the public option. If you heard about Lieberman making news on health care today and went to Google "lieberman public option," you'd get these results. The shaded red boxes are the News Corp. properties: WSJ.com and Foxnews.com. Those would disappear, but there would be no shortage of results showing you what Lieberman told the WSJ in the top results.

But let's say you were really motivated to find the specific Wall Street Journal story about Joe Lieberman derailing health care and you searched "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal." That would currently bring up the story in question, as well as the Fox News result and an old WSJ blog post. But it would also bring up plenty of other sites that can tell you what was in the WSJ story. Those all likely will also provide a link to the WSJ story, but if they put up the pay wall Murdoch has promised, why would you bother to click through?

Lastly, here's a search for "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal," but with results from WSJ.com and FoxNews.com filtered out—in other words, what Google would return if they weren't allowed to index News Corp. pages.

All but the top two results — irrelevant HuffPo stories — show you exactly what Lieberman said in the Wall Street Journal. And would conceivably show you a link to the WSJ. So, no big loss.

The mag's closure will come with about nine layoffs. Its final issue hits newsstands on Dec. 25, and will be there through March. InStyle will continue to publish other similar types of spinoffs (i.e. InStyle Hair), but no mas for the weddings.

Conde Nast folded Elegant Bride and Modern Bride last month, and its flagship Brides is having problems of its own.

Condolences to the layoff victims.

A tipster tells us that three assistant managing editors have been laid off at Fortune magazine, presumably as part of the ongoing companywide Time Inc. layoffs. Mediaite confirms that the company did do a round of layoffs today. If you have more details, email us.
UPDATE: We hear five staffers were laid off at SI.com: Two associate producers, a copy editor, a producer, and a production editor, according to our tipster.


Gary Weiss got a peek at a BusinessWeek corporate post-layoff memo, in which the people not fired are referred to as "Individuals ineligible or not selected for inclusion in the restructuring program." Well. How Bloombergian.


Dave Eggers continues to save print! This time by producing a $16, 300-page "newspaper" with content "ranging from Stephen King's reporting on the World Series to explanatory graphics on subjects as diverse as the conflict in eastern Congo and how to make the perfect bowl of ramen." The whole thing sounds great. Except, of course, this six-month long niche literary project has absolutely nothing to do with newspapers or with the continued viability of print, which is dying as a mass medium, naturally, due to its obvious limitations.


From Roy Greenslade: "Twelve journalists were among 46 people murdered yesterday in the Philippines in what is thought to be the greatest loss of life by news media in a single day. Several of the victims were beheaded or mutilated in the massacre carried out by a huge force of gunmen."

In addition to (some of) Playboy, AMI has the National Enquirer, Star, and zombie RadarOnline. And then a bunch of muscle magazines! Perfectly capturing America's true, vapid obsessions with unattainable celebrity, unattainable sex, and unattainable bodies, all under one roof. As for Playboy, they say that the money they'll save with this deal will let them bring a touch of class back to the ol' cover page:

Though Mr. Jellinek said buzz-generating covers need not be costly, citing a recent cover with "Simpsons" cartoon star Marge, Mr. Flanders said freeing up cash for celebrity pictorials is a chief aim of the deal. Actress Tara Reid will pose nude for the first time in the combined January/February issue.

A bargain at any price.

For years, newspapers and other media companies have complained about Google reaping profits by indexing media content for free. Google has responded that media companies are free to remove themselves from Google's search engines if they wish. But media companies never actually did it, because the hit to their traffic would be too big. They'd prefer to just get paid by the search engines. Which is what Rupert Murdoch may now do.

Business Insider estimates that the Wall Street Journal, News Corp's most prized media property, would lose about $15 million by pulling out of Google—meaning that Bing could theoretically secure exclusive search engine rights for that price. The money is almost too small to matter. But this could be a trigger for much bigger things. Namely, the Great Search Engine Wars for media content.

Brian Lam argues that this move would hurt consumers. Instead of being able to go to Google to find everything, consumers would have to know which specific media outlets had exclusive deals with which search engines in order to track down their content.

And that's absolutely true! This trend, if it becomes widespread—every big media company hunting for the richest deal it can get from a search engine—would make life more inconvenient for media consumers like you and me. Which doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad. The fact is that the current situation cannot stand. Have you read our #layoffs tag lately? Rupert Murdoch—and other media owners—are tired of Google making money off their content, for free. The original idea was that the traffic driven to media sites by Google would provide enough revenue, through ads, to make everyone happy. That hasn't turned out to be the case. Online ad revenue is not doing the trick.

So media companies will need new revenue streams to survive. A big one will be paid content; i.e., if you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay some sort of subscription fee. But search engine deals like this—in which media companies make search engines pay for exclusive rights to access their content—are another online revenue stream that could become significant. News Corp's deal isn't big money, yet. But presumably if Google and its competitors realize they will have to engage in bidding wars to lock in rights to good media content, the value of those deals would increase considerably.

The bigger picture is this: Yes, the "journalism" industry will shrink. That's part of the future. Fine. But even with the wondrous world of blogs and nonprofit journalism foundations and every other new permutation of creating content, the fact remains that if people want to enjoy a fundamental baseline of serious news media in this country, they will have to pay for it, somehow. Yes, it's more inconvenient to have search engines with exclusive content deals. It's also inconvenient to have to pay to read online news. But these and other new revenue streams will have to come into place if we don't want to keep griping forever about journalists being laid off and news quality getting shittier. Everything cannot always be free and delivered directly to us on a platter when it costs money to make, okay! So try not to fear the portentous coming of the Search Engine Bidding Wars. We're just going through the bumpy phase of things now. You'll get used to it. And the annoying kid you sent to J-school might actually be able to land a job one day, too.

[My colleagues do not necessarily agree with me!]

The story, with its irresistible blend of drama and detail, is the most frequently front-paged of the day. Apart from that, each paper seems to be airing the off-diary journalism, the features and quirkier angles, they've been looking for an opportunity to run. Which is actually a lot of fun for readers, many of whom must be sick of reading about troop levels in Afghanistan and the fools on the hill. Today we get a some gripping local tales - the boy who ran away and rode the subway for 11 days, the murder mystery in DC, the fear in a homeless community along the LA river - that it would be nice to see more of even when important things were happening.

Disclosure: I freelance write and report for newspapers that are included in this roundup. Where there is a direct conflict of interest I will make it clear.

The New York Times: looks towards the aptly-named Black Friday with a piece on discount wars between Amazon and Wal-Mart. In other wars of attrition news, a prisoner swap is looking likely in the middle east (although other reports say it is more dubious) and the Iranian government is stifling the opposition. But some people are working together! The left and the right both hate the expansion of the criminal justice system - so expect to see a Glenn Beck/Keith Olbermann joint campaign soon. Everyone likes it when terrorism investigations are unsealed - you get a story delivered complete, like this. And finally the tale of a 13-year-old boy who ran away from home and spent 11 days riding the subway around the city.

The Washington Post: everyone loves a murder mystery - look out for the use of the word 'okay' in a quote. It really makes you think the boyfriend did it. The unsealed terror charges against a group of Somali Americans make the front here too, nuclear power is back, a staggering 34.5 per cent of young black men are unemployed and, at the other end of the spectrum, property owners fight to keep their beaches in Florida.

The LA Times: has one of those embedded-with-the-marines in Afghanistan stories that used to be all the rage but have recently made way for tales of internecine fighting among the top ranks over troop numbers. There's another front page standby here - the science-y giant telescope story, the feature is about violence along the LA river, Californians should use less water and the terror charges get another airing.

The Wall Street Journal: has further evidence that the recovery is nothing more than wishful thinking. Although people are buying a lot of gold. Barack Obama sucks at golf, which is actually something of a relief, and a new direction for Gucci.

The New York Post:has one of those 'we all knew it' stories about the United Homeless Front panhandlers - apparently, those who yell at commuters for money are not strictly above board. Related: Ronald McDonald is scary.

The Daily News: continues its anti-gun campaign with news that South Carolina has a gun sale on Friday. The picture inside - of an old redneck holding a gold Desert Eagle underneath a US flag would have been the front page of the year.

The Bakersfield Californian: completely disagrees with the Wall Street Journal about the housing market. Fight!

Las Ultimas Noticias (Chile): and the hairstyle of the day award goes to...

Carl Kasell, the NPR newscaster known for saying things in that voice of his, is retiring from the morning newscast (but continuing to appear on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me). "The biggest change in his life may be not having to wake up at 1:05 in the morning in order to be ready for the network's 5 a.m. ET newscast." NPR has been literally trying to kill beloved newscaster Carl Kasell, all these years.


Not to get back on this subject again (please), but a tipster tells us there are still more AP layoffs going down, today: "one biz writer in nyc who was on vacation last week. two people in los angeles," our tipster says. We are hoping and assuming these are just leftovers that didn't get done last week.


James O'Shea was a Chicago Tribune editor who got pushed out as the entire company went to hell. Now he's starting up a rival Chicago news organization. But when the NYT asks him about all the BEEF he must have he says, "No, I don't have any interest in any of that." Ridiculous! On the internet, "news" is just a code word for BEEF. You will learn this soon enough, Mr. O'Shea.


What's this, one guy writing in True Slant defends the continued existence on earth and in our daily newspapers of NYT nature writer and most annoying essayist in the US of A Verlyn Klinkenborg? No. He is indefensible.

1. Andrea Peyser confronts the mom of a 16 year-old shooting suspect about why she is such a bad mom that her kid would shoot somebody. Answer: Because she is selfish and she lets her son hang out with his relatives thugs. Black people! Why can't they raise kids the right way? "There do exist real fathers. Take Federico Grullon. He won't allow his three kids to leave the house."
Black kids should be shackled at all times.

2. Did you know there is a soup kitchen now for orothodox Jews? And other Jews are facing foreclosure? But Jews are the ones with all the money!

So — shhh! — The United Jewish Appeal has started Connect to Care, which already has given more than 8,000 needy Jews financial services, job help and mental-health counseling to get through unfamiliar territory.
Just don't expect anyone to admit it.

3. "If Johnny Depp is the Sexiest Man Alive, I'm swearing off men." That one wasn't totally unexpected.

"While I'm innocent, I'm sorry to all my fans and supporters for this embarrassment," Carter said.
Then he drove off in his shiny black Mercedes.

Ouch.
[NYDN]

We should all move to Ethiopia, or catch enormous fish from tiny boats — stories about farming in Africa and tuna fishing from kayaks are pretty well the only bright spots. It's one of those days where there's no clear lead story. The only theme is doom and gloom; maybe the editors have seen 2012, or read Going Rogue, and are so fearful for the future that they feel they must warn us. Even the princess and pauper story of the Upper East Side model who fought her neighbors to marry a staffer at her building has a nasty twist. There's always tomorrow...

Disclosure: I freelance write and report for newspapers that are included in this roundup. Where there is a direct conflict of interest I will make it clear.

The New York Times: has some cheery financial news - the enormous quantity of debt the US must service will cost $700bn a year, and some cheery water-quality news too, that is best summed up in a quote: "untreated feces and industrial waste started spilling from emergency relief valves." The NFL is responding to a spate of recent stories on the brain-damage football can cause, there's a test case for terrorism detainees, Chuck Rangel is defiant and this man thought it would be a good idea to catch 157lb bluefin tuna from a kayak.

The Washington Post: contrasts the startlingly obvious with the completely unexpected above the fold - the public option is contentious in the healthcare debate and Western nations are flocking to get farmland in Ethiopia. There's a dramatic tale about the difficulty of tracking sex offenders (is there any other kind?), a study on the Moonies and more conflicts of interest may arise in congress now lawmakers have bigger stock portfolios.

The LA Times: is the paper that loves drugs. About three days a week they run with a drug story. They also love pictures of men with guns, and today's accompanies an Afghanistan story. While the Post have news that Ethiopia is blooming, the LAT reports struggles for Egyptian farmers. There's a slighty interesting new way to look at the vote-gathering for healthcare reform and the cunning stunts mall owners in California will go to to attract customers.

The Wall Street Journal: if in doubt, and you can't think of a clear, clever headline, always alliterate. And the world is still falling aparthee, in new ways: fears of a W-shaped recession (two dips) may be well-founded, spray tans can give you a fake six pack and no-one updates Wikipedia any more.

The New York Post: takes its turn to lead with a the kind of gruesome, dramatic crime that the city seems to specialize in.

The Daily News: have given the Upper East Side model who was lionized for marrying a staffer at her building a lesson in media backlashes.

Montgomery Advertiser: we have to go to Alabama for a positive story, accompanied by a picture to warm the cockles of your heart. And an opportunity to dig this out of the archives.

The Gleaner (Jamaica): if this is not the best newspaper name ever, I don't know what is. They do not report. They glean. They also probably accumulate, amass, ascertain, conclude, cull, deduce, extract, garner, gather, harvest, learn, pick, reap, select, sift and winnow, according to a list of synonyms. Good newspaper names all!

The lofty rhetoric surrounding the launch of outfits like the CNC, a MacArthur Foundation-funded news organization run by former Chicago Tribune staffers, is based on the notion that genuine public-service journalism—the expensive boring stuff that results in legislation—is at risk as for-profit newspapers crater. In the words of CNC founder and former Trib editor Jim O'Shea:

At a time of declining resources in newsrooms across the nation, journalists must adapt to new technologies and devise some creative, innovative ways to fulfill our obligations so we can hold our government accountable to citizens and restore to our journalism the standards desperately needed in these troubled times.

Newspapers can't afford to live up to those obligations anymore, so nonprofit-funded outlets like the CNC need to step into the gap. So what sort of hard-hitting "accountability journalism" can we expect from these new creatures? The CNC has contracted with the New York Times to produce an insert for the paper's Chicago editions purporting to bring Chicago readers the sort of shoe-leather that the bankrupt Chicago Tribune can't afford to produce anymore. It debuted today, so lets have a look.

• The lead story, by former Trib reporter Dan Mihalopoulos, is precisely in line with what news alarmists say will be missing if and when we lose newspapers: Internal documents from the company that the city of Chicago sold its parking meter business to last year show that it is making boatloads of money, and that the city would have done better just to keep the meters for itself. Bravo!

Now for the rest:

• A trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, where we learn that "young people (under 30) tend to enjoy modern art."
• A 195-word story about a stay-at-home dad who tried to join a play-group for his infant son, but couldn't because it was for moms only.
• A 156-word story about the Chicago Bulls' "circus trip," an annual tour that the item doesn't really explain but has something to do with Ringling Bros. and the Bulls losing. Here's a Sun-Times blog entry on the matter, published two days ago.
• A column from Jim Warren wherein he visits a food pantry.

Some of this is perfectly useful, but is it going to save journalism? Does a recitation of the Bulls' woes count as holding "our government accountable to citizens"? Is the MacArthur Foundation fulfilling its mission of creating a "more just, verdant, and peaceful world" by subsidizing stories about dads getting barred from mommies' groups? Is this what all the fuss is about?

The problem is that yes, newspapers underwrite important, expensive journalism that in many cases falls through the cracks in the pageview-obsessed, run-and-gun environment of online publishing. But that's perhaps five percent of what the average paper does. Maybe ten or fifteen. But it's a fraction. The rest of it is rewriting press releases, spouting opinions, reviewing things, and telling people what's on television and when—things the internet is exceptionally good at. CNC has loudly proclaimed that it is going to take up the slack and "restore" journalism's "true values," but, to judge by its first outing, all it's doing is creating a mini-newspaper—one solid story surrounded by a bunch of fluff that you could get anywhere. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with fluff, it's just that no one is raising alarms about the lack of quality writing about art museums and sports and opinions about poor people as newspapers decline.

If the idea of nonprofit journalism and innovative ways of paying for and distributing important reporting is going to succeed, it's going to have to actually produce important reporting. And if former newspapermen are going to lay claim to journalism's future by launching projects aimed at restoring its values, they ought to come up with something better than one good muni story.

UPDATE: Jim Schachter, editor of digital initiatives for the Times, writes in to make a good point that we hadn't considered—the Times asked CNC to provide a mix of serious and fluffy stories. So it was the Times, and not CNC, that wanted the mini-newspaper. We still don't understand why the MacArthur Foundation has to step in to help pay for the fluff the Times is asking for, or where that fluff fits into the CNC's journalism-saving rhetoric. But good point nonetheless:

Perhaps your dart is a bit misaimed. We asked the Chicago News Cooperative to give us a mix of content, because we're trying to come up with a formula for adding local news to The Times that prompts people to keep their subscriptions or start one if they're not buying our paper now. The tough story at the center of today's report, about the parking meter deal, is representative of what CNC means to be about. And, to be fair, so is Jim Warren's humane and pointed column.

I'm expecting to see a lot more afflicting of the comfortable and comforting of the afflicted from Jim O'Shea and his crew over the coming months.

A "long-standing editorial feud" between a left-wing German paper and the right-wing paper Bild has culminated in the left-wing paper commissioning a huge artwork on the side of a building showing "Bild boss Kai Diekmann spreading his legs as his mighty manhood stretches across five storeys before the tip turns into a rearing cobra." If this isn't an idea that would suit Col Allan, we don't know what is. [Sexxxy pics]


A high school paper outside of Chicago wanted to publish some stories about students smokin and drinkin' and makin' babies, so the school spiked the issue, and now it's national news. The takeaway here is that the only thing dumber than school papers (I served on two!) is the reaction of school administrators to school papers.


Chris Roush has the latest updates on who's staying and who's going at BusinessWeek.


TVNewser says that Good Morning America staffers are wondering whether potential new GMA host George Stephanopoulos has the morning chops to pull of the big fluff interviews that would go along with job. Or will he be worried that it will undermine his fancy (alleged) "credibility" on his Sunday show? Let's be honest: With that hair, George Stephanopoulos was made for fluff. Also he is not a "journalist," so who cares?

When Bloomberg bought BW last month, expectations were grim—one preliminary report said that Bloomberg was planning to lay off the entire staff. Insiders told us at the time that was "nuts," (which it was), and made vague sounds about not being able to tell how many layoffs would be necessary.

Which was at least mildly hopeful! But the signs were pretty clear: BW's editor left immediately, Bloomberg started canning the magazine's celebrity columnists, and began the early stages of the layoffs on Monday. An internal memo at the time promised "a meeting (in person or by telephone) to learn next steps." Staffers got that yesterday. And 130 of them are gone, including many high-level writers, editors, and some of the mag's most visible columnists:

Most of the columnists were let go, including Inside Wall Street writer Gene Marcial, Media Centric columnist Jon Fine, tech columnist Steve Wildstrom, the longtime Business Outlook columnist Jim Cooper and tech writer Steve Baker, a 23-year veteran.

When you work for the media these days and your first instinct is that the future is dark, you're probably right.
[More on BW layoffs here]