From a 1932 ad for the Automat in London: "Dialing [the] number of soft drink or wine delivers a shot from the spigot, thus eliminating customary bar tenders." Well, that can't possibly have been good for the wine. [Modern Mechanix]

Those communist-era magazines seem so quaint, if one forgets the dull horror of the system that produced them. Russia's Soviet Museum carries an excellent online collection of the usual propaganda posters and photographs-and these images of Soviet Union magazine, in which the strategic rockets are daintier than the…

The National Press Club in Washington, D.C. is celebrating its centennial this month. It's only semi-recently since they've tolerated women in the club: "In 1956, the men offered a compromise by inviting women to attend the luncheons, so long as they sat in the balcony and left as soon as the lunch was over. While…

Newspapers, now suffering a technological inferiority complex, weren't always so apologetic. The New York Public Library has a wonderful collection of confident posters, promoting newspapers such as the Sunday Herald and the New York Times, from the turn of the century. The issue of the Times here featured offers a…

Today, we learned from the Times of London that Felix Dennis, Britain's eccentric billionaire entrepreneur and the vice-engaging publisher of Maxim, may have already killed a man. But besides the events of one dark night at the edge of a cliff 25 years ago, did you know that he's also an accomplished poet? Here's one…

Now this is actually awesome: a fameball turning on itself in such convolution that the snake eats its own tail. Remember Sweet Valley High, the 80s young-teen series about a pair of California twins named Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield? They went to Sweet Vally High, and although they looked exactly the same, their…

After a series of character-sapping changes over the past 10 years, the Wall Street Journal is contemplating yet another makeover, this time of its Marketplace section. Owner Rupert Murdoch is looking to replace many of the columns and feature stories on the front of Marketplace with hard news, the Times reports in…

Newspapers aren't what they used to be, what with their declining circulations and evolving missions, and old-school, hard-drinking writers and editors like the Post's Steve Dunleavy are retiring and dying of liver failure in droves. The exciting new "journalists" of the internet like to talk about how much they drink…

The attached clip shows local news at its absolute finest: a hothouse of over-serious but under-talented egos, squabbling with each other over the responsibility of real journalists to cover broken elevator stories as thoroughly as possible. The anchor, venerable old Jim Ryan, forced into retirement from WNYW in 2005.…

Doldrums? Blues? Forget the Zoloft. Seriously, just put it down. Instead, douse yourselves with these old-timey news station sign-offs, from the days when the networks took pity on their viewers and ceased to hurtle information at them around the midnight hour. The swelling arias! The purple mountain montages! The…

Yesterday's gallery of journalism flicks, whose soaring soundtracks are partly responsible for infecting your mind with the Pulitzer bug, was a collection of some of our favorites. Twelve of yours, clamored after in the comments, are after the jump. Can we talk about Michael Keaton's secret burning desire to be a…

Don't lie kids. There's nothing wrong with staving off career burnout and despair by watching Robert Redford make Bob Woodward look good in All the President's Men. You know you've done it and you've probably got the 1976 Watergate flick to blame for your outsized career expectations. The chase! The glory! The…

* "I was almost a newspaper delivery boy but lacked the snazzy cap and knee-shorts. And the delivery manager tried 'initiating' me by warming his hands by sliding them down the front of my pants on a 5am street corner. Even for San Francisco, I thought that was a bit odd. I mean, it wasn't that cold."

There goes the neighborhood. Rupert Murdoch is planning to move his Wall Street Journal newsroom from the financial district where it's lived for over 100 years to News Corp's headquarters on Sixth Avenue. The Midtown Journal just doesn't have quite the same ring, though. We predict singing rumble sequences in the…

So we were a tad scatterbrained on Friday and forgot entirely to post the second weekly installment of Old School Odes, in which we (and you!) remember The Press The Way It Was. We apologize heartily for neglecting our elders. Last week our inbox was flooded with the smells, sights and sounds of journalism's Golden…

Things we miss about old-timey journalism: bourbon in every desk drawer, the sound of 400 Underwoods clacking away at the same time, teletype rolls cascading out into the hallway and the undivided attention of the American public. Things we don't miss? Alcoholic colleagues (Balk aside), carbon copy paper, the glass…