Sawyer's off to "ABC World News Tonight," where she will read news to the old people who watch it. As the Times reports, the GMA shake-up has been "shrouded in secrecy" and the subject of much tabloid and blog speculation, and the reconfiguration gives the show that sweet, sweet gender balance. But we still won't be waking up in time to watch it. [NYT]

•Nicolas Cage is almost existentially broke (is that a thing?): Christina Fulton, the mother of his eldest child, is suing him because, apparently, his legal problems have somehow left her $1.2 million in debt. This only makes sense because it is Nic Cage, and we would not put any level of fuck-uppery past him. [The Wrap]

•Quick: Name two actors who were huge in the nineties but are sort of washed-up now: Was it Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler? The duo is in talks to co-star in a new Columbia rom-com called "Pretend Wife," which follows Sandler as he tries to gather a wedding party. Remember when Aniston's hair was such a big deal? [THR]

•Dang, news reporters don't even have it this bad: A new website created by a PR group and a research company will be paying laid-off film critics $100 a pop to review arthouse films. Thing is: They basically just fill out a standardized survey like a focus group with questions like "who are your favorite characters?" So, film critics = glorified SAT-takers? [The Wrap]

•The Writers Guild of America has allowed writers for a joke-a-day iPhone app to become members. Surely, then, they can write a joke about this because we don't want to. [The Wrap]

•This is surely not the first New Moon related arrest, nor will it be the last: a 22-year-old girl was arrested on Nov. 28th for filming parts of the film with her digital camera: The potential sentence? Three years in prison!!! Maybe for Harry Potter this is a just punishment. Those movies were awesome. [The Wrap]

•Speaking of people from the 90s: Carsooooooonnnnnn!!!! The former MTV VJ and current NBC late-night host is back on the radio dial, where it all began. God, all the girls we had crushes on in middle school had such a crush on him. We will never forgive you Carson, no matter how many forms of media you conquer.

The subject line of the WSJ email promoting this new store was "Introducing WSJstore. Not just smart. Street smart." Leading well-known wag Ryan Tate to observe, "Doesn't that WSJ biker jersey just scream "STREET SMART??"

Orgy correspondent Ryan Tate further observed, "I also like the Bull and Bear glasses. Perfect for refreshments at your next gay sex orgy!"

This WSJ-branded sweater vest says: "I am a nerd."

WSJstore.com sells women's jewelry, also. Why?

How big of an asshole do you have to be to carry around a WSJ-branded money clip? Quite a big one, folks.

So the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper, set up some online store and now are they vendors of knockoff Oscar awards? What is next—selling cell phone cases, like a common mall kiosk?!?

Fin.

The figures come from the industry breakdown of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' new employment numbers [pdf]. Jobs in the print publishing category—that includes newspapers, magazines, and books as well as direct-mail shops and the like—have declined from 863,600 last November to 776,800 last month—a 10% drop (those are seasonably adjusted figures). Last month alone saw a 4.2% decline in print jobs, helped by massive bloodletting at the Associated Press, Business Week, Time Inc., and elsewhere.

And those numbers explicitly exclude internet-based jobs, which don't appear to be tracked separately. So the total number of media workers laid off in the last year is almost certainly substantially higher.

Overall, the new job figures are being described as a small improvement, given the downtick in the unemployment rate. But the largest single employment sector to add jobs in the last month was temporary services, with an increase of 52,000. And the largest drop in unemployment was among teenagers. These are not quality jobs.

And this paragraph from the BLS's release should provide some sobering context:

About 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in November, an increase of 376,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

But there's good news: Employment in commercial banking increased by 1,000 jobs, or about 1%. They always win, don't they?

As we mentioned earlier this week, the WHCA has invited Salon, Politico the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo into the White House pool rotation—the system whereby the White House press corps joins together and appoints one outlet to follow the president during his waking hours and file reports that everyone can use. According to the most recent rotation schedule, there are 34 outlets in the "print" pool. (Click the image at left to see a bigger version of this month's schedule.) The order of the shifts are assigned alphabetically, though if you are, for example, the poor sap at the New York Daily News who drew Christmas, you can try to talk someone else into swapping shifts with you. Partly this is done so that every news organization doesn't have to dedicate a full-time reporter to gathering the most basic of facts about the President's activities. But it also helps the White House to not have to herd 34 reporters onto a bus whenever Obama leaves 1600 Pennsylvania.

It's a time-honored and mostly harmonious tradition. Now Politico's Michael Calderone reports that the old guard doesn't like the idea of ideological upstarts being let into the club:

"This is really troubling," said New York Times reporter Peter Baker in an email to POLITICO. "We're blurring the line between news and punditry even further and opening ourselves to legitimate questions among readers about where the White House press corps gets its information."

Baker said he has no problem with outlets like Huffington Post, which he described "an important part of the marketplace of ideas." But the site, he said, has a mission "to produce pieces with strongly argued points of view" and that puts the Times-or other non-partisan news organizations-"in a position of relying on overtly ideological or opinionated organizations as our surrogate news gatherers."

Though we wouldn't quite call it "troubling," we actually understand where Baker's coming from. But there's a rather glaring irony here: The main reason for putting the new kids into the pool is there's fewer people in the print world left to do it. When newspapers close or consolidate their Washington bureaus to save what little money they have left, the pool loses bodies. If Baker doesn't want to rely on pool reports from some leftist blogger, the Times will have to either a) exit the pool and assign someone to cover Obama's comings and goings full-time with the paper's own resources, which it doesn't have, because blogs are slowly killing it, or b) offer to pick up the shifts that Salon, Huffington Post, and TPM reporters are taking over.

It's a rather concise little vignette about the plight of newspapers: Online outlets that the old newspapers regard as insufficiently reverent to the ideals of journalism are able to attract readers by not being stodgy and hidebound; newspapers are laying off so many reporters that they don't have the manpower to do the boring work they consider as their core mission; when the online (i.e. reckless) outlets step up to fill the gap, they sniff at them for being insufficiently stodgy and hidebound.

Not to mention that, as Matthew Yglesias puts it, the pool is little more than a "mutually agreed upon plagiarism pact"—members of the pool simply fold the reporting into their stories as though they were actually there. So Baker isn't being forced to rely on "overtly ideological" outlets for his reporting. He is free to quote from the reports and cite their authors, thereby insulating his paper from any partisan influence. But that would require abandoning the fiction of the pool reports altogether and alert the Times readers to the fact that its reporters are not everywhere, all the time.

In defending the idea of letting folks like TPM participate in the pool, WHCA president Ed Chen claimed that ideological leanings don't matter, because the pool reports themselves are "transparent" and available for everybody to inspect:

"So whether it's [the Huffington Post's] Sam Stein or [TPM's] Christina Bellantoni or Peter Baker, all of our work is out in the public," Chen said. "It's transparent, can be judged, and when there are violations, we'll come down on them."

We think that's a magnificent idea, so we've decided to make Chen's claim a reality. Gawker was recently added to the White House Press Office's email list, which along with official press releases, speech transcripts and advisories, includes the presidential pool reports. The fact that the White House is in charge of distributing the raw reporting of people covering the White House is, as we've noted before, deeply strange. Since the pool reports are by their very definition "on the record," and are distributed by the White House to the entire press list (not just the pool participants), it seems to us they should be considered public records. In fact, it's never made sense to us why the White House Correspondents' Association doesn't just post them to a web site of their own.

So, we're stepping up to fill the gap. We have posted all the reports we've gotten in the past week to the tag page #publicpool, and will post each new report to that page as we receive them. We recommend having a look. You can find some interesting things, like the time when Politico reporter Nia-Malika Henderson, in covering the Obama state dinner as a pooler, threw a plug for Politico into her report—"shameless promotion for POLITICO...see this link for more details on the bookstore arrivals..."—and actually appeared live on CNN while she was on pool duty, which kind of defeats the purpose of pool duty. There's all kinds of great stuff in there. Enjoy. We'll update it early and often.

Oh, and before you accuse us of just freeloading off the work of real journalists, Gawker is volunteering for pool duty if the WHCA will have us. Gabriel says the travel budget can cover a once-a-month Amtrak ticket to DC.

The magazine group plans to publish its content on computer tablets including, per widespread speclation, Apple's highly anticipated device. Right now these super magazines are just conceptual; Time Inc.'s demo video above just outlines the company's ideas, well developed though they may be.

That's partly why the video looks so exciting: Making a great demo is much easier than making a great product. It also helps that Time Inc, like other publishers, has come to see tablets as central to its future. If only the company had felt that way about the Web, five years ago, it might not be so desperate for new revenue right now.

World of Warcraft: The Magazine is the official magazine of the dangerously-addictive online role-playing game of the same name. It bills itself as "a deluxe high-quality, collectible quarterly coffee-table publication." And it needs a new EIC. Laid-off media elite: Chug your Monster energy drink, power off your iPhone and tell Mom to save some dinner: Your quest for stable magazine employment has begun.

The job has been posted to Mediabistro (which is down now, likely due to everyone needing a job) and also to San Francisco Craigslist, where WOWTM's offices are based:

Do you know the difference between a Night Elf and a Blood Elf? Do you know your favorite class role and spell rotations? And, more importantly, can you show us superlative examples of your publishing experience in the games/entertainment markets? If so, this is your opportunity to turn your favorite passion into a full-time job! Future US is looking for an Editor-in-Chief for its newest launch, the Official World of Warcraft magazine. This is a new quarterly magazine that covers all aspects of the World's biggest MMO from its content to the players themselves.

Um, favorite class role: Creative underclass?

And check out the perks:

What We Offer:
* A casual, comfortable dress environment with musicians, gamers and journalists roaming the halls
* A culture that encourages a passion for life both inside and outside of the office
* Don't want to drive? No worries - Future US offers a free shuttle from BART/Caltrain to the office

Any unemployed media person can tell you this sounds better than about 99.99 percent of what's out there. And probably more stable too: As the official World of Warcraft mag, WOWTM has a huge potential—and very captive—audience in the game's more than 11 million subscribers.

To get you started, here are some ideas for some WOWTM listicles:

•Top ten reasons you don't want to go on a date, ever
•Seven things on which to blame your current station in life
•The three World of Warcraft expansion packs that will make you forget your unbearable loneliness
•Something about spells and shit
•The eight other magazine jobs you would have right now if it weren't for the economy

Washington Times Announces Additional Changes to Become a 21st Century Multimedia Company

Changes include improved on-line presence, focused print edition and more exclusive news and commentary

WASHINGTON, DC - The Washington Times LLC today announced changes to refocus its position as a provider of vital information and insight to readers in the nation's capital, across the country and around the world. As with other news organizations in the United States, the company continues to reshape operations to keep pace with the dynamically changing economics of the news business.

"These changes will continue The Washington Times' transformation into a 21st century media company and reinforces its mission to provide an independent, alternative voice in the nation's capital," said President and Publisher Jonathan Slevin. "We have developed plans to secure our position and advance our vital role in an evolving media marketplace and through challenging economic times. A new Washington Times will continue to reach readers and more effectively earn new audiences via digital, broadcast, print and wireless media, well into the future.

"Changes at the Times are rooted in a rigorous business analysis applying sound and tested financial principles, and shaping plans informed by current marketplace realities," continued Slevin. "In this regard, the company is aggressively working to achieve efficiencies of scale that must include significant staff reduction of its 370 personnel."

Scheduled for incremental implementation between now and the first half of 2010, the changes announced include:

• News focused on strengths. The Washington Times news operation will operate in a highly focused manner, investing in Washington Times' well-established core strengths that include exclusive reporting and in-depth-news national political coverage, enterprise and investigative reporting, geo-strategic and national security news, and cultural coverage based on traditional values.

• Controlled-market local circulation. In the first quarter of 2010, the local print edition will be distributed at no cost in select areas, and home/office delivery will be offered at a premium price. No-cost distribution will focus on targeted audiences at influential branches of the federal government as well as at other key institutions. Single copy sales will continue through newspaper boxes and retailers at select locations. Current subscribers will also be offered their choice of subscriptions to Washington Times' digital editions and The Washington Times National Weekly.

• Digital news resources: The Company will expand the recently launched theconservatives.com, subscription-based e-briefings and other new digital information resources as part of its online strategy.

• Radio programming. The newspaper's 3-hour-a-day morning radio program, "America's Morning News," will continue to grow through its syndicated by Talk Radio Network. It currently airs in more than 70 markets nationwide.

• Partnerships. The Washington Times will work closely with its affiliate company, United Press International (UPI), to mutually benefit both organizations through collaboration in areas such as photography and online sales, as well as leveraging UPI's multi-lingual and international presence.

"The new Washington Times will continue to report Washington-focused news that other journalistic enterprises often overlook," said Slevin. "Fearless reporting, respect for American values, and crisply written editorials and columns will remain the centerpieces of our new strategy, and our content will continue to engage readers and viewers through a wide range of 21st century media."

Jack Dorsey is no longer a day-to-day executive at Twitter, but he used to be CEO of the microblogging service and is widely credited with coming up with the idea for brokering 140-character status updates. Those updates, in turn, now carry a large amount of local news and commentary of which papers like the Chronicle, which is losing circulation and money most months, were once the main suppliers.

Which is why it's more than a touch ironic that Dorsey is leasing space in the Chronicle building for his new credit-card processing startup Square. Joining him will be two tech "incubators" that promise to nurture technology as disruptive as Twitter. This is sort of like renting space inside your body for one of those creatures from Alien. It will explode out of your stomach and devour you someday. Look out, Chronicle!

[via BayNewser]

(Pic by Esther Dyson)

Oyster's schtick when it debuted to much fanfare in June was that it would hire experienced staffers to stay in hotels and write reviews, giving it a competitive advantage against user-submitted sites like TripAdvisor.com. Sure enough, the site hired 20 reporters and at least three editors—veterans of the New York Times, Money, Fast Company, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and all sorts of other former lions of print—to fly around all the time and stay at hotels. "We pay for all the expenses, the plane ticket, taxis, meals, rooms and, of course, salaries and benefits," co-founder Elie Seidman told the New York Times in June. He added that he hoped that by the end of 2010, he'd have 150 full-time staffers.

Well, that couldn't last very long, could it? After just under two quarters of operation, the site has engaged in what we hear are massive layoffs: 75% of staff is gone, our tipster says. A spokeswoman for Oyster confirms the layoffs, but says the 75% figure is laughably high. She declined to offer the accurate numbers, or say how many staffers the site currently employs. UPDATE: Oyster's rep got back to us with figures that indicate the site laid off one-third of its payroll, though the mix of full-time and temp staffers isn't clear: "At our 2009 production peak, we had more than 30 people, full-time and temporary. As a result of both economic conditions in the market and our decisions to slow our rate of new market additions after 18 months of torrid growth, we now have more than 20 people — full time and temporary."

In a statement, Seidman said Oyster was just limiting its coverage area:

After a burst of massive growth over the past 18 months, we've covered a very large percentage of the U.S. leisure market with a product that has been incredibly well received. In order to focus on winning in the markets we've already covered, we've decided to slightly slow our rate of new market coverage.

(That 18 months figure must include a lengthy pre-launch "burst of massive growth," because it hasn't been 18 months since Oyster launched in June of this year.)

Anyway, if you're a reporter terrified of losing your job and dreaming of an online gig where you get paid to travel and stay in luxury hotels and write about it, that escape hatch just closed. Maybe it's time to think about law school.

UPDATE: Two sources confirm that 17 staffers got the axe at Oyster, including 11 reporters. It's still not clear whether that constitutes 75% or 33% of payroll or somewhere in between, but it's a huge chunk of the site's editorial staff. Four reporters remain, we're told. To make matters worse, one tipster says the company sent eight non-editorial staffers on an all-expenses trip to Jamaica last month, which was explained as a gift in lieu of bonuses. And they were buying everybody free lunches every day until late October, when they apparently realized they needed to stop spending money and start firing everybody. One former Oyster reporter writes, "This is a sinking ship, and a severe case of entrepreneurial hubris. Shame."

If you know the details on who got fired, or how many people it was, let us know.

Editor-in-Chief Joshua Neuman denies that Heeb is in trouble—see the bottom of this post—but a number of tipsters beg to differ. You be the judge.

Tuesday morning update: Heeb's editorial director Yasha Wallin emails to say Heeb isn't "shutting down" pointing to parties and the web site, which seems to sidestep the question of the magazine. We asked her to clarify the future of the magazine and will update again if she gets back to us. Updated again: "We have the utmost confidence in assuring you that our Spring edition will be out no later than Rosh Hashanah." (For you goys, Rosh Hashanah starts on September 9 next year.)

We just put out our winter issue (The Future Issue) as well as our first Storytelling anthology, Sex, Drugs and Gefilte Fish. We're gearing up for Heebonism, our biggest party of the year, held in cities around the country on Christmas Eve, and we're working on a re-launch of our website for early 2010. So, no, we're definitely not shutting down.

According to one tipster who used to work at Heeb, rumors that the magazine is folding have been so commonplace among young Jews in the know that they're usually greeted with an eye-roll. But this time, "everybody in the Jewish world kind of knows" that Heeb is just about ferklempt. (Or whatever the word for "totally fucked" is in Yiddish.) The main sign, our tipster tells us, is that donors who have traditionally propped Heeb up are pulling out their money and are actively looking for new Jewish non-profits to give it to. Thanks, in part, to the recession. (and not, amazingly, the Roseanne-Barr-as-Hitler photo spread) Says our tipster:

[Heeb] was able to live high on the hog when there was a lot of money coming in, like around 2004 The fact that they were wasting money went kind of unnoticed by the Jewish organizations donating to them. But the recession hit them kind of hard. Now Lots of funders are asking very specifically for people to spell out where their money is going.

Heeb has indeed been wasting a lot of money if it is run as incompetently as our tipster suggests: For example, the magazine—supposedly quarterly—would regularly miss printing deadlines for no other reason than they couldn't get the issue out to the printer in time.

This one issue came out in September and the advertising guys sold a bunch of ads for Rosh Hashanah services at different places. But they missed the deadline so the issue didn't come out until after the holidays and they had to give all the advertisers their money back.

(Other tipsters have also mentioned how Heeb's irregular printing schedule has come to resemble last spasms of the near-dead.)

And it doesn't help that the Heeb offices are run extremely haphazardly by editor-in-chief Joshua Neuman, according to our tipster. "He ran off almost every good editor and writer who worked there. They were frustrated with him because he would pay some people for stories and not others based on whether he liked them."

A freelance photographer backed up this claim and offered further proof that the end of Heeb is near. After receiving a potential assignment via email from photo editor Mike Garten in August, she asked if there was a budget: Silence.

This was the second fake assignment (fake because it is presumably unpaid labor, including gas—they wanted me to drive to baltimore!?), so I presumed when I read this it was on its last legs.

The Heeb Magazine death watch starts now.

UPDATE The JTA's Fundermentalist blog has a statement from editor-in-chief Josh Neuman:

"I think they maybe they're reading a little too much into the cover of our Winter Issue. Like Tupac faking his own death or something. Whatever. The traffic will help us sell menorahs for Modern Tribe," he told The Fundermentalist late Monday night.

He added: "We've actually got some pretty giant initiatives in the near horizon. A new website on its way, our largest partnership, more and more video...Dude, we just started printing an Australian edition!!!!"

Lachlan's investment vehicle Illyria is putting up half of a reported $70 million bid to purchase the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Brandweek, and Mediaweek from Nielsen Communications, according to the Financial Times. The other half comes from an investor group that includes James Finkelstein, the owner of Roll Call The Hill.

The Hollywood Reporter is, to put it mildly, failing. And while Billboard is reportedly treading water, its future is bleak when one considers the fact that it is a trade journal devoted to covering a business (the music industry) that for all intents and purposes doesn't really exist anymore. The logic of paying $70 million for properties that either don't make much money or are losing money and positioned to do little else but continue losing money eludes us.

Unless you happen to be the son of Rupert Murdoch, who promised you, his eldest son, the keys to his kingdom only to leave your mother and marry a much younger woman and then cast you aside, forcing you to return to your native Australia to nurse your wounds and plot your revenge. Maybe then it makes sense to buy yourself a little spot in Hollywood from which to spit in Old Dad's eyes now and again. Prior to the Nielsen move, Lachlan's acquisitions had been decidedly boring—he purchased half of an Australian radio chain earlier this month for $110 million, and he owns a piece of an Indian cricket team.

It's also worth noting the psychodynamic implications of Lachlan's unloading of half his nonvoting shares in News Corp. earlier this month, to the tune of $23 million. He got those shares under a settlement after his father attempted to cut his children with his third wife Wendi Deng in on the family business, violating a prior agreement to leave the company in the control Lachlan and his brothers and sisters. Now he's dumping it to finance his own acquisitions, including a Hollywood rag that closely monitors the doings of Daddy's company.

Or he could just be stupid and enjoys wasting money. That's always a possibility.

The cuts at the magazine happened at the end of October and were 50 or so deep - the Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and London bureaus were axed entirely, and the layoffs spanned several days. Perhaps it's not surprising then that writers and editors with nothing to do but fume would turn to the tell-all. And that, per the tipster, they'll get all the help they need:

Recently ousted employees are said to be lining up to share anecdotes and sources with the authors of the proposed tell-all.

More as it comes in.

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."

For example, the charmers at my hometown paper, the Las Vegas Review Journal, saw an increase in circulation this year by 6.6%. Which is awesome! Except: strange. Because Vegas' economy is in the toilet, having been crippled by foreclosures and joblessness. Why wouldn't these people just go online and get that shit for free? Funny you'd ask, because weekday sales dropped by 12,000 copies.

So. About that increase in circulation. Is the mob fixing numbers in Vegas again, or what? So old-school. Here's how this works: back in April, the Audit Bureau of Circulations changed their rules to let numbers look better to people who look at circulation rates, like ad buyers (and media reporters). The standard-change was bad. Like, disingenuous. Which is how the Review-Journal went up in circulation this year.

The change happened because the price the newspaper was charging for the online replica — it costs print customers an extra 50 cents per week — hadn't been high enough to qualify as paid circulation until the ABC's April change. That let newspapers define their paying readers as anyone who spends at least a penny for a copy. Previously, a newspaper copy had to sell for at least 25 percent of the basic price to qualify as paid circulation.

Right, so, by that logic, $1 could potentially equal 100 copies, and $100 equals 10,000 copies. Here's where I'd write that that's five times the amount of copies of the LVRJ distributed in Vegas, but I can't, because we have no idea how many copies are actually distributed! Fun. How do advertisers feel about this runaround? Raging mad, right? Um, kind of. One advertiser thinks the numbers are "less credible."

You really have to do your homework now and ask newspapers about how much double counting is going on,'' said Allison Howald, U.S. director of print investment at PHD Media.

The rage doesn't come across quite like I was expecting it to.

Hopefully, "less credible" is a kind euphemism for "complete bullshit," or some advertisers are going to wake up one day and start asking questions about why the 200,000 eyes they were promised on their quarter-page actually only amounts to a third-grade arts class making paper machete hats. You'd think these sketchy practices are limited to sleazy gambling towns like Vegas, though, right? WRONG again. Wall Street Journal, you guys will be transparent, right?

Nope. WSJ spokesman Robert Christie wouldn't respond to the AP's questions for quote on the new rules, including whether or not their numbers included digital subscriptions.

Including the print side, the Journal's total circulation edged up by just 0.6 percent to 2.02 million. ''We followed the ABC's rules and methodology,'' Christie said

Right, so, newspapers: more fucked than previously statistically "proven."

I'm forgetting where I read about the guy who used to steal ATM receipts of trashcans to impress dates with his huge bank account. This reminds me of that.

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.

That's what this recent Financial Times profile of the Vice empire tries to grasp. It starts by looking at Vice's lavish, quarter-million dollar Halloween party and asking the very good questions: "$250,000!? Wha—-huh!? Where did they get all this money?" Here's where: Vice increased its revenue from $45-64 million in 2008 alone. Turns out it's all about what you DO AND DON'T, and we had a foul-mouthed former Vice intern annotate the various tips and tricks contained in the FT piece that you, too, can use to build a successful alternative magazine/media empire.

DO: Become an Ad Agency

With Virtue, [Vice's in-house ad agency] the business has become a one-stop shop for youth branding. At the same time as charging premiums for advertising in its own pages, the company produces video content, photoshoots and other work for less than more established advertising agencies thanks to its network of 4,000 freelance creatives from around the world.

4,000 freelance creatives! In addition to the magazine, website, Viacom-backed online video channel, record label, book publishing house, film studio and London pub (!), Vice should think about opening a chain of over-priced coffeshops to give those freelancers somewhere to park their Macbooks.

DON'T: Be Corporate

The company has always been marked by an anti-establishment approach that has infused its editorial and business approach. Only now, for example, is the company starting to create hierarchies and line managers.

Fuck hierarchies. The only thing a hierarchy is good for is to give you something to fuck your way to the top of. Line managers, though, I can deal with; just depends on what kinds of "lines" they're managing, if you catch my drift...

DO: Have an "incredibly sophisticated" audience that gets why you work "with brands and for brands"

"Since day one, we have worked with brands and for brands," explains an unapologetic Mr Simon. "We are completely transparent in what we do. Never in any of our communications will we find a cheeky way to get one over on our audience. The audience is incredibly sophisticated."

Here's how sophisticated Vice's audience is: One time, I met this girl at the Charleston and I told her I was interning for Vice. And she's like "Cool, let's go back to my place fuck." So, we go back to her place, she puts on some Finnish electronica, then calls up her ex-boyfriend and asks him if he wants to come over and have a three-way with a dude who works at Vice. He said no fucking way. But still, she was totally into it!

DON'T: Let Sketchers Advertise in Your Magazine

But while Vice's reach is global, it remains targeted at a large niche and advertisers are required to fit with this brand image. For example, it has rejected advertisers, such as footwear giant Sketchers, when they have not fit with its image.

I believe it was the great philosopher Plato who once said: "There's just something about Sketchers that screams, 'I am poor.'" Seriously, Sketchers put the "S" in "Trailer TraSh".

DO: Think Big

"We can produce better content than is on TV for pennies in the dollar and put it on phones and TV," says Mr Smith. "Eventually when we get to 25m unique [users] and have all the biggest brands in the world underwriting it, we go to Google and say, ‘If you turn on the jets we'll be the biggest network in the world and overtake MTV'."

Imagine that: It'll be like a hipster Tower of Babel, bringing together all the slightly-differing types of hipsters from all over the world and uniting them in a glorious three-day outdoor indie music festival. We'll call it: The Dell Celebration of Universal Brotherhood.

The Apple Tablet has been something of a holy grail for gadget fiends. Now print publishers are enlisting in the cause with just as much fervor. Condé Nast's plan, as described by company execs to Peter Kafka of All Things D: Port Wired to Apple's tablet by mid-2010, followed later by all 17 other titles. By using a special digital format now under development by Adobe — which makes the publishing software that Condé and most other magazine publishers use — Condé also hopes to gain compatibility with tablet and other touch-screen devices made by Hewlett Packard and others.

Jobs should be flattered that such a high-profile publisher is chomping at the bit to get onto his new gizmo. Condé joins New York Times editor Bill Keller in talking up Apple's device; News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is another recent print-media convert to the tablet religion.

Condé, clearly eager, should keep its enthusiasm in check. The company has closed six magazines and slashed budgets 25 percent at its remaining titles this year, setting off a wave of layoffs. It's doubtful that even Steve Jobs can come up with a silver bullet to rescue businesses that have spent many years squandering past digital opportunities. Especially if the company rushes too quickly and turns out a slapdash tablet product that burns its readers on the format forever.

(Photo illustration by Photo Giddy on Flickr)

Way to win reader trust, Post-Dispatch!



The employee's comment was just one word: "Pussy." It was a stupid response to a stupid blog post, entitled "What's the craziest thing you've ever eaten?" The joke was a groaner, to be sure. And one that was annoyingly re-posted once after administrators deleted it. But the comment posed no threat to anyone or anything other than perhaps good taste. So it's bizarre how far the author of the post to which it was attached went next: The author, , Kurt Greenbaum,looked at the IP address on the comment, associated it with a local school, called the school and forwarded them all data on the commenter.

Then, Greenbaum later wrote, the guy got busted:

The school's IT director took a shine to the challenge... he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.

Score one for Greenbaum! Now St. Louis-ians won't dumbly assume they can speak anonymously to the local paper, or that newspaper staffers, of all people, might have some sympathy for the soon-to-be unemployed. And we can't imagine anyone else hurling the word "Pussy" at Kurt Greenbaum again. Because this is clealry a guy with a thick skin.

(Pic from Greenbaum's Flickr)

[via Read-Write Web]