The outgoing president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors is angry! "I am angry at the pundits who would dance on newspapers' graves. Their anti-newspaper vitriol disrespects the work being done by journalists in newsrooms all over America.
These pundits take delight in telling us we are failures. Yet truth be told, the vast majority of local public interest journalism—the watchdog stories, the investigations, the coverage of city hall and the school board, the stories with impact on public policy—is still being done in newspaper newsrooms." As is the majority of writing of angry columns directed at straw men!


Sad party report: last night current and former staffers of the now-dead Portfolio gathered for a wake for the magazine at Botanica. Michael Caruso, Bob Row, and Jeff Chu were among the mourners. "It was mournful but also a relief and anti-climactic," said one attendee, "because everyone knew it was going to come to an end." On a somewhat positive note, the 85 staffers losing their jobs are getting paid through August.


Yet another group of former newspaper guys (this time, 40 bought-out refugees from Newark) are getting together to launch a website covering news in their former coverage area (this time, NewJerseyNewsroom.com). Do any of these projects have any hope of eventually generating enough revenue to pay their employees a living wage, each? We doubt it but at the same time we hope so, because we are not pundits who would dance on newspapers' graves.


The NYT Co. is rumored to be considering selling off the NYC classical music radio station that it owns. They sure will if they can get a dollar for it. They need dollars.

Ha, while nobody was looking (except Kate Klonick of True/Slant), the defunct New York Sun started publishing editorials on its website again! Since its editorials were the most repulsive part of the paper, I wonder if they've changed at all? (Checks). Nope.

Incidentally, the site's branding was outed by Tina's friend, octogenarian gossip columnist Liz Smith. Having been burned by the backlash against Talk magazine—the glossy backed by Harvey Weinstein which Tina Brown launched with massive hype and one of the most lavish parties in magazine history—Manhattan's "queen of buzz" has been more discreet in the preparation of her first web venture. One assumes that Liz Smith forgot the sneak peek of the website was supposed to be for her eyes only—though Tina Brown can hardly complain about Smith's discretion, having pressured the ancient New York Post gossip writer to come out as a lesbian for an early issue of Talk.

No doubt The Daily Beast will invite comparisons to the newspaper of Waugh's novel; already Liz Smith compares the IAC mogul backing Tina Brown to a character in Scoop, proprietor Lord Copper; and there will be easy jokes to make whenever Brown's news site makes an error or hypes a story.

But I was reminded more of the scene in Scoop in which the hapless hero goes on an extravagant shopping trip before heading to Africa to cover the war, buying six linen suits, surgical instruments and a portable humidor. Waugh, himself a foreign correspondent during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, once said: "There are few pleasures more complete, or to me more rare, than that of shopping extravagantly at someone else's expense."

That quote could serve as a statement of editorial principles for the notoriously profligate Tina Brown, who happily doubled writers' contracts to lure them to Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. The Daily Beast has already run through a series of expensive design consultants and employs about half-a-dozen staff its office in IAC's Gehry-designed office palace. During her magazine career, Tina Brown shopped at the expense of Conde Nast's Si Newhouse; reinvented as an internet entrepreneur backed by Barry Diller, she's still spending other people's money.

The main criticism of the Sporting News' strategy is that its newsletter will come out in the morning, while rabid sports fans will probably have gotten their fill of the news the previous night. It's certainly possible that the entire comeback will be a colossal failure. But getting one of the sports world's most high-profile bloggers on staff (once again—Leitch worked there ten years ago) was a pretty savvy move for the old folks. People will be forced to link to them now!

Publisher Ed Baker's defense of the morning newsletter:

"What if a player gets arrested or traded? Things happen overnight," he said in response to Mr. Padwe's comment. "And if the Mets are on the West Coast playing the Dodgers, how many people stay up till 1 to find out the score?"

Here's hoping for plenty of arrests!

[NYT]