Pitchfork Media, the twenty-year-old music criticism site known for mainstreaming decent musical taste and worshipping the band Radiohead, has been acquired by media empire Condé Nast, which is excited to be the new owner of “a very passionate audience of millennial males.”
Nicki Minaj and Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg. Together. At last. If this means nothing to you, fair enough: the story has been over for almost a year. Last June the morning-show host rather rudely dissed Minaj's pop tendencies at Summer Jam just hours before she was supposed to perform at the Hot 97-sponsored festival.…
There's a very good reason that our culture's most enduring artistic and moral icons all died young: because if they'd stuck around long enough, they'd have ended up shilling for sugary beverages during the Super Bowl. So long, Eminem. You were fun while you lasted.
Jersey Shore's Snooki has hired a firm to slap her name on every sort of product imaginable. And she's applying for trademarks on a variety of her catchphrases, too. The Snooki onslaught is coming—and it's scary!
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper doffed his prissy parka for a tight T-shirt for a new weekly series about the environment. But if you look at this ad, you'll see the show's been underwritten by polluting chemical company Dow. Uh oh!
When kids today grow up and teach them about The Beatles, they'll see John Lennon's face and say "He's from that Citroën commercial!" A weak Twitter defense of this commercial from Sean Lennon makes this even more inexcusable. Unreal.
If you loved Martha Stewart's collection of cheap (and injurious!) junk for Kmart, you're going to be thrilled to hear about her latest venture. She's now offering Martha-approved destination weddings in partnership with the world's tackiest chain of resorts. (You know, the one that makes you hit the mute button on…
Photographer Annie Leibovitz came close to losing everything this past fall when she was sued for failing to pay back the $24 million loan that had been extended to her by Art Capital, which had taken her real estate holdings and the rights to her photos as collateral. Leibovitz managed to avert crisis when she …
Wow. We knew VICE sold out and went corporate, but this is some Conde Nast-y shit. Looks like Vice holds writers to non-competes, barring them from having anything to do with departed VICE founder Gavin McInnes' site, Street Carnage.
You all know the tale: MediaBistro started as a series of cocktail networking parties hosted by Laurel Touby, who then realized she could monetize a website by charging (voluntarily, at first) for job postings. Then came the classes, which are totally overpriced—especially when compared with nearly identical, yet much…
Everybody knows what happened to the third iteration of "pop and politics and pop culture and scandal and pop" Radar last Friday: they fired everyone, locked them out of their offices, folded the magazine, and sold off the website to AMI (home of Star and other quality publications.) The website is now a reanimated…
Steve Stoute is Jay-Z's partner in Translation Advertising, and specializes in connecting huge corporations to "urban" celebrities for ridiculous amounts of money. Such as R&B star Chris Brown's secret deal to make a song all about Wrigley's gum, but not tell anyone until after it was a #1 hit! "It's incredible that…
Serious writers like to think "no," but of course they would—if the money was right. Writes Tod Goldberg in the LA Times, he got a call wondering if "I might be interested in writing original novels based on Burn Notice, the popular show on USA about a blacklisted spy named Michael Westen, who uses his training to…
Lou Reed, the lead singer of the seminal Warhol-backed band Velvet Underground and noted ape-like jerk, was always admired for his artistic integrity. (Or maybe, he wasn't!) At any rate, he isn't! He's 65, avaricious and willing to go sneer, strut and sing for the highest bidder. Yesterday, Reed performed for an…
Well, we're a little late on this one. This night shift completely fucks up our Project Runway watching experience. But! Ending a holiday rut of reruns, the first new episode of Proj Run was on on Wednesday night and it was kind of amazing. "Amazing" might not be the right word. What's the word when a hero of yours,…
Director and awards season cow wrangler David Lynch makes no secret of how he feels about the encroachment of corporate interests upon his stubbornly abstruse cinematic meditations. (Quoth: "Bullshit. Total fucking bullshit.") That isn't to say that he's above whoring himself out for the occasional contract work,…
With American Idol soon set to crown its winner and its audience teetering on burnout—even the phone-in results have felt a little phoned-in since Sanjaya was sent packing—Fox is hoping to recapture the nation's sizzling love affair with the couchbound minting of new creative superstars through its latest reality…
Once, the elfin drunken DJ trio MisShapes were the ultimate arbiter of cool. But last night, the three stooges DJ'ed the opening of Michael Shvo's wondrous, strange and utterly ridiculous condo, "Gramercy." Gramercy is first of all not in Gramercy—23rd between 1st and 2nd?—but designer and lunatic Philippe Starck's…
