Is this the end of Sam Zell, failed newspaperman? The NYP says the gnomish, mean rich man is "on the verge of giving up his claims to buy a huge stake in the company and, according to a source familiar with the matter, is ready to walk away from the company." Tribune Co. employees—whose money Zell used to buy the bankrupt company—will be happy to see him go. But not as sad as they were to see him come.


A federal judge ruled that former WSJ assistant managing editor Carolyn Phillips can pursue her lawsuit alleging that Dow Jones fired her in 2002 because she was black. The WSJ's former editors deny it all. And Rupert Murdoch is just cold sitting back being like "I didn't even own the paper back then, suckas." Then he fires a black person somewhere, just for fun.


Former NYT Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman didn't like the NYT's (pretty awesome I thought!) profile of Harvey Weinstein last weekend—for one thing it was by a reporter Waxman referred to as "David Segal (um, who?)." Turns out she worked with him at the Washington Post and even shared a byline with him. Our editor Gabriel Snyder knows Hollywood and would probably have something insightful to say here, but unfortunately I have no idea who Gabriel Snyder is.
[New insta-joke: "UM WHO?" Haha!]


"Huffington Post + Facebook = the Future of Journalism." No.

John Koblin did his heroic best to explain What It All Means: The accelerating decline of Variety, the rise of celebrity Twitters; the enduring but increasingly preposterous hope of the Los Angeles Times, the swagger of self-made blog bigfoot Nikki Finke; the "clubby" world of pre-internet Tinseltown reporting, the ambitions of upstart blogger Sharon Waxm—

"I do think it's kind of surprising that Sharon Waxman even has a blog," [former LA/NY Times reporter Anita] Busch told us. "I think she's even one of the worst journalists I've ever encountered."

Uhhh...

"Her site is getting no traffic and is inaccurate and boring..." Finke said.

OK, well, maybe we could get back to a constructive dialog about how the economic misfortunes of movie studios have maybe accelerated the decline of printed med...

[Variety's Brian] Lowry, in a blog post singling out [LA Times' Patrick] Goldstein, calls him lazy, petulant and a weak reporter. "Now you have this blog, ‘The Big Picture,' so I'm thrilled to see... you squeeze out more than 800 words a week," wrote Mr. Lowry.

Right. We'll skip right over the discussion of economic viability amid the decimation of advertising revenue in the print-to-online transition, then, and just ask if anyone else want to hurl some fecal m...

"The way [Finke] twists things and the way she always manages to bend the facts-and I put facts in quotes-is in a way that suits her..." Ms. Waxman... added. "People around Hollywood are terrified of her."

Alright, fine, bottom line: In case the example of New York wasn't clear enough, Los Angeles media also illustrate how technology and fragmentation are reviving the old tradition of feuding. As longtime Variety kingpin Peter Bart explains to Koblin, we're going back to the 1930s, when Louella Parsons competed ruthlessly with former friend Hedda Hopper to dominate Hollywood gossip. Everyone is at one another's throats.

No, the Waxman-Finke rivalry isn't exactly hot news, but the point is that more of these little squabbles are erupting all the time, if only because there are so many would-be media alpha dogs in this period of flux, before the inevitable consolidations and shakeouts that make life boring again.

Seeking a final bit of illumination on that, we excitedly emailed Koblin's piece to a media source who quickly replied, "I thought only Hollywood bloggers cared about feuds created entirely to bait traffic, but I totally forgot about the New York Observer!"

Oh, my.

Then again, what did we expect? Welcome to the future. It's kinda bitchy!

[NY Observer]

(Illustration via)

In a post titled, "Memo to Nikki: Stop Saying TheWrap Isn't Breaking Stories," Waxman takes aim at previous Finke claims that Waxman's newly launched media site, TheWrap.com isn't breaking news.

Tit for tat.

In Finke's last hit, she was quoted in I Want Media as saying she doesn't read the site, basically calling it irrelevant.

Finke: "If it ever starts breaking news, and then doing it day after day, hour after hour, it will be. But that's hard. I wish her well."

Ouch.

Waxman writes in her column, saying that was the third instance of Finke dissing her site.

"So before this kind of repetition hardens into supposed fact, let me set the record straight. TheWrap is breaking news every day, and seeks to offer an authoritative, intelligent take on the issues facing the entertainment industry, every day."

She goes on to point out that she beat Finke in reporting that SAG President Alan Rosenberg "was suing his own union over the board's ouster of negotiator Doug Allen," and broke the news of the Lionsgate-Summit talks.

"We won't succeed every day," writes Waxman. "But we break a helluva lot of news, including right in Nikki's sweet spot — the guilds and the potential SAG strike."

Then she said: "Neener, neener, neener." No, really.

Can't wait to see what apocalyptic hellstorm Finke conjures after this.

RapRadar: Elliot Wilson, former editor of hip hop magazine XXL, is launching what he hopes will become the Huffington Post of Hip Hop. Which is just a horrible slogan. Basically it'll be some HuffPo-ish mix of blogging, journalism, and hip hop celebrities writing guest columns. "If Jay-Z wants to express his feelings about Obama, there's not really a forum where he can do that right now," Wilson says. This is false.
Chance of Survival: Not great, but theoretically possible. XXL was a quality magazine. If he can replicate that online, he could build an audience. Problem: XXL already replicated itself online. Problem 2: Audience doesn't mean advertisers. See Vibe magazine, currently.

The Wrap: Ex-NYT correspondent and Gawker opponent Sharon Waxman launched this Hollywood/ entertainment news site thing last month. Bad timing, but hey.
Chance of Survival: Ehhh.... moderate? It'll have to get better. Waxman has some money at her back, which is good. But she has some very entrenched competition in Hollywood. If something happens to Nikki Finke, then... slightly less of a chance of failure.


BastardLife: This is Genre magazine editor Neal Boulton's "pansexual sex & relationships site for ALL men." No idea what that means. Is 'pansexual' different than 'bisexual?' It's a question you may be able to find the answer to at Bastardlife.com
Chance of Survival: As a forum for Neal Boulton's personal musings, decent. As a moneymaking venture, very low. Unless pansexuality takes off as a recession thing.


Alpha Kitty: Atoosa Rubenstein was a big shot editor at Seventeen magazine. Then she left to run this "Alpha Kitty" project. Which, as best we can tell, now consists of her Myspace page and a Youtube channel.
Chance of survival: Ummm.. good? But the chance of making money with this is nil, as far as we can tell. Although to be completely honest I'm still not sure what this thing really is.


The Daily Beast: I made up a little haiku about The Daily Beast, ready?:
Tina Brown glamour
Fancy online articles
No advertising

Chance of Survival: Unless Tina comes up with a brilliant plan to monetize this site, it will be a victim of its launch timing and its utter lack of urgency to come up with a workable business plan. She will burn through Barry Diller's millions, subsidizing many worthy writers in the process, then eventually fold. It will be a nice place to go back to and read the archives one day, though.

[Disclosure: Neal Boulton has owed me freelance money forever, so I may be biased.]

For starters, Google searches for "The Wrap" place the showbiz portal at the top of their results, accompanied by the following description: "Small local chain offering wraps and juice drinks. Includes menus, nutritional information, video clips, and a list of locations." Apparently The Wrap until now was the online presence of a delicious sandwich outpost servicing the hungry Ivy League minds of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Anyone logging on to order a hummus/tuna combo from now on will be disappointed to find nothing but calorie-deficient updates on Michael Jackson/John Landis legal fracases.

Secondly, the Rumor Mill section—one of our favorites—has been downgrading their gossip condiment bar from 4-pepper habanero spicy ("OVERHEARD AT SUNDANCE: Screenwriter of festival winner Push, Geoffrey Fletcher, so hated the first cut that he opted for a pseudonym, Damien Paul"), to the milder, less flack-dyspepsia-inducing, "The screenwriter of festival winner Push, Geoffrey Fletcher, opted for a pseudonym, Damien Paul. How come?"

C'mon, Sharon. Lay it on us. We got guts of steel! [The Wrap]

The former WaPo/NYT reporter — who took a couple years off to dabble in the always-volatile antiquities beat — has finally reemerged with The Wrap, which she'd been teasing for months from her blog HQ at Waxword and finally launched this morning with a wordy introduction to "new Hollywood" and about $500,000 of venture capital at her back. That kind of money won't hurt, just as fun rumors from Sundance ("Screenwriter of festival winner Push, Geoffrey Fletcher, so hated the first cut that he opted for a pseudonym, Damien Paul") and inspired Slumdog slags also offer some rowdy good times on opening day.

Yet other rooms on the grand tour left us a little chilly: "Who E-Mails In Hollywood?," Sharon? Really? ("Scott Rudin, Academy Award-winning American film producer and a Tony Award-winning theatre producer – but he's new to it.") And we foresee the consolidation (read: eviction) of underwhelming media news and personal blogs before long, including this home run from LAT critic emeritus Howard Rosenberg

Samuel J. “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher is a sitcom waiting to happen since being dispatched to Israel by the website pjtv.com for in-depth reporting on Israel vs. Hamas. Here's my vision of how prime time’s “Journalist Joe” might progress.

Israeli military officer briefing Joe: “Our troops are in the Gaza Strip.”

Joe (perplexed): “Gaza Strip? Is that an Arab girlie club?

Laugh track.

That would coincide with prime time’s generally banal view of journalists.

What? As you were, Howard; there's fresh blood coming in from Variety any minute now.

• The Wrap

We amended yesterday's news of a top-secret actor's meeting to reflect Waxman's retraction, which occurred overnight after Nikki revealed how Waxman got punk'd. Except, Waxman noted this morning, she didn't retract the story; she was just correcting her errors and saved the piece to "draft." Right.

Still, Waxman emphasizes, "the essence of the story is correct": A high-octane, strike-gauging meeting took place at SAG president Alan Rosenberg's request, though not at the time of federal mediation between SAG and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which would a serious no-no. But what about Finke's allegations?

"If the story is so unimportant, I wonder why Nikki Finke devotes so much energy to it, and if doing so serves her readers. I suspect it has more to do with embarrassing a fellow journalist. Is she a mouthpiece for SAG, or an independent voice?"

All right, fine — it's a draw. Still, Sharon, consider having an editor look at that cut above your eye.

• More SAG Secrets: Famous Stars are Asked to Pre-Authorize Strike [WaxWord]

• The 'Secret Starry SAG Strike Meeting' That Wasn't [DHD]

• Who Holds SAG Accountable? [WaxWord]

Waxman's schadenfreude on our recent layoffs:

So, now Nick Denton is laying people off, just like those dinosaurs in mainstream media.

The difference is, mainstream newspapers fired real journalists.

OH SNAP.

What the Gawker empire represents is as transitory as the people he employs. Denton has indisputably proved that you can create a lucrative business model out of highly targeted blogs, fed by tightly managed staffs of journalists who've numbed themselves to nagging doubts that what they do every day is journalism.

Ha. I have no doubt that what I do here every day is not "journalism," per se. It's called "blogging," and it has elements of journalism. What an asinine argument. I expect far more accurate insults from an actual journalist, Sharon Waxman.

Denton is ripe for mocking, and he knows it... "Gawker Media is behaving like those big media companies that we mock so easily." (Used to? Does this mean they will no longer mock and smear and malign journalists at big media companies? Too late. Had I known, I might have stayed at The New York Times.)

We apologize for singlehandedly forcing you to quit your job at the New York Times in order to seduce venture capitalists into funding your upcoming "primary, multi-platform source for the best original and aggregated content, adapted for the digital age." Although, to be honest, we will continue to smear and malign journalists at big media companies, when necessary.

And while I'm at it,

Yes?

let me publicly lament the flight of talented colleagues, Jeff Leeds of the Times and Gabriel Snyder, once of Variety, to the world of celebrity infotainment, and the kingdom of snark, respectively. Leeds, one of the best music journalists working (or, rather, not working) has gone to Buzznet, where he will be the editor-in-chief. Snyder becomes managing editor at Gawker. Like other journalists, they have to eat, so one can hardly blame them.

And to think: they could have applied at The Wrap News.

[Waxword]

No seriously, we actually wish Sharon, who hopes The Wrap will be the Politico of the entertainment industry even though there are already innumerable trade publications plus Nikki Finke serving that role and hello, entertainment is actually a tiny and shrinking sector of the American economy that really does not deserve as much attention as the federal government, marginally more success than we wish the other two ventures, because Bonnie Fuller is the mustard gas of American brain cells and Tina Brown's Beast sounds like another Huffington Post, which, you know, is a lovely site and all, but…do we really need more? (No.)

Why does everyone have to start new stuff all the time, anyway? Would it really be so radical for one of these broads to go work for something that already existed? Or even SOMEONE ELSE??

Full disclosure: I know Sharon sort of, because when I lived in LA I went to a party at her house one time with this old friend of mine, Evan Wright. Fittingly, Sharon had met Evan while writing a story about his internet startup, which was naturally some sort of porn company. At the time Sharon was frustrated at the Washington Post in part, I was told, because she liked "hard news" and politics and the Middle East and spoke Arabic and stuff, and also maybe because she was a little on the pathologically sloppy side. Meanwhile Evan was transitioning out of porn and into a magazine career that has since yielded two National Magazine Awards for and the much-acclaimed HBO series show Generation Kill. All of which is to say: nice job, both of you, you could be doing this.

Which is to say, hi guys! This is my first Gawker post. I'll be covering the media and ideas, which is to say, Nick Denton's ideas about the media. I am open to all venture financing I can receive via PayPal.

Are Tina Brown And Bonnie Fuller Wired For Their Shift Online? [LAT]
Sharon Waxman Aims To Be The Politico Of Hollywood [Marketwatch]

At least he was nice enough to chime in with a disturbing note from jail, excerpted after the jump.

Yoga, meditation, and the love of my family and God have sustained me as I grapple with blankets that have blood stains dried in tie-dyed patterns and battle nocturnal visits from entities that include, but are not limited to, rodents and insects (that I have not even seen in the jungles of India!). How much of it is my imagination? I'm not really sure. But the whole thing feels like a Stephen King novel turned into a movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

A fair trial is a wonderful concept but more of a satire in my case, based on how this has been manipulated and has been anything but fair. No one besides the parties involved (traditionally "two") knows IF intimacy/sex even happened or much less if it was consensual or not. Wouldn't one call 911? Get a rape kit or at least STD testing? Would anyone continue to follow, travel, live with someone who allegedly assaulted them?

Oh, give it up, AJ — Manoj would never direct a Stephen King prison adaptation. That's Frank Darabont territory all the way.

• Designer Sex [LAM]

• An Accused Serial Rapist Speaks, Ahead of Trial [WaxWord]

It is a tragic tale, however you slice it: either the insidious corruption of a Harvard-educated, lover of history by the prevailing norms of a see-no-evil antiquities trade. Or the public crucifixion of a competent curator who played by the rules — and the rules lived in a grey zone — and then found herself in the cross-hairs when the rules changed to black and white.

Marion True Lives Within Her Means [ArtsJournal]

Sifton inherited Waxman when he took over Culture at the Times; she was hired by Jodi Kantor, then the editor of Arts & Leisure, and Jodi's then-boss, Steve Erlanger, in October 2003.

It's unusual for a reporter with Waxman's experience and contacts, as well as family attachments in Los Angeles, to be recalled to New York. (Other examples are welcome—drop us a line.)

"She was hoping to get something else on the culture desk, but Sifton wanted her out of there," said the source. "For awhile she thought she could get something from [Styles editor] Trip Gabriel, but those are really coveted jobs. Trip was very diplomatic and said there are no jobs."

Waxman started in October, 2003, when she came over from the Washington Post. Since then, the Times has issued at least 45 corrections on her articles, approximately one per month. This is out of 385 bylines, according to Nexis, for a correction rate of 11.6%.

Many of those corrections are merely of names misspelled or titles gotten slightly wrong.

However, the most common complaints from L.A. are that she puts information on the record that was explicitly supposed to be off, and that she gets simple details wrong.

Here it should be noted that L.A. industry types in general never like what reporters say about them, and try to discredit reporters who don't follow their proposed storylines.

"Sharon has become a liability for the newspaper because nobody wants to talk to her," said one Hollywood industry executive. "And if she's not trustworthy because her past behavior causes people to feel like they've been burned, that makes her even more of a liability."

Sometimes the corrections do go beyond the relatively minor. At the end of December 2003, Waxman reported that CBS had paid Michael Jackson for an interview that was to air on 60 Minutes; this was not true. In February, 2004, the Times wrote an editor's note about a Waxman story about Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ, in which she maintained that David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg had "privately expressed anger" over the film. In part, the Editor's Note said:

The Times should have checked directly with both men and given them an opportunity to comment on the executive's statement.

Mr. Geffen said yesterday: "Neither Jeffrey or I have seen the movie or have formed an opinion about it."

Waxman also famously angered director David O. Russell in 2004 by writing an article for the NYT based on reporting she had supposedly told him was going to be in her book, Rebels on the Backlot. "He felt blindsided," says a source, "because she violated their agreement." (But the pair never had a written agreement, and Waxman has denied that she misrepresented her intentions in reporting the piece. Russell also has a reputation as something of a loose cannon, to put it mildly.)

The result, says a source, is that "nobody likes to deal with her"—which is why she's being recalled to New York.

So if Hollywood is all about access and trades, what good is a reporter who has corrupted hers? Which is the essential problem of covering that industry altogether. Far better for Waxman to have burned bridges, or even sources, than to have sunk into the murk.

His most recent television articles—a piece on May 27 on the Fox sitcom 'Til Death, a story about Bob Barker's TV specials on May 15—were merely forgettable, but some of his pieces are eyebrow-raising for their cluelessness.

Before moving to Los Angeles last year to be with his wife, Jennifer Steinhauer, the head of the Times' Los Angeles bureau, Wyatt covered publishing from New York, and without particular distinction.

On Saturday, April 28, the New York Times ran an article, "Well-Known
Secret: 'Grey's Anatomy' Spinoff for ABC," by Wyatt. In the article about Grey's Anatomy, Wyatt wrote, "Like a doting parent trying to hide a child's Christmas bike under the bed, ABC has been pretending to hope that no one notices what could be its biggest winner in next fall's television season, a spinoff of its hit nighttime soap opera 'Grey's Anatomy... Despite the buzz being generated by a potential spinoff of its highest-rated scripted show, executives at the ABC network and its television studio have refused to talk publicly about the new venture."

The next day, Sunday, April 29, the front page of the Los Angeles Times' Calendar section was devoted to the Grey's Anatomy spinoff. It featured quotes from, among others, ABC's entertainment president, Stephen McPherson, and Shonda Rhimes, the creator of the series.

And in a piece of Wyatt's about Lost on May 8, he wrote, "ABC declined to make its executives and the show's creators available for interviews." But the LAT managed to get both of the show's executive producers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, to give quotes in the article by Maria Elena Fernandez that ran the same day.

"He doesn't have a tremendous number of contacts," said one L.A. executive in the industry of Wyatt. "I don't look at that as a failing on his part! It takes awhile to develop those relationships." Wyatt appears to have written his first story on his new beat in March, 2006 ("Smithsonian-Showtime Deal Raises Concerns"), though people out west had the perception that he had been on the beat for a much shorter time.

"Ask me in three months what I think of him, and I'll be able to give you a better answer," this executive said.

At the New York Times, as at the Los Angeles Times, television is covered by both the Arts and Business desks. At the NYT, Jacques Steinberg and Bill Carter report to Business editor Larry Ingrassia [they used to report to Ingrassia; they now report to the Culture desk]; Brooks Barnes will report to media editor Bruce Headlam, one of Ingrassia's deputies, on the Business desk. Wyatt, and Virginia Heffernan and poor Alessandra Stanley, report to Steve Reddicliffe, the culture TV editor, who's under Sam Sifton.

At the LAT, Maria Elena Fernandez, Martin Miller, Greg Braxton, Scott Collins, Lynn Smith and Matea Gold—all reporters—are edited by Kate Aurthur (who used to work at the NYT on the Arts & Leisure desk), while Meg James reports to Sallie Hofmeister on the Business desk. That's not counting the LAT's critics. Even as the LAT prepares to slim down, they remain bulked up on their home turf—a place where they think they can show up the NYT.

Wyatt's relative inexperience wouldn't be so noticeable if the rest of the NYT's entertainment coverage was strong. And that's why Barnes—who has a reputation as someone who breaks stories—has the potential to be something of a thorn in the LAT's side in writing about the film industry. For example, Sharon Waxman (who's on the Culture desk, though her stories often touch on business-related topics) has been basically blacklisted by at least a few Hollywood folk since September 2004, when she wrote an article for the Times, "The Nudist Buddhist Borderline-Abusive Love-In," about the director David O. Russell and his film I Heart Huckabees. The article was filled with details that Russell—rightly or wrongly; there's a lot of he-said, she-said here—thought were for Waxman's book Rebels on the Backlot. When they ended up in the Times, he was none too pleased.

Since then, Waxman's lack of sources has become a detriment to the paper's coverage of the industry—a very recent example is her piece on the box-office success of Pirates of the Caribbean which (very logically) speculated that a fourth Pirates had to be in the works, given the success of the first three. Waxman quoted Mark Zoradi, president of Disney Studios marketing and distribution, an anonymous "film executive close to 'Pirates 3,' and Paul Dergarabedian, who runs a company called Media by Numbers, which tallies box-office receipts.

Meanwhile, the LAT's story had quotes from Disney studio chairman, Dick Cook (better than the head of marketing and distribution); Sony Pictures studio chairman Amy Pascal; Pirates producer Jerry Bruckheimer; and anonymous Sony executives.

Then there's the NYT's Bill Carter. Recently, Carter—who's been on the beat since the dawn of time—has had a few slip-ups that make it look like he's phoning it in. Take the recent incident involving Chris Albrecht, the HBO chairman forced to resign after allegedly beating the crap out of his girlfriend in Las Vegas; the LAT's Claudia Eller was the first to report that Albrecht had been accused of assault in 1991.

Later, Eller reported that Time Warner president Jeff Bewkes authorized a $500,000 payment to the woman, a settlement that raised eyebrows on the occasion of the company's annual meeting—will Bewkes be passed over for the head honcho job when Dick Parsons resigns? The NYT had nothing on the story.

Carter has trouble with HBO stories, for one, and also in getting stories when there's any whiff of scandal to them. Carter is also notorious for not giving credit to writers from other publications who break stories; compare, for example, Carter's coverage and its lack of credit to that of his new co-worker Barnes, always quick to slip in an acknowledgment. (Of course, both the NYT and the LAT both sometimes fail to give credit where it's due—take the recent firing of NBC's Kevin Reilly, which Nikki Finke reported on Deadline Hollywood before either publication; neither gave her credit.)

So, pre-Brooks, L.A. is up in the struggle. But what will happen next? When asked to compare the two papers' TV coverage, one critic (from neither publication), called the LAT's coverage "kinda schizophrenic. Sometimes, it's as sharp and as insider-y as it should be. At other times—well, look at the lead of this story. Wouldn't it be more appropriate in the Kansas City Star?"

(Disclosure: Gawker's Managing Editor takes a small bit of money from the LA Times, via the Calendar section (and has previously taken money from the New York Times via the culture section). Defamer's Mark Lisanti was called in to review this item.)