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celebrity-industrial complex
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The Atlantic
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celebrity-industrial complex
mugging
Please Politely Welcome Jeffrey Goldberg to the Internet
Atlantic contributor Jeffrey Goldberg started his very first blog this week, with a charmingly naive post mostly about how he knows nothing about blogging but does sit near uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan. "This is almost certainly a mistake," he begins, and it turns out he's 100% right. When the New York Observer's media blogger Matt Haber (the forgotten Gawker Alum!) devoted a post yesterday to basically announcing the existence of Goldberg's blog and needling Goldberg for his initial boneheaded support of the Iraq War, Goldberg blew up with rage. Haber's post was a mugging, he says. Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Jeffrey. We'll show you what a mugging is. More »
branding
'Atlantic' No Longer Flying Solo Across Internet
The Atlantic is a magazine about news and culture and stuff. It has been continually published for thousands of years—its founding editor was Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar. Now, though, the internet, which has made Americans forget how to read, is killing it. They struck back recently by putting on their cover a woman who is famous for being mentally disturbed, and now they've gone so far as to bring on brand consultants. Folio reports that Atlantic Media hired "an integrated marketing agency to handle its rebranding." They're redesigning the magazine and relaunching the website! Next fall they will "roll out of a full-scale marketing campaign to communicate the brand message." This is "something the Atlantic has never done" because it is a thing that was invented by marketing agencies ten years ago. [The Atlantic]
magazines
Cranky Old Bill Cosby: A Kucinich Man
Bill Cosby is back in the news! And as cranky as ever. The Atlantic has a loooooong think piece about Cosby by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who incidentally is one of the only tolerable writers about hip hop ever to work outside of the music press. Coates runs down Cosby's whole history, and his transformation from the friendly black face popular with black and white Americans alike to a latter-day Booker T. Washington whose gruff dismissal of things like, you know, racism, rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But the key lesson of the story: whatever you do, don't ask Bill Cosby about Obama! More »
He Said It
"Yes, I want to take full responsibility for destroying The Atlantic, 150-year-old pillar of American journalism, and now it's gone, thanks to me," David Samuels, author of "The Britney Show," the Atlantic cover story that has made the magazine temporarily relevant. [On The Media]
"Yes, I want to take full responsibility for destroying The Atlantic, 150-year-old pillar of American journalism, and now it's gone, thanks to me," David Samuels, author of "The Britney Show," the Atlantic cover story that has made the magazine temporarily relevant. [On The Media]
celebrity-industrial complex
The Lady Doth Protest Too Much
So The Atlantic's cover this month isn't on Iraq or subprime mortgages. It's on Britney Spears, you remember, that sweet girl from the "Hit Me Baby One More Time" video. The editors of The Atlantic don't think they're lowering their standards with the cover; they see themselves as covering an important story seriously (too bad Rolling Stone got there first). But really, there's no need to front. Britney Spears is the new weather: a topic we're all interested in. And if The Atlantic needs to put her on the cover to move issues, so be it. Just don't get so defensive about your identity crisis, guys! More »
the clintons
Spiked Clinton Story Finds Home At Author's Own Magazine
Atlantic editor Josh Green was writing a mildly unfavorable GQ piece about the Clintons until the Clintons said they'd pull Bill from the mag's cover if it ever ran. So they killed it. (For real this time, not like that old Vanity Fair rumor.) And Green took it to The Atlantic. The story is about how ousted campaign manager Patti Solis-Doyle didn't so much "run" the campaign as just act like a surrogate ego to Senator Clinton herself, and that Solis-Doyle continued to be allowed to fuck up Clinton's campaign primarily because of her slavish loyalty, and not for any political skill she might possess. The story is good! But now it's in the unread Atlantic. And the story's author is on the unwatched TUCKER. Clip below! More »
everything used to be better
'The Atlantic' Dying Away From Dying Boston, Says Not-Dead-Yet Boston Paper
Here is Boston Phoenix media critic Adam Reilly's backpedaling column on The Atlantic: The magazine is being ruined by its relocation from Boston to Washington, D.C.! "The Atlantic seems drier, wonkier, more focused on grabbing readers (and advertisers) by following the stories of the day, and less interested in examining subjects no one else is talking about." No! Grabbing readers? Horror! And now it is filled with graphs and buzzwords! More »
The December Atlantic will have bear-blogger Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama as its cover. Can you hold your breath until then? Let's hope Sully is as right on Obama as he's historically been on everything from "the end of AIDS" to publishing excerpts from The Bell Curve in The New Republic to his participation in a religion that hates him to his misreadings of Susan Sontag to supporting the war in Iraq to linking the 2001 anthrax mailings somehow to the war to endorsing Bush in 2000! [Folio]
"Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It's easy for David Cross's character on 'Arrested Development' to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on 'Flight of the Conchords' to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the '90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd... but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn't require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn't mean you should." [Atlantic]
New Yorker Washington correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg will leave the magazine to join The Atlantic. [WWD]
david bradley
David Bradley To Form Suspiciously Gay Cadre Of Extremely Sadistic Super-Bloggers
David G. Bradley, the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, today announced in the Washington Post that he seeks to "recruit a cadre of uber-experts to form what he calls the Atlantic Society, 'where we will find 300 of the smartest human beings across the main intellectual terrains we're likely to cover and to go out and ask them, would they be essayists for the Atlantic?'" And if they decline the opportunity, he slits their throats on the spot. We knew things were going to get deliciously freaky over there after they hired that perv Andrew Sullivan away from Time. More »
the atlantic
Trouble Brewing At The Atlantic Online?
We're hearing that David Bradley's long-in-the-works Atlantic website relaunch may be on the rocks. The relaunch was described to job-seekers about a month ago as a "sure thing" to launch by mid-April, with all hiring completed by mid-March, and a tipster who applied for one of the positions at Atlantic Online sends along the following email from the Atlantic's Recruiting department today:Thank you for your interest in The Atlantic Online positions. I wanted to get in touch to give you an update on the status of the openings. Given Chuck Todd's departure, we are placing these positions on hold as we make some internal decisions. When the positions open we will consider all of the applicants that were interested in the positions this time around.More »
andrew sullivan
Andrew Sullivan's New Look
After addled former-con blogger Andrew Sullivan's one-year contract was up at Time last month, he hopped his buns over to the Atlantic, and had his illustration redone. More »
greg lindsay
'Atlantic' Borrows Its Story Ideas From Greg Lindsay
Alas, an uncredited and stripped-down borrowing — Greg spent three weeks in airports, far more impressive that Wayne Curtis' measly six days — doesn't make it onto the Greg Lindsay Career Trajectory. Poor guy. More »
media bubble
• CBS reporter injured in Iraq is in critical but stable condition, sedated and breathing with a ventilator, and able to recognize her boyfriend. [AP via NYSun]
• Seventy WPers take early retirement. It's almost like working at Time Inc.! [WP]
• The Atlantic is opposed to flip-flops, tank tops. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Court says fuckin' CBS shouldn't have fuckin' fired Arthur Chi'en from fuckin' Channel 2. Fuck. [NYDN]
Media Bubble: Whatever Will We Do Without Valerie Plame's Book?
• Valerie Plame's $2.5M book deal with Crown falls through. Patrick Fitzgerald subpoenas Judy Miller and Matt Cooper in attempt to find out why. [NYT]• CBS reporter injured in Iraq is in critical but stable condition, sedated and breathing with a ventilator, and able to recognize her boyfriend. [AP via NYSun]
• Seventy WPers take early retirement. It's almost like working at Time Inc.! [WP]
• The Atlantic is opposed to flip-flops, tank tops. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Court says fuckin' CBS shouldn't have fuckin' fired Arthur Chi'en from fuckin' Channel 2. Fuck. [NYDN]
judith miller
Gold-Star Gabe Sherman Reports: Judy's On Muammar
The Observer's aggressively bespectacled Gabe Sherman wins the Gawky gold star for delivering the answer we've been looking for: The piece Judy Miller is working on for The Atlantic is about Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi. It was assigned months ago, Sherman reports, before James Bennet was named editor, and it's unclear whether Bennet plans to run the piece. He does, however, have a working telephone. More »
caitlin flanagan
Caitlin Flanagan: Finally Someone Makes Margaret Atwood's Fiction Seem Plausible
This month's Elle (shut up, we like the horoscopes) contains a profile of Atlantic and New Yorker Authority on Women's Issues Caitlin Flanagan (known in some quarters as "Caitlin 'Marital Rape? What's That?' Flanagan") that needs to be read in its entirety to be believed. Flanagan, who got her job at The Atlantic the old-fashioned way (she was seated next to an editor of the magazine at a dinner party) has some, shall we say, retrograde notions about a woman's place (it's in the home, damn it!). Laurie Abraham, the piece's author, should really be credited: She does her best to make sure that Flanagan doesn't come off as the most repellent person in the world, but, gosh darn it, Caitlin keeps charging in to prove that she is. As we've said, you should read it all, but our favorite part comes about halfway through, where Flanagan expounds on the importance of having a hot cooked meal ready and waiting for your man when he returns home from work, and why it's critical to stay home with your children (and nannies, natch):I mean, I have a really good friend who's an incredible television executive. Her husband's a really highly placed writer. They rock out their lives to the nth, nth degree. Their son's a good friend of ours. I love going to their house. They, you know, order in everything, Flanagan continues. Everybody feels very loved there. It's just different styles.More »
