[via MagCulture]

Yes! Which is why, as readers, we are happy these guys from Boston have founded the Politico of international news. (It is already poaching people from Politico.) And those newsroom cutbacks may enable Global News Enterprises LLC.* to put together a pretty strong team. From an announcement in March:

The Boston Globe foreign correspondent Charles M. Sennott leaves April 4 to become executive editor and VP for Global News Enterprises LLC, a new Boston-based website that launches next year to cover international news. Other contributors to the new site will include The New York Times Magazine contributing writer Scott Anderson, Times of London bureau chief Sam Kiley, Newsweek reporter Joshua Hammer and Newsday foreign reporter Matthew McAllester. The site will be led by New England Cable News founder Philip S. Balboni.

Since then we have heard they've added Meline Toumani, formerly of the Times Magazine** as a full-time staffer.

So what does it all mean? A gaping black money hole is what Denton predicts! International news, see, is the only sort of content less attractive to advertisers than politics***. And as we have pointed out before, Politico, despite all its trumpeted success, is still something of a mystery, business model-wise.

That said, the lead investor in Global News Enterprises LLC is a guy named Amos Hostetter who made a couple billion selling his cable company to Comcast. He isn't afraid to be service-y and may just feel like, since he made all that cash in the business that brought America The Hills he might as well throw a bone to the people still struggling to engage the four brain cells we have left.

To sum up, we don't know what will happen in North Korea or what will happen to the people who will try to explain it to us.

*Yeah, it is a worse name than Federal National Mortgage Association, for sure, but maybe they will think of a cute nickname when they go live?
**And also of being very beautiful, but that's totally irrelevant except inasmuch as this is Gawker we are talking about.
***'The Economist', of course, does great, mostly because it is so fucking expensive to subscribe to. Though I sometimes worry what would happen if someone founded the Craigslist of all those "Disaster Risk Reduction Advisor" and "Organisation & Governance International Secretariat Office" Help Wanted ads they run. Ha ha ha, they could call it "Formal Encounters."

Earlier: What Is 'Politico' Up To?

The Clinton machine only exaggerated this problem. Mrs Clinton surrounded herself with familiar faces from her White House years—people like Mark Penn, her chief strategist, Terry McAuliffe, her chief fund-raiser, Howard Wolfson (one of the least helpful spokesmen this newspaper has ever encountered) and, of course, her husband.

Ouch. That is really not like them!

So now it can be told: the entire newsmedia turned against Hillary Clinton because they could not stand dealing with her communications director. Amusingly they also all hated her chief adviser Harold Ickes AND her chief strageist (slash pollster!) Mark Penn. But for some reason poor dumb Wolfson is the one they're all beating up on. Because Penn and Ickes give better quote, probably? Which is another reason Howard was a terrible flack. Sigh.

Let a thousand buck-passing stories of how the disintegration of the Clinton campaign was the fault of her coterie of incompetent aides bloom!

Full MP3 via Bellicose Studio

[Guardian]

?

All that's on the site at the moment is information about upcoming cartooning event, but the front page promises "a collaboration between The Economist and the legendary Second City comedy theatre to explore the role of humour and satire in politics."

[Economist's Art Of Satire]

Researchers "found a smoking ban increased fatal alcohol-related car accidents by 13% in a typical county containing 680,000 people. This is the equivalent of 2.5 fatal accidents (equivalent to approximately six deaths). Furthermore, drunk-driving smokers have not changed their ways over time. In areas where the ban has been in place for longer than 18 months, the increased accident rate is 19%."

Accidents in one Pennsylvania county have gone up 26% since neighboring Delaware instituted its own smoking ban in 2002. The county between non-smoking Boulder and smoky Denver? Up 40%. Clearly we should reinstitute smoking everywhere and then ban cars, nationwide. [Economist]

Some conservative critics are not happy with new standards for measuring poverty, as they could mean thousands more poor people begging them for nickels as they try to navigate the Bowery in their carriages, and beating these ragamuffin throngs back with the horsewhip may attract the negative attention of the local constabulary. But it is foolish not to count the myriad inflated cost of living expenses New York requires when figuring out which of its denizens are actually deserving of our limited supply of compassion and federal funds.

Meanwhile, those cross-pond small-L liberals at The Economist have decided on their very own standard for measuring inequality: consumption. This measure has the handy quality of making the inequality picture look really not so bad, all things (or rather, some politically motivated things) considered. Because in America, even the poor people have refrigerators. And as income inequality has risen, "consumption inequality has barely budged for several decades," according to some study. If we all have cars and TVs and 3 a.m. Chinese food, how unequal can our society even be! "A widescreen plasma television is lovely, but you do not need one to laugh at 'Shrek'." Because dead-eyed idiocy recognizes no class divide.

SO: either you're way poorer than previously thought, because your rent is ridiculous and your income is laughable, or you're perfectly well off you big baby because jeez, you have a laptop and home internet access and a cell phone and you're telling us you're impoverished?

Bloomberg Seeks New Way to Decide Who Is Poor [NYT]
Seeking a Better Measure of Inequality [WSJ]
The New (Improved) Gilded Age [Economist]

EXT. BAY BAR
The Sunday noon crowd at Bay Bar consists of those running in and out to get iced coffee products and those sitting at tables enjoying iced coffee products. VISORGAY, wearing olive drab cargo shorts and a navy mesh Nike visor, sits with TANKGAY, in olive drab cargo shorts and a robin's egg blue tank. They are at a prime table overlooking the harbor and the boardwalk that runs along it. Across the water, unidentifiable shrieks can be heard.

Previously: The Pines Party

Seeking full charge Editor for new high-end, affluent gay weekly focused on mainstream politics, business, science, art, and sports, and gay sports and local culture.

The magazine is the gay version of The Economist mixed with New York Magazine, and will be started on a very small scale, but grown quickly into multiple national editions.

Candidates need to have degree from top college or university and an educational or work background in Politics and/or Business.

If no prior experience, candidate must prove capabilities in pre-interview.

So much to work with here. "Sports and gay sports!" (Go for it.) "The gay version of The Economist." Why not? Everyone copies it, how hard could it be to translate into gay? Add a snide, empty dash of New York magazine and there you are! If only we had a degree from a top college or university we'd be out of here so fast this whole blog would be dead air. Do let us know what capabilities you need to prove in that pre-interview, please. (And is it anal?)

Editor of new gay weekly - politics, business, science, sports [Craigslist]

Think that's not important? Perhaps it's not. But neither are you, catdog! Way back in smaller times, about a hundred years ago, when only 13% of people enjoyed the sights and smells of urban life, city dwellers could take comfort in being among the lucky few. Now this fad of grouping populations in space, a leitmotif of human civilization for millennia, has gone utterly mainstream; that is to say, totally passé. When rebellious youngsters rebel now, they'll have to run from New York, to the sad stereotypicality of the suburbs in order to flout expectations and such. Maybe this is why kids like Park Slope now?

Adding insult to injury, the Economist's "Top 50 Most Livable Cities" list, compiled by the mysterious and frightening "Economist Intelligence Unit," indicates that Houston and Reykjavik are both better than New York. Also? Detroit! —Lux

The World Goes to Town [Economist]

There were only two of them, but they made a whole frontage: huge, compelling, pneumatic. They burst out of tight red dresses—preferably red—or teased among feather boas, or flanked a dizzying cleavage that plunged to tantalising depths. These were celebrated, American breasts, engineered by silicon to be as broad and bountiful as the prairie. With them, a girl from nowhere—or from Houston, Texas—could do anything. The body behind them waxed and waned, sometimes stout as a stevedore's and sometimes almost waif-like, matching the little-girl voice; but the Breasts remained.

Anna Nicole Smith [The Economist]

[Image: AP]