Oh ho! Not so "Gangsta" after all, are you? In fact you are 100% of something else, which you may not be so pleased with, tough guy! It takes about ten virtual bitch slaps in the girl's face to get to this screen so don't give up before she's thoroughly bruised. You'll want your kids to play again and again. [Adfreak]

Well, that will probably be their interpretation of local news. Because all the rest of it is poverty, development, crime, gentrification, and other stuff involving the poors and Black People and none of that shit Wins The Afternoon.

Anyway. Everyone is totally excited about this "hyperlocal" new Politico news thing. They hired Jim Brady, who used to run washingtonpost.com. He is a good hire. Jack Shafer thinks it will be a very good website that Politico invents, about the Redskins.

But only the local alt-weekly, the City Paper, notes that it will almost certainly lose a lot of money, like Politico does.

Because, come on, a staff of 50 people writing local news? For the internet? The people who read Politico do not care about local news. Maybe they care about some new fancy beer bar in Logan Circle, or something. But a website with a paid staff of three or four could pretty much take care of that.

Once this stupid thing launches and everyone talks about how it is a new and exciting model for local news or something, just remember that it will not be making any money, because Politico is a rich person's vanity project.

We had a nice chat with Jonathan Crutchley, the CEO of Manhunt.net's parent company Online Buddies Inc (nope, never saw that name on our credit card statement) and one of John McCain's most controversial contributors. Crutchley didn't have nice things to say about the site, which has the gays who go there to get laid in an uproar.

"I share your pain," he said about the new version of the site. "It's new to me. I don't like it either, but you get used to it." Asked if he's found anyone since the relaunch earlier this summer he said, "Of course."

As for our tale of evil gay-hating gospel singers cashing in on Manhunt.com, it's just not true. Crutchley told us that when the company tried to claim Manhunt.com back in 1998, but it was taken, so they got Manhunt.net instead. In 2001 they launched the popular website and trademarked using the name Manhunt for gay dating website. The company approached the gospel singers about buying the Manhunt.com domain name, but they said they were using it.

In 2006, the group stopped using the site and the domain name fell into the hands of Crazy Calm Media, who used Manhunt.com to link to their sex and hookup sites, including Bareback.com [NSFW, unless you work at a bathhouse]. In 2007, Online Buddies sued them for trademark infringement and won. Part of the settlement was ownership of the domain name, which now redirects traffic to Manhunt.net.

Yeah, way more boring than the original story. Now we're going to go and use Manhunt to see if we get used to it like Crutchley says we will. It's research, people. Research!

The new LAtimes.com rolled out today, and it's not so bad at first glance—lots more black-and-white than their old site, mimicking NYTimes.com. One difference, though: At NYTimes.com, you can scroll down the page and find listings for World, US, NY/Region, Politics—"news" things! Scroll down from the top of page at the new LAT site and you find: Health, Food, Education, Technology, Sports, Blogs, Columns, Opinion, Photos & Video, Summer Hot List, and "Your Scene, Your Comments." Did you miss the, say, 'International news' section? It is way up at the top in tiny tiny type. Below the top fifth or so of the page, there is no "hard news" at all. They had to make room for the Summer Hot List somehow!

Then there is this thing:

The new Newsday.com does have its own Facebook-like status report on top (cute!!!) but does not, apparently, have "news." Do pictures count as news?

This (and a bunch of layoffs) is what you get for $680 million.

Let's weigh the ups and downs:

BAD: No longer owned by fancy Conde Nast.
BUT: Now owned by American City Business Journals, producer of lots of actual business content!

BAD: No more Felix Salmon or Jeff Bercovici.
BUT: Is launching a new media blog by former Gawkerer Matt Haber, who got laid off by the New York Observer in its latest purge!

So it'll probably be much less lofty than Portfolio itself (which could be a good thing), but still bookmark-worthy. Zombies: sometimes they win!

Bad newspaper news daily roundup: The Washington Post's ad revenue fell by a third in the first quarter; the Chicago Tribune newsroom is pissed off that the marketing side was surveying readers about coming stories; and layoffs at Poynter, the institute for excellent journalismism! Excellence is now too expensive.


The head of the AP says he's gearing up for a big fight with Google News, over stealing news content for free. Somebody's gotta do it, right? Just pay em something, Google. The sushi budget. Anything.

There was some fear that the NFL Network might "go dark" on Comcast today as its contract expired, but have no fear: the NFL Network will not go dark. Just imagine what could have happened with no NFL Network here in the off-season.


WHCInsider.com: the new website where you can go to read about the DC press corps. Hopefully it's very scathing, or what's the point?

The NYT Co's last minute math error in its negotiations with the Boston Globe reportedly has the reporters there now disbelieving everything the company says, right down to how much money the paper's losing. Hey guys, it's a moot point. Slightly less terrible performance is not enough to save you.

Nerve hired its new CEO away from The Onion, for some reason, and he's doing this, for some reason:

The most significant change to Nerve, which launched in 1997, will be in how little nudity will be on the revamped site. Mills said that Nerve's premium and members-only photo archives, which contain many photos that display substantial expanses of naked skin, will be spun off into a new, as-yet-untitled external subscription site.

The Nerve blogs that sometimes feature nudity will be similarly toned down, said Mills, who started at Nerve last week. The nudity that remains, Mills said, will be more like the nudity that appears in the New Yorker or New York magazine-that is, occasional and relatively incidental.

Ha yes, purely incidental nudity like Lindsay Lohan all up New York magazine, nekkid. I mean if some girl is wandering by the Nerve offices and it's hot out and she wants to slip out of her clothes and do a photo shoot, fine, but otherwise, those titillating reader-submitted short stories should do the trick, revenue-wise.
[Businessweek. Pic: Nerve, scandalously]

Portfolio.com is getting some new bloggers. Good sign! Ryan Avent from The Economist is replacing the departing Felix Salmon, and investigative biz reporterman extraordinaire Gary Weiss is also coming over. He's good!


Ha, jolly-looking NYT editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal is answering letters from readers this week. Paul Bilsky asks: Why can't you guys get a "serious" female columnist? Oh and he loves Verlyn Klinkenborg, btw! Rosenthal responds: "I'm answering this because it's a slow, hanging ball. First, I love Verlyn, too. And second, I would be the last person alive to suggest that Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins are not serious columnists. They are indeed, very serious." Allow us to answer as well, Paul: Verlyn Klinkenborg is the single most annoying op-ed writer at the NYT and takes up valuable space that could be dedicated to anything else, anything at all. Dowd is not serious, Collins is. And Andy Rosenthal just wanted an excuse to say "hanging ball."


The Philly papers are $300 million in debt, and bankrupt. They just offered their creditors $50 million to call it even. Newspaper investing, hey! Jack Shafer points out that people have seen newspapers as a dying business since at least 1918. They were prescient.


Disney's strategy to lure in more boys as viewers: "more science." This is contrary to the normal strategy, "more tits."

Roxana Saberi is an American-Iranian journalist who's going on trial in Iran soon, charged with spying for the US. She's worked for the BBC and for NPR. US diplomats are reportedly trying to help her get set free, but Iran doesn't sound very receptive. Good luck, Roxana.

Tina got a hefty dose of start-up cash from Barry Diller, so TDB hasn't felt much pressure at all to go forth and seek, you know, income. Just over a week ago they were being positively breezy about the whole thing. But now they have secured an "advertiser!" Some fashion thing, Bottega Veneta, is in for one month (of glory):

[TDB's general manager] Ms. Marks said "breakthrough ads" will become a standard part of the site's advertising inventory. She declined to comment on the cost of the ads or how they compare to more standard online ad units. She said only that "this is premium advertising for online."

Only time will tell if this whole "advertising" scheme proves to be more than a fad. [Ad Age]

"In the Papers," as you know unless you have the grave misfortune to live somewhere where you are unable to enjoy Pat Kiernan's calm visage and dulcet tones in the morning, is a segment where Pat leafs through the morning papers, pointing out the stories that are interesting to Pat Kiernan. Now Pat's going to "expand his personal brand" by taking the segment online, so readers across the nation can allow Pat Kiernan to "'cut through the clutter' and compile the most relevant articles for readers each day."

What's that you say—this is just a half-ass news roundup of the sort that countless blogs have been doing for more than a decade now? Shut up. This involves Pat Kiernan. End of discussion.

Plus Pat has a blog where he addresses the question of "whether I might enjoy the fish tacos."
[NYT, Pat's Papers]

SAI says that Wired.com was "gutted." We've heard the same, although exact numbers are hard to come by (we still hear 20 or so layoffs total). One layoff victim, we hear: Wired.com managing editor Leander Kahney, who was once mistakenly fingered as the writer behind Fake Steve Jobs, by Nick Denton.

There seems to be some feeling that Wired editor Chris Anderson protected his print side at the cost of his online team. Choosing sides is guaranteed to make somebody mad. If you know more, email us.

Plenty's print version is dead, but Mother Nature Network, an environmental media company owned by former Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell, bought its website, Plentymag.com. Now, one writer who got stiffed by Plenty (there are plenty of em, ha) tells us that several of them are trying to get MNN to pay up;

No one was paid anything for the last issue on stands (it was a December/January issue). And no one was paid, not even a kill fee, for the Feb/March issue that was being edited/about to be printed, when it folded. A bunch of us are trying and trying to get paid, and [former Plenty owner Mark Spellun] told us a few weeks back, after MNN bought it, that we'd all be paid in two to three weeks, and of course it's now four weeks and...nothing.

They're going to MNN for their payment, but I'm not entirely sure they're liable for it: this story about what MNN was acquiring doesn't make it clear exactly what they're going to be doing with all of Plenty's old content, if anything. [Are YOU a media law expert? Comment].

Of course, since a semi-celebrity's involved here, loud public shaming is the way to go. Like this post, for instance. Holler and scream and use guilt and eventually Chuck Leavell should decide it's much cheaper to pay you to shut up than to have to go in the internet and read people wondering why BIG DO-GOODER CHUCK LEAVELL DOESN'T PAY THE WORKING CLASS FOR THEIR LABOR????

What should be avoided in all of them is any hint of racist, sexist or religious bias, or any suggestion of nasty, snide, sarcastic, or condescending tone - "snark." If something could easily fit in a satirical Web site for young adults, it probably shouldn't go into the news pages of nytimes.com.

That's fine with us, New York Times, because this is the reason we will continue to dominate your ass in the "young adults who enjoy satirical Web sites" category.

Contractions, colloquialisms and even slang are, generally speaking, more allowable in blogs than in print. But obscenity and vulgarity are not, and of course unverified assertions of fact, blind pejorative quotes, and other lapses in journalistic standards don't ever belong in blogs.

That's just the attitude I'd expect from NYT standards editor Greg Whitney or whatever, yo, the same motherfucker that a dude I know said he heard—direct fucking quote—"keeps a totally messy desk and brings in brown bag lunches of some nasty food that stinks up the place." I swear I heard it's true. Now I'm off to guesstimate someone's age and put it directly into a story without verifying it.

Also, be advised: "if the comments [submitted to an NYT blog] contain vulgarity, obscenity, offensive personal attacks, say that somebody 'sucks,' or are incoherent," they won't be approved. Here: the opposite.

This isn't the first time the NYT has set forth hilarious statements about the internet. Nieman Lab dug up a transcript of Pinch Sulzberger talking at an "On-Line" news conference way back in 1995, just after the NYT had started putting its front-page stories online for free. The parts that he got right now look tragic; the parts he got wrong now look comical, like his brush-off of the idea that NYT reporters might one day be inundated with email by wingnuts. Ridiculous!:

MR. SULZBERGER: Are you making the assumption that we're going to put all of our reporters online? Is that the assumption built into the question, that every day, all of our reporters will have hundreds and hundreds of emails that they've got to respond to?

Pinch, please, a kicker—some quote that will feel like digging up a time capsule, the contents of which would make anyone in the newspaper industry cry—can you do that for us?

People say they are worried about losing advertising to the Internet, and I am worried about that, too. But I also know that if the tradeoff is losing 10 percent of my advertising and not having to pay my newsprint and distribution costs, I am vastly, vastly aided from a financial point of view.

Well, he had a 50/50 chance of that being true.

[NYT; Nieman]

The obvious reason this happened is that RadarOnline was bought by AMI as the new online front for the National Enquirer, to be used for the purpose of gossip-laundering. But even that doesn't explain the sheer scope of the Octomomness currently going on over there.

Just this week at RadarOnline, Octo has launched a video diary and a blog and is just communicating her heart out, while, as far as I can tell, the rest of the world continues to steadily lose interest in her story.

She's lifecasting, people. RadarOnline is slowly morphing into the new Nonsociety, which would make Octomom the new Julia Alllison, of bizarro world. What a crazy place the internet is!

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.]

"We've been pretty cautious so far," said Beast general manager Caroline Marks. "We're just in the stage of evolving...There are a spectrum of ways you can execute (an ad model) and we're looking at all of them. It is a dialogue that will evolve over the course of this year."

Oh, take your time. No rush.

Marks added that while many digital publishers, particularly blogs, have grayed the distinction between advertising and editorial, The Daily Beast was likely to employ a more strict boundary between church and state-particularly given Brown's magazine background (the celebrated Brown founded the short-lived Talk magazine and previously edited The New Yorker). That should mean less clutter and more traditional sponsorship elements.

LOLOLOLOL! Yes, the Beast will only consider projects that respect a very strict and clear wall between advertising and editorial. Like, for example, this two-page Taraji P. Henson interview sponsored by 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', which is virtually indistinguishable from regular content, except for being somewhat more vapid.

See here, the job of the Daily Beast is to take millions from Barry Diller and redistribute that money to deserving writers, until such time when Barry Diller gets tired of losing money and closes the operation down. We hope not to hear of this "advertising" foolishness again. [Brandweek]