• Monthly mags continue to suffer: Ad pages have dropped by 23 percent on average, although the situation is particularly dire at CondĂ© Nast. [NYP]
• Maureen Dowd landed in a bit of hot water after it was revealed she'd "borrowed" from blogger Josh Marshall for her op-ed column yesterday. She's since offered a…
For magazines, the first quarter of this year was hell. Particularly for Conde Nast. Now, ad sales figures for the first half are out. They're hell. Particularly for Conde Nast!
These tweets are made for venting. Joanna Pearlstein, Susan Orlean, Jim Louderback, and other media twits found plenty to complain about on Twitter:
Don't take an iPhone to a movie screening, don't Twitter when you should be making coffee, don't buy a 2002 Honda, and don't be Meghan McCain. This and more we learned from Twitter today!
Picture Martha Stewart sitting in the dark, unable to get anything accomplished. It's like the perfect metaphor for how Twitter fails to illuminate the lives of media people!
• Esquire, The New Yorker, Backpacker, and Wired were all big winners at last night's National Magazine Awards, although the mood was much more subdued this year, not surprisingly. [ NYT, WWD, NYP]
• Portfolio's Joanne Lipman reflects on what went wrong. [Newsweek]
• Hollywood might be on track for its best year ever…
This is the media life on Twitter: Readers daring to call on the phone, bloggers taking each other out to lunch, and blowhard predictions made about blowhard predictions! Today's Twitterati:
As the recession takes a toll on print media, magazines have been busy looking for new ways to drum up cash and stay in the spotlight. Sadly, they don't have much to show for their efforts. The once unmalleable line between art and advertising has been getting blurrier by the day, leading purists to point their…
The gang of webheads sent by the State Department to Iraq is doing what webheads do: blogging, Twittering, and posting photos in real time. This must be giving their government minders fits.
Barbara Walters sending Twitter messages as she gets her hair shampooed is a sign of the Apocalypse. Run for the hills, kids — but make sure to get a frosty caffeinated beverage before you do!
Call it the final wave of the American invasion: A passel of tech executives from Google, YouTube, Twitter, and others, squired by a Wired feature writer, are touring Iraq.
Consumer magazines as a whole lost nearly 26% of their ad pages in the first quarter. We broke out the numbers for Conde Nast, and they're just as bad. The biggest loser: Wired.
Feeling out of it? Then go read what media types like Amanda Congdon and Sarah Lacy are saying about themselves on Twitter. You'll feel better instantly!
If you have no idea what people on Twitter are talking about, fear not. They have no idea what they're talking about, either. The latest mutterings from Chris Anderson, John Byrne, and other online twits:
Anyone have a handkerchief? What? Oh, nothing in particular — just the tearjerking phenomenon of seemingly intelligent people like Jake Tapper, Rachel Sklar, and Paul Carr spending so much time sharing so little on Twitter:
More detail on the layoffs at Conde Nast Digital today (which is not an April Fool's joke, okay): Wired.com was reportedly hit hard. Internal turf war?
Ryan Seacrest's wordsmith can't stand the sight of body hair! Wired's Jason Tanz went to the dentist! And a journalism instructor saw a mouse! It's scary out there in Twitterland:
Why isn't there, like, an iPhone app that does all your actual work so you can spend your day chatting with friends on Twitter? Touré, Courtney Hazlett, and Kurt Andersen puzzled over similar questions:
Why hit the phones when you can just do your work on Twitter? Jason Pontin, Caroline Waxler, and a Washington Post reporter show us how to tweetsource your way to more free time:
Who knew New Yorker writers used Facebook enough to hate its new look, as Susan Orlean does? In other trivia, Tricia Romano got sauced, Olivier Knox developed a crush, and Jon Fine revealed his ignorance:
