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"You can't keep a good creative down," as the old saying goes. When pushed out of their community by covert gentrification, overt invasion, and other insidiousnesses, good creatives will simply move elsewhere and establish new, even more authentic communities. This is how the Land of NoBro came to pass. More »
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Is there anything worse than a first date? It's as if a condemned man was forced to eat his last meal with some random girl his friend knows from grad school. But first dates are getting worse! They're getting quirkier. More »
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Fat: it's good for lewd and cruel jokes, but it's not so good for your health - including that of your brains. It eats them! More »
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As if America's jobless weren't screwed enough — more employers are running credit checks on potential employees for jobs that involve no financial decisions, so you'd better pay your bills on time even if you don't have a job! More »
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Question: How can the children be the future of America when they, the children, yearn to be naked, and their liberal, Obama-loving parents allow them to run around with their little wee-wees and va-jay-jays hanging out all over the place? More »
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Tragedy of the elite: we hear that Sheryl WuDunn, the wife of Times columnist Nick Kristof, has been laid off from her job as a private wealth advisor at Goldman Sachs—a casualty of Goldman's plan to cut 10% of staff. She was a longtime journalist, and wrote for the Times, Reuters, and the WSJ before going into banking. She married Kristof in 1988 and won a Pulitzer in 1990 for her reporting in Beijing. Rather ironic that the journalist in the family is now the breadwinner over the banker, no? The lesson here: just when you thought you were getting out of the crappy journalism industry... it PULLS YOU BACK IN! And lays you off at your new job. Care to watch Nick and Sheryl appear together on Charlie Rose back in happier days? Then click through to do so! More »
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Cosmopolitan Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni: "Taste is personal. For instance, I love the texture and consistency of lamb hearts, and for some reason the idea that they’re hearts doesn't bother me emotionally or intellectually — doesn't give me any pause. I love the custard-like richness of brain, though I admit that for some reason I have to make a bit of an effort to edit out my consciousness (and I’m not making a cute joke here) that it’s brain I’m eating." Fine, just put down the knife and we'll bring you whatever you want. [NYT] More »
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The Times shows us "What You Get for...$1.2 Million": a house on six acres in Massachusetts with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and "KKK" posted above the back door. Click to enlarge. More »
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Sharon Waxman is a former NYT reporter who quit the paper to go to LA and make her way on the wild World Wide Web, which has "endlessly rich tools to pursue our craft," etc. She sent out an email today to her Trusted Friends and Colleagues telling them that The Wrap News, "which will have a fresh approach on reporting news in the entertainment industry" (!) and will be a "multi-platform source," etc., is all set to launch in January, and by the way please take a survey. And who will the world have to thank for Waxman's new "news and community resource for entertainment professionals?" Heartless Gawker, which made her quit her real job, allegedly!: More »
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Media heiress and urban prose stylist Emily Brill used to be overweight, which is worse than cancer. She heroically slimmed down, and is now compelled to weigh in, ha, on weighty public health issues. So when she saw a week-old Times story about the decline of calorie-counting, she could not conscientiously keep quiet! "Mind if I add my two cents?" she writes. "I did manage to lose some weight over the past year or two..." More »
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Dexter Filkins spent four years covering the Iraq War for the New York Times. Today, the paper's magazine has an excerpt of his upcoming book, The Forever War. Filkins is a beautiful writer, which only serves to enhance the enormous sadness of his story. The piece pulses not with political outrage, but with weariness over a steady diet of death. After the jump, one small excerpt: Filkins tells how his desire for a photo of a dead insurgent ended with a Marine shot and killed: More »
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It's about time that the paper of record started covering the happenings in McCarren park, the ragged dirt patch that is home to the Brooklyn Hipster Kickball League, that den of sociological intrigue so ably chronicled by our own Sheila McClear. What with the legal drama and fundamental instances of human love associated with the hipster kickballers, it's no stretch to say that they are the demographic group most worthy of media coverage in NYC or anywhere else. But in an article today that is lightly reported to a comical degree, the Times attempts to deny the BHKL-ers their rightful place at the top of our minds!: More »
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Allen Salkin is the Times' designated kitschy trend specialist and author of a book about fake holiday Festivus, which sums up his sensibility very well. When we last encountered him he was sending out email blasts looking for travel companions to the Olympics, dinner companions to a barbecue joint, and sources for a story about ukeleles. You'll be happy to know that his aggressive pursuit of ukulele players has paid off! But you've tipped your hand, Salkin. We're onto you: More »
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Did you hear the rumor about the Brazilian lottery winner? Supposedly a Brazilian immigrant bought a winning $126 million lottery ticket in Newark, but couldn't cash it in because they were illegal, so they passed it on to somebody else, now rumors are flying from here to South America, and nobody knows who has it, but everybody is so obsessed with looking for it, the media on two different continents is on the case, but maybe the whole thing is false. It's all a product of the ease with which the world communicates in this digital age, as well as a powerful statement on immigrants yearning for the American dream. One new clue is this actual sentence from a KKTV story about the Montauk Monster: "According to the Huffington Post, Gawker has raking in eleven billion page views since the picture came out Tuesday." So aren't we all really "lottery winners," in a way? [NYT] More »
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Summer is not just an excruciatingly slow time of year for actual news; it's also an excruciatingly slow time for manufactured news. It's not like ad agencies can just riff off all the interesting scandals in the news, when there are no scandals in the news. What does that mean for you, the consumer? A shitload of publicity stunts, in which advertisers try to create some interest out of nothing. What does that mean for advertising reporters? Stories about these very stunts—sometimes even a trend story, to give the appearance of being something more than just a roundup of items from Adrants. See, the system works! Although that doesn't mean any of these stunts are necessarily good: More »
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Crackhead-turned Times reporter success story David Carr is loved by media types for being a cool guy, and is basking in the generally positive public attitude towards his upcoming memoir. But everything is not well in Carr's world. Oh no. Just as Carr has found the strength to open up to the world about his past drug use, an even bigger scandal threatens to overwhelm him: his incurable fondness for potatoes. More »
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Oh, New York Times "T" fashion magazine: we will never understand you. We know the glossy mag brings in a ton of advertising dollars for the paper. But beyond that, its editorial mission is too rarefied for us to grasp. There's the odd indie rock fashion spread or child porn dustup, but what for? Today we were informed by a marketing person that the magazine has launched a series of celebrity "screen test" videos on its website. As far as we can tell, they're the first people to succeed in editing a five-minute long Will Ferrell interview in such a way that it is not funny at all. Beyond that, we're not sure what they were trying to accomplish. Watch the clip below, and take your own guess: More »
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Look, we have another entrant to the oversharers hall of fame! This guy doesn't post pictures of cum on his face, or go on and on about his four-year-old's cheese preferences. But considering that this man is a reporter for the New York Times, we're going to hold him to a slightly higher standard. Anyhow, is everyone in for the barbecue excursion next week with Allen Salkin? More »
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Well, it's been a year or two since the corporate world started its "green" advertising revolution, and it's worked. The problem is solved! The problem being the fickle consumer's desire to hear companies talk about how "green" they are. “After 18 months, levels of concern on any issue tend to drop off,” explains one marketing wizard. Now we can all sit back and feel good about what we've accomplished! The earth is still destined for environmental ruin, but at least we'll be subjected to less marketing bastardization like this: More »
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Iran has tested missiles! Not just one or two or even three missiles, but four missiles! Our crack intelligence agencies know this, because the Iranian military's propaganda arm helpfully provided the media with a photo showing—count 'em—four whole missiles blasting off into the sky. You'll regret the decision to build only three missile shelters, Israel! The scary, quadri-missiled photo of terror was splashed across front pages nationwide. Too bad it's a big phony! More »
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Is the Fox News PR machine trying to get back in the good graces of the New York Times—and slyly drive a wedge between reporters there at the same time? The network's famously vicious media relations operation was ravaged in a David Carr column in the Times on Monday. But now that they've let Bill O'Reilly take his obligatory on-air shot at the paper, the network seems to have decided to play nice with Times reporters—at least, with some of them. More »
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A deliciously bitter ex-NYT reporter named John Darnton, who worked at the paper for more than 30 years, has a book coming out called Black and White and Dead All Over, which is murder mystery set at a thinly veiled version of the Times. The terribly-titled (but maybe well-written!) volume features a bunch of obvious allusions to real Times people, including a standards editor who gets murdered (take that, standards). Droopy-faced News Corp. overlord Rupert Murdoch figures prominently as an ominous character named "Lester Moloch." But this isn't the first time Murdoch has been flogged in fictional works. Oh no! More »
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For unclear reasons, the Times felt compelled to hand a huge chunk of its Sunday Business section over to a profile of Bonnie Fuller—the woman most responsible for creating our nation's soul-destroying cast of powerful celebrity magazines—who was recently axed from her multimillion-dollar gig as editorial chief of American Media. A sympathetic profile! The news peg, purportedly: Bonnie Fuller is doing some vague new project on the internet. For women! With specifics to be determined! Color us skeptical. The Fuller that the Times describes does not sound like the woman who was so despised by her assistants that they put snot in her food. What's the major malfunction here? More »
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If you ever selected a plastic surgeon or LASIK doctor based on a random YouTube video, it's probably apt that that video only happened as a result of an under-the-table payment and the doctor was really incompetent and now you walk around blind and ugly. But what about the victims of the future? Plenty of doctors have gone right ahead and offered patients rebates or huge discounts in exchange for posting glowing videos about their procedures online, although something like that would be patently unethical in the "regular" media. Docs are like, "Huh, rules, really? I just thought it would be nice!" Patients are like, "Sweet, cheap surgery!" The loser is you, the affluent, narcissistic consumer. A couple of typical videos are after the jump; just because "a famous celebrity (name undisclosed for privacy)" gets LASIK from Dr. Feinerman doesn't mean you have to, too: More »
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People today: they're all angry! There's taxes, politics—hell, the little man is getting screwed left and right! Corporate America understands and empathizes with your anger, and would like to encourage you to channel it into the constructive area of commerce. “On some fundamental level everyone’s sick of everything, economically, politically,” says one ad agency exec. Fortunately, skilled advertisers are able to take this vague and unsubstantiated insight into your psyche and put it to use by making just the type of ads that you want to see: angry ones! Just look: More »
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Celebrities: they're in ads! That's because celebrities tend to sell stuff to people, according to the New York Times, which broke this story wide open with an epic piece in yesterday's paper. There are three clear points that you, the educated consumer, must understand: Companies are run by starry-eyed celebrity hound white guys who will pay any price to hang out with a cool rapper or have their umbrella endorsed by Rihanna; many celebrities are themselves sheep, convinced that their endorsement deal is a meaningful attempt by a corporation to plumb the depths of their soul (it's really not! surprisingly); and finally, all of this is the fault of dirty gossip websites just like this one! More »
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Is it a mark of progress that our national ads can now feature characters that are far more foul-mouthed and offensive to white bread America than in times past? I'm inclined to say yes. The Times considers the rise of Family Guy characters as beloved ad icons, even for wholesome brands like Coke and Subway. But hey, sometimes they say things on that show that are funny! Times are changing, you see, and these cartoon characters are just acceptable enough to squeeze into the mainstream under the rubric of "edgy." Since this is a hugely popular TV show on the Fox Network that is just the next in a long line of "edgy" cultural moments, you could correctly call this an antiquated discussion (even for the olds). The real question is: will Americans stand for a fat, ignorant cartoon father telling them how to eat their meat? More »
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Frank Bruni is pissed! The New York Times' omnipotent restaurant critic (pictured) today reviews a new Tribeca restaurant named Ago, which is owned in part by actor Robert De Niro. And Bruni's experience there is proof for the entire restaurant business that no matter how popular, expensive, or exclusive your place is, it is still quite possible to receive a terrible review if you act like an idiot. Please: Learn some lessons from Ago's fiasco. Here is what not to do when your restaurant is being reviewed: More »
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Does the New York Times have an intern who just reads copies of the Wall Street Journal from last year and suggests story ideas to steal? Has our explanation of the rules for stealing news stories legitimately had no impact on Times whatsoever? (No). Yesterday Anemona Hartocollis wrote a story for the Times about family-style therapy, largely focusing on the work of a Beth Israel treatment center. That's....been done: More »
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Back in 2005, two activist groups—Wake Up Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Watch—launched campaigns to kick Wal-Mart's ass in the media. Which they did quite successfully for a while. The soulless retailer spent untold millions on a huge, political-style PR campaign from our friends at Edelman to fight back against the criticisms of them for everything from poor health care to union busting. But the Times reports today that Edelman's Wal-Mart war room shut down months ago, and the torrent of news stories about the company's flaws has died down. Why? Because Wal-Mart has adopted a philosophy of working with critics, and made their enemies their friends. This is either evidence of progress, or cause for despair. Since the company is still a horrible union buster, we'll go with "despair." More »
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Now that the rules for stealing news stories have been revealed, people are seeing stolen stories everywhere! At the National Review, they're accusing the New Yorker's Jeff Toobin of ripping off the Weekly Standard's profile last year of Nixon-loving political hit man Roger Stone. We guess that's true, if you consider it plagiarism to quote the well-rehearsed quotes of a veteran quote whore: More »
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Super-rich guys who work in private equity may be the masters of the universe, but it's remarkably easy to get under their skin. All it takes is some crappy "street theater" mocking them as mean, heartless wealthy elites, and they run back into their corner offices and cry into their monogrammed handkerchiefs. The huge union SEIU has, for the last year, been staging little theatrical protests of the private equity industry's greed, featuring puppets and megaphones and whatnot. Which you would think would be as effective as sitting across the street from the White House with a "No Nukes" sign. But it really gets the rich guys worked up! Now the SEIU is taking their campaign international, with help from grumpy comedian Lewis Black, and it's making the titans of finance so upset they want to run out and buy the Kleenex Corporation. It's not fair! More »
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The media has lots of unwritten rules. Many of them are followed more closely than the written rules. After the Times ripped off a year-old Wall Street Journal story with no credit last week, we realized the need for a complete explanation of the powerful rules governing a time-honored and fundamental practice: Stealing stories. Every media outlet in the world does it—after all, there's much more space to fill every day than there are exclusives. Done the right way, it's perfectly acceptable; done the wrong way, it can be the start of an undercover war. After the jump, we explain everything you need to know to be an honorable, thieving hack. Memorize it: More »
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Discovery is launching a new cable network called "Planet Green" that will offer round-the-clock "green" programming. The standard assumption is that his network signals a further mainstreaming of environmentalism, and therefore will somehow be good for the environment. This assumption is incorrect. Rather, it signals that environmentalism—a brand of activism that actually means something—has been transformed into "green," a vague lifestyle term that means nothing. What revolutionary do-good messengers will Planet Green bring to the public? General Motors, Tommy Lee, and "earth-conscious celebrities": More »
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After commenters attacked the Times' Jennifer 8. Lee for her rather asinine, haughty story questioning how convenient bicycle commuting really is, her editor stepped in to defend her: "Readers, Since some of you seem to be seeking disclosures... Jennifer 8. Lee, a native New Yorker, has never owned a car. Nor do most writers and editors on the blog's staff. Indeed, several of us are avid cyclists." Proving cyclists can write dumb articles about cycling, too. [City Room via Animal NY] More »
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Do you ever feel that your editor is making a mockery out of your work? Sometimes they just don't understand. The Raleigh News & Observer sends up an imagined editing of a recent NYT story. [Which NYT story? Specify!] More »
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Remember that Wired article about the various pluses and minuses of drug use that got the Times' panties all in a bunch about whether it would actually "promote drugs?" It was a stupid controversy over a relatively innocuous drug story. The Wired piece didn't deserve criticism for its content, but it might have been served by some disclosure; the author of it, Mathew Honan, is a reformed cokehead. That fact didn't appear in Wired, but on Honan's own blog: More »
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It's come to our attention that the Times' story today about the "miracle fruit" that makes everything taste sweet is—to use a technical journalism term—a big ripoff of a Wall Street Journal story from a year ago. A Page One WSJ story, at that. And it's not just that the Times wrote a piece on the same topic, which is common enough; they used a bunch of the same sources, and made the many of the same points in the same way. With not even a nod to the original! This is a semi-gotcha—it could have been solved by simply giving a little credit. It's not plagiarism, but it is enough to mightily piss off a fellow reporter. Check out the similarities: More »
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Wild urban youngsters these days are all eating magic fruit and guzzling Tabasco sauce, and there's really nothing you or the authorities can do about it. Internet-savvy hipsters flock to Long Island City rooftop parties where a dealer/ guru named "Supreme Commander" hands them crazy berries to chew on, sending them into blissful fits of uncontrolled food-sampling. If it spreads, this "flavor tripping" phenomenon threatens to destroy the traditional notion of exotic seasonings that hip chefs in hip restaurants in hip neighborhoods have worked so hard to achieve. Because, let's face it: these magic berries sound awesome: More »
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John McWhorter—Bill Buckley-esque NY Sun columnist and bizarre racial thinker—has taken his bizarre racial thinking act over to the New York Times for a day, presumably because conservative black academic columnists are hard to come by in New York City on a holiday weekend. In a video debate on the Times' website, McWhorter advances the novel theory that Barack Obama doesn't have to worry about racism; just his race. Here's an example of a statement that he says is not racist: "I won't vote for a black person because he's a radical type and would bring in Farrakhan." And hey, how come black people can hang around each other and it's okay, but white people can't? It's because "white people aren't allowed to be diverse." Okay! The other guy is, frankly, no match for McWhorter's secret redefinitions of words that negate their own meaning. The baffling debate, after the jump. More »
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