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For nearly two years I've been covering the media industry's bad news on this blog, including some that's hit very close to home. Now it hits closer still: Condé Nast Portfolio is closing.
Our editor in chief, Joanne Lipman, just broke the news to staff, saying the decision had been made "because of financial reasons at Advance," Condé Nast's parent company. "It's not anything that the company wanted to do." She said she was informed by Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. this morning of the decision ... ContinueRupert Murdoch may be losing the tabloid war, but he suddenly has a pretty good comeback next time someone accuses him of ruining The Wall Street Journal.
If I'm making such a hash of it, he could say, why is it the only big newspaper in America that's growing?
Okay, "growing" might be an overstatement. But according to the latest semi-annual report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Journal is alone among the top 25 U.S. newspapers in reporting higher weekday circulation for the six months ending March 31, 2009, than for the same period a year earlier ... Continue-Newspapers are even more screwed than the auto industry: "Even if some publishers wiped out all their debt, they would still be creating a product with high fixed costs and declining revenue, as readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet. That's why closing the presses may be a more viable option than a Chapter 11-style restructuring." [Breakingviews on NYT]
-Maureen Dowd continues to play West Coast media reporter. I say if it keeps her from writing about Michelle Obama's arms, more power to her. [NYT]
-Facebook is opening up the information in its users news streams to third-party application developers. [WSJ]
-Coca-Cola Co. wants to change the way advertising agencies get paid; it's pushing for an industry-wide embrace of performance-based compensation, under which agencies will only get maximum payouts if the campaigns they create hit certain effectiveness targets. [Ad Age].-Former Facebook executive Owen van Natta is the new CEO of MySpace. [WSJ]
-The New York Times Company Foundation has suspended new grant awards and matching gifts. [AP]
-New York magazine has canceled two summer issues to save money. [Folio].Is practicing the more rarefied forms of journalism a right or a privilege? I'd say a privilege, but the way some people talk about the evolution of The Wall Street Journal since Rupert Murdoch bought it shows they take the other view.
Check out Scott Sherman's 5,000-worder in The Nation to see what I'm talking about. Although Sherman interviewed plenty of people who think the Journal is as good as it was before Dec. 2007, or even better, he still can't shake the nagging sense that a terrible injustice has been committed. "Murdoch has not corrupted the Journal," he concedes, grudgingly. But, just as damnably, "he has smothered it and made it ordinary."
Just what manner of smothering are we talking about? In brief, Murdoch has cut back somewhat, though not drastically, on long features; favored, among the features that remain, those that have some connection to the news of the day; instructed reporters to generate more scoops; and devoted more of the paper's space to news. More news in a newspaper? The fiend! ... ContinueHuffington Post co-founder and chairman Kenneth Lerer delivered a talk to students at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism last night. Portfolio.com's Alexandra Fenwick, a student at the school, was there. Here's her report.
HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer says that newspaper publishers will be making a "huge mistake" if they put up pay walls around their content, but concedes that mass layoffs are "inevitable" in the journalism of the future, which he decrees will be lived online.
Lerer told journalists to stop whining and get with the digital revolution already at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism last night, where he delivered the school's annual Hearst New Media Lecture to a chorus of real-time Tweets accompanying a simultaneous live-video feed of his speech.
"Ubiquity is the new exclusivity," he said ... ContinueHow much does Roger Ailes love business bloodsport? Enough that, having evidently bored of trouncing CNN and MSNBC in the cable-news rating race, he's trying to wage a newspaper war in New York's sleepy Putnam County.
As I've reported before, Ailes has over the past year acquired two weekly newspapers, the Putnam County News & Recorder and the Putnam County Courier, installing his wife, Elizabeth, as publisher of both.
This week, the News & Recorder went after its chief competition, the Gannett-owned Journal News, with a populist-tinged broadside that will be familiar to anyone who's followed Fox News's persecution of GE and The New York Times ... ContinueI'm not even going to bother to explain this (but if you need explanation, read this New York Observer story). It's the best thing since Lil' O'Reilly.
.-NPR is laying off more employees -- although no one in programming this time -- and also mandating company-wide furloughs, benefit cuts and a freeze on merit raises. [WaPo]
-Randi Rhodes, the former Air America host who was suspended from that network after calling Hillary Clinton "a big fucking whore" in a comedy routine, has signed on with Premiere Radio Networks, the on-air home to Rush Limbaugh. [WSJ]
-Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, who this week won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson, is working on a new book about George H.W. Bush. [NYP]
-Gawker is on a mission to ambush Jesse Watters, the O'Reilly Factor producer who handles the show's ambush interviews. [Gawker].-Some guy thinks The New York Times Co., which doesn't make enough money, can save its bacon by buying Twitter, which makes no money. I think some guy needs to go back to math school. [HBR]
-New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan, who's leaving the paper after 15 years, may land in the No. 2 job at Condé Nast Traveler. [WWD]
-People now spend more time on Facebook than the do using web-based email. [The Deal].A lot of people think Fox News is too critical of President Obama. As headlines go, that bit of information -- the chief takeaway from this week's News Index Survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press -- is right up there with dog bites man.
More interesting, perhaps, is who's doing the asking. Pew's survey of 1,000 American adults was conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, a polling firm that works closely with Fox's main competitor, CNN. According to its website, "ORC is proud to be an official partner of CNN on the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll, conducting national, speech reaction, state and flash/overnight polls for the world's most trusted name in news."
And "the world's most trusted name in news" came out pretty well in this week's survey, wouldn't you know ... Continue-As expected, Chris DeWolfe is out as CEO of MySpace. His co-founder, Tom Anderson, is expected to leave the social-networking site but hang around at News Corp. in some capacity. [LAT]
-Nerve.com's CEO, formerly of The Onion, is planning an advertiser-friendly remake for the highbrow sex site. [Fine on Media]
-Viacom is launching a new cable channel, a sister to BET, aimed at older African-American viewers. [NYT]
-Barry Diller's IAC is trying to sell Very Short List, the email newsletter about cultural must-haves started by Kurt Andersen. [NYP]
-ABC is bringing back Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Regis Philbin and all, for a 10th-anniversary run in primetime this summer. [AP].-Peter Kaplan is stepping down after 15 years as editor of the New York Observer. He says he wants to spend more time with his family -- really! -- and maybe find a job where he helps figure out how to save journalism. [NYO]
-There were newsroom layoffs at the Chicago Tribune today, although not as many as had been rumored were coming -- 53 vs. 100. [ChiTrib]
-A man from Papua New Guinea who was the protagonist of a story by anthropologist Jared Diamond in The New Yorker is suing, saying Diamond presented as facts all kinds of anecdotes that never really happened and the magazine didn't bother to fact-check him. [Stinky Journalism].Can the longest-running power marriage in publishing survive a literary self-appraisal?
Legendary non-fiction author Gay Talese recently told The New York Times that he's working on a book about his 50-year union to noted editor Nan, of Random House's Nan A. Talese/Doubleday imprint. Both were present at a cocktail party Newsweek held last night to celebrate editor Jon Meacham's Pulitzer Prize in biography for his book American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.
I asked them -- separately -- whether Nan will read Gay's writing while it's in progress.
Gay: "I hope not. She has a tough hand -- a very tough editor. She has a blue pencil stuck in her thumb."
Nan: "Yes. I read every page as he finishes it, aloud, to him. And I'll learn a lot as I read aloud, as I have in the past." ... Continue"At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post," writes Mark Penn in The Wall Street Journal.
Maybe we shouldn't trust the prognostications of a guy who's mostly famous for managing Hillary Clinton to defeat in the 2008 Democratic primaries -- and whose calculations about the number of Americans blogging for a living are highly suspect. But this is kind of a fun game to play. When will the Huffington Post be worth more than the Washington Post? ... Continue-You thought the New York media world was a snake pit? The journalists covering Hollywood -- trade reporters, newspaper writers and, especially, bloggers -- all despise each other and don't mind saying so. [NYO]
-Another bad quarter, another 5 percent workforce reduction at Yahoo. Also, new CEO Carol Bartz lived up to her reputation for sailor talk on the earnings call. [CNET, MediaFile]
-The New York Times Co. won't accede to a demand by the Boston Globe's union that all their negotiations be public. [Globe]
-A study suggesting that heavy Facebook use by students results in lower grade should be viewed with skepticism. [WSJ]
-Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich won't be appearing on a reality TV series anytime soon, says a judge. [Sun-Times].-So much for the faint hope that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer might be able to maintain its web traffic with no print edition and a fraction of the staff. Seattlepi.com was down 23 percent year-over-year in unique visitors in March. [E&P]
-John Koten has stepped down from his job as CEO of Fast Company and Inc. Some think a couple of obnoxious memos he wrote not long ago had something to do with it. [Crain's]
-Washingtonian magazine used a shirtless photo of Barack Obama on its current cover, and it digitally changed the color of his swim trunks from black to red, possibly to suggest he's a Communist. [Huffpo].Financial Times editor Lionel Barber is delivering a lecture at Yale University this afternoon titled "Did financial journalists miss the financial crisis?" His verdict: Yeah, kinda.
Specifically, he says, they blew it in five ways: by failing to see the dangers in unregulated derivatives; by missing the risks in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's government-backed structure; by not raising alarms about the over-leveraging of banks; by not appreciating the relationship between the banking system and the economy; and by focusing too much on the here-and-now rather than the what's-to-come ... Continue- Conde Nast Closing 'Portfolio'
- Apr 27 2009 10:02AM EDT
- Newspaper Circ: 'WSJ' Gains as 'NY Post' Tumbles
- Apr 27 2009 9:32AM EDT
- Idle Chatter: The Prognosis for Newspapers, more
- Apr 27 2009 8:55AM EDT
- Late Breaks: MySpace, NYT, 'New York'
- Apr 24 2009 4:01PM EDT
- Nostalgia, Entitlement and Murdoch's 'Journal'
- Apr 24 2009 4:00PM EDT
- Huffpo's Lerer on the 'New and Better' Journalism
- Apr 24 2009 12:44PM EDT
- Ailes Heats Up Cold Spring with Newspaper War
- Apr 24 2009 12:33PM EDT
- Happy Friday. Now Watch This.
- Apr 24 2009 10:24AM EDT
- Idle Chatter: NPR Cutbacks, Jon Meacham, more
- Apr 24 2009 8:50AM EDT
- Late Breaks: Twitter and the 'Times,' more
- Apr 23 2009 5:59PM EDT
- CNN Partner's Polling Finds CNN Fair, Balanced
- Apr 23 2009 4:10PM EDT
- 'Scientific American' Editor Out in Reorg
- Apr 23 2009 3:19PM EDT
- Idle Chatter: MySpace, Nerve, 'Millionaire,' more
- Apr 23 2009 8:20AM EDT
- Late Breaks: 'Observer' Editor Resigns, more
- Apr 22 2009 4:15PM EDT
- One Marriage, One Memoir, Two Opinions
- Apr 22 2009 2:31PM EDT
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