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  Conde Nast Folds DNR [Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 4:24pm CST by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  great magazine dieoff  

  Conde Nast is folding DNR, the men's fashion trade magazine. It's also shuttering its website, DNRNews.com. The feeble spin is that WWD will pick up the slack by launching "comprehensive, round-the-clock men’s fashion and retail coverage." [#2 of the ">four ways to kill a magazine, for those keeping track]. Points to the PR department for attempting to create an upside. But it's clear that this is evidence of weakness in the fashion category specifically, and more momentum for the scary Great Magazine Die-off in general. The company hasn't announced how many layoffs will go along with DNR's death, but departing staffers with more details can email us.

  
  
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  Four Ways To Kill A Magazine [Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: November 19th, 2008, 3:37pm CST by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  great magazine dieoff  

  Just because we're in the midst of a Great Magazine Die-Off, you may be under the impression that all magazines die equally. Not true! We Leading magazine scientists have identified four distinct varieties of magazine death. Each has its own special flavor of despair for all those connected with the deceased publication. Here they are, from most common to least:

  
  

  • Dead dead: Folded. Shuttered. Gone for good. Staff laid off. Throw away the business cards. Shred the back issues. There is nothing more to see here. Notable recent victims: 02138, Play.
  • Folded into the mothership: When a publishing company doesn't quite have the hear to say they're folding a magazine for good, they'll say instead that they're "consolidating its content" into some other larger, more stable title. Sometimes this is accurate. Other times, it's just a polite way to leave laid-off staffers with a bit of self-esteem. "At least our magazine survived, in a way!" Notable recent victims: CosmoGirl, Men's Vogue, O at Home.
  • Online only: In rare instances, this can be a forward-thinking move by a company that really believes that the internet is the future, and print is an anachronism. More often, it's a way to keep a magazine brand on life support on a shoestring budget, just in case. Notable recent victims: The Christian Science Monitor (not a magazine, but a publication that actually did this strategically), PC Magazine.

  • Zombies: Some magazines die, but then they come back again! They are the undead. Usually, they die again. And then maybe rise again. And die again. And so on. Notable recent victim: Radar, of course.

  
  
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  Cottage Living Folds [Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: November 18th, 2008, 4:51pm CST by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  great magazine dieoff  

  You'd think that in these hard times more people would be scaling down to cottages, but no. Time Inc. just announced to its staff that Cottage Living—which had a rate base of 1 million(!)—is folding. The website will also die. According to an internal memo, "the economy inhibited its ability to grow and therefore, sadly, we had to make the decision to close it." Sad for cottage-livers. More sad for the apartment-living employees.

  
  
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  NYT Folds Play Magazine [Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: November 17th, 2008, 12:35pm CST by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  great magazine dieoff  

  The New York Times is folding Play, its quarterly sports-focused magazine. FishbowlNY spoke to Play editor Mark Bryant, who said that although the mag broke even last year, "The company needs to make some pretty considerable cuts going forward," and his magazine was one of them. This is a bad sign. T, the Times' fashion magazine, turns enough of a profit to prop up a lot of money-sucking newsgathering operations; the NYT doubtless hoped that Play could do the same. Not in this ad market, apparently. Scratch that off the dwindling list of lifelines for the Times. [FBNY; anybody with more info can email us.]

  
  
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  Terrible Jobs For Ex-Magaziners [The Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: November 16th, 2008, 8:17pm CST by Ryan Tate

  Tags:  the great magazine dieoff  

  Ad Age ran the numbers and found magazines eliminated 3,200 jobs between June and the end of September. And that was before the Great Magazine Die-Off! Here's what to do before your severance checks run out, former magazine people: Don't put off looking for a job; call up those contacts you thoughtfully cultivated before you were laid off and be an insane, annoying optimist. Do so and you just might be among the lucky few to snag one of the jobs on the following list, which depressingly represents the sum total of what Ad Age found to be still available, sometimes:

  • Selling advertising for display "at the gas pumps... at the malls." You can tell your friends you work in "out of home advertising" if you prefer, although then they'll probably assume you sell those ads above urinals in bars.
  • Pharmaceutical advertising, aka "direct-to-consumer advertising." If you're lucky, this means helping with print or TV ads. If you're not, you may well be spamming ads for "V1agra," or designing/selling Web ads that are barely a step above.
    
  • "Contract and consulting opportunities," miscellaneous.

  Is any of that really worse than, say, fact-checking a back-of-the-book listice on must-have gadgets for Christmas? You may well find out!

  (Image via BBC)

  
  
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  'There Is Also Cursing And Boobies:' Worst Movie Review Ever? [Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: November 10th, 2008, 12:26am CST by Ryan Tate

  Tags:  great magazine dieoff  

  How bad is the Great Magazine Die-Off? Thanks to the internet, the most terrifying media recession yet. Because for once the living shall envy the dead, if the fate of print-to-online-only publications are any guide. You'll recall most recently the example of Radar Online, turned to celebrity mush by AMI. A tipster also pointed us to the sad fate of FHM,which went online-only in early 2007 and was sold to Bauer Publishing at the end of last year. Here's an excerpt from FHMOnline.com's awful, awful review of raunch-com Role Models:

  Role Models feels like a dysfunctional family film. It’s got a lot of that warmness, but there is also cursing and boobies. It’s got a good moral in the end, that you would want to share with your kid, but might feel uncomfortable with the nudity, or not. It’s a little bit like a dirtier Meet the Parents.
  ...By hearing the premise, you might have already guessed the movie's ending. Role Models falls into a lot of standard movie clichés. At the same time, it’s still entertaining throughout, and easy to follow.

  It is possible a more terrible movie review exists somewhere, but this one is in the unfortunate position of having been read by jealous ex-staff of the former magazine. Though lad-mag FHM was not known as a bastion of top-flight journalism by any means, editors known unredeemed, completely unpolished filler when they see it. Our disapproving source claims the review the product of a former FHM office assistant, now drawing down a nice salary on the "editorial" side of FHMOnline.

  Unemployed writers, take notice: The review carried no byline! It's hack work, but perhaps better than temping? Sigh.

  
  
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  O At Home Folds [Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: November 7th, 2008, 10:52am CST by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  great magazine dieoff  

  O At Home—the quarterly magazine for those who liked Oprah but were exclusively concerned with her take on home furnishings—has folded. Its content will be absorbed back into the mothership, O magazine. Simultaneously, O At Home's former editor, Sarah Gray Miller, is becoming the editor-in-chief at Hearst knick-knack mag Country Living. Much of the rest of the magazine's staff will surely be laid off today. It's becoming quite clear that folding magazines is becoming the new favorite version of the Friday News Dump technique, so we reserve the right to tell you about more magazines folding later on today.

  
  
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  Layoffs At Redbook [Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: November 5th, 2008, 4:15pm CST by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  great magazine dieoff  

  We hear that as many as eight editorial employees—ranging from senior editors to editorial assistants—got laid off from Redbook today as part of the broader Hearst layoffs we told you about earlier. "The economy" was the stated reason. If you know more about layoffs at Hearst, email us.

  
  
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  America's Hookers Smarter Than Undecided Voters [Great Moments In Journalism]

  Posted: October 31st, 2008, 11:51am CDT by Pareene

  Tags:  great moments in journalism  

  Great news for Obama: "Majority of Allegheny prostitutes are on the Democratic side." This is a fantastic piece of investigative journalism by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. See, they found 675 people convicted of prostitution-related crimes and then looked up their voter registration information. Look what else they discovered:

  The Illinois senator also has the advantage with local 'johns' — 72 percent go Democratic. And convicted pimps: Four out of every five register Democratic. And for the most special of special interest groups — male transvestite hookers — they're batting a thousand for Dems, albeit in drag.

  Ha ha ha, marginalized members of society support Democrats! Breaking!

  Majority of Allegheny prostitutes are on the Democratic side [Trib p.m.]

  
  
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  Time Inc. CEO Sees 'Stunning' Ad Depression [The Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: October 31st, 2008, 5:57am CDT by Ryan Tate

  Tags:  the great magazine dieoff  

  "By this October it was looking like 1931." [Folio]

  
  
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  Some Print Deaths Unmourned Amid Carnage [Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: October 31st, 2008, 4:46am CDT by Ryan Tate

  Tags:  great magazine dieoff  

  The publishing landscape is so bloodied right now that it's hard to keep track of all the corpses. This month has seen the end of Radar, Men's Vogue, CosmoGirl, 02138, Culture + Travel plus cuts at Time Inc., Portfolio, Niche Media, and Doubleday. Wow. Two casualties have gone largely unnoticed. A tipster informs us that Town And Country Travel closed a few weeks ago to little fanfare. Meanwhile, the New York offices of London-based travel book series Rough Guides are said to have closed, presumably doomed by declining travel, a declining pound — and perhaps a Gotham too depressing to visit. (Publishers, we know things are rough, but do allow us to give all your titles proper burials.)

  
  
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  Conde Nast Cuts Endanger Men's Vogue [Great Magazine Die-off]

  Posted: October 30th, 2008, 8:20am CDT by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  great magazine dieoff  

  Quelle horreur: Conde Nast is cutting the budget of all their high-class rags by 5% across the board! Five percent of payroll and 5% of every title's expense budget. And that goes for the editorial and the business sides. The Observer calculates that it will be impossible to accomplish the cuts without layoffs. One less assistant for Vogue's Anna Wintour! A slightly less long tail for Wired's Chris Anderson! And, worst of all: could this be the end of the long road to oblivion for that emasculating Wintour plaything, Men's Vogue?

  Executives are still figuring out what to do with Men's Vogue, and options have run the gamut, including the possibilty of folding it.

  One Condé Nast source said that it's likely that the magazine will scale back from publishing 10 issues a year to running only twice a year and it will give up its entire ad sales staff, with Vogue business staff handling the work.

  Well, we warned you. [NYO]

  
  
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  Britney Spears in Hail Mary Sex Embargo [Great Moments In Parenting]

  Posted: October 4th, 2008, 3:09pm CDT by ian spiegelman

  Tags:  great moments in Parenting  

  Now that Britney Spears has seemingly been free of drugs and scuzzy males for a little while, her parents are hoping to make the rebirth stick by banning her from having sex for the next six months. Spears (left, in another life) has never been romantically linked to a decent man in her adult life, and that might have something to do with her parents' crap treatment of her as a fleshy commodity when she was still a kid, so one could imagine their happiest daydream lately is a celibate, childlike Britney in the body of a grown woman.

  A friend tells Now, “Jamie and Lynne feel she’s so close to cracking the big time again that they don’t want anything to get in her way.

  “They’re desperate to ensure that it won’t happen again. Their worst nightmare is that she gets involved with someone else who’s just trying to use her for her money or to further their own career.”

  [Entertainmentwise via OhNoTheyDidn't]

  In other Spears news, Britney's sister, Jamie Lynn, 17, reportedly just broke up with the father of her four-month-old daughter.

  
  

  

  
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  Megan Fox: "Who Gives Hand Jobs? Who's Given A Hand Job Since Seventh Grade?" [Great Moments In Journalism]

  Posted: September 19th, 2008, 10:56am CDT by Moe

  Tags:  great moments in journalism  

  

  Back story: I'm lurking around one of the low-rent haunts of the highbrow magazine elite Wednesday and come upon a friend of mine, Jess, who introduces me to Donavan Hohn, a brilliant writer whose recent piece on a Hong Kong toy fair had inspired me to write a handjobby post about how much I love 'Harper's.' Anyway, like pretty much all journalists under 40 who bother with the whole "crafting exquisite paragraphs" thing anymore, Hohn has cash flow issues. So Jess suggests — naively, I'm assuming — he get into the celebrity profile racket. Her friend Mark Kirby does it! He just wrote a profile of Megan Fox for 'GQ' that was really actually a rewarding effort! And I'm thinking, "Oh Jess, guys like Donovan Hohn are just not wired to hustle celebrity profile assignments. Not least because guys like Donovan Hohn probably didn't know who Megan Fox even was when he saw her at a comic book convention at which he was busy jotting down the philosophies of some enchanting small-time hucksterpreneur, and plus, everyone knows celebrity profiles are the lowest form of hackery." Well shit, was I so totally wrong. Jess had just tipped me off to the best celebrity profile in years. Seriously, you know how the celebrity profile is totally dead? This profile could do for the genre what…Megan Fox does for impotence or something!

  So she totally unloads on GQ. Kirby asks if Transformers 2 director Michael Bay plans to make the "robots seem more human" than in the original. “You weren’t concerned about them making the humans seem more human?” she asks. And, perhaps realizing "making preposterously hot superhero superbabe comic book character Terry Richardson-shot Megan Fox seem like a real person" it's a crusade she alone is going to take up, she:

  1. Tells a story about her more youthful youth that suggests she is either a sort of sweet unlikely feminist hero or read Notes From Underground, either of which we'll take.
  

  Well, that year my boyfriend broke up with me, and I decided—oh man; sorry, Mommy!—that I was in love with this girl that worked at the Body Shop [a strip club on Sunset Boulevard]. I decided that I was going to get her to love me back, and I went out of my way to create a relationship with this girl, a stripper named Nikita. I was there all the time—I would go there by myself. I bought her things—perfume, body spray, girlie stuff. I turned into a weird middle-aged married man. I felt like I had this need to save Nikita. I’d get lap dances so I could get to know her, and I’d give her what I thought were great little sound bites of inspiration—like You can do it, you’re better than this! I didn’t want her to be there.”

  Why her?

  “She smelled like angels.”

  Seriously?

  “No. Well, she did smell good. Like vanilla. She was sort of a tough badass, but she’d do these beautiful slow dances to Aerosmith ballads. She had really long stick-straight hair and was Russian. I just liked her. She was really sadistic and sarcastic and funny."

  2. Makes up for bringing up the stupid stupid stupid stupid Miley Cyrus epitomeofstupid whydoweevenknowaboutthat "scandal" by saying "fuck" many times.

  With any of the Miley Cyrus shit, or any of that Vanessa Hudgens shit—I would never issue an apology for my life and for who I am. It’s like, Oh, I’m sorry I took a naked, private picture that someone is an asshole and sold for money. I’m sorry if someone else is a dick. No. You shouldn’t have to apologize. Someone betrayed Vanessa, but no one’s angry at that person. She had to apologize. I hate Disney for making her do that. Fuck Disney.”

  Can I get that on the record?

  “Yeah. Fuck Disney.”

  Followed by:
  

  “Yeah, that was probably a bad move—they own everything. But it’s not right. They take these little girls, and they put them through entertainment school and teach them to sing and dance, and make them wear belly shirts, but they won’t allow them to be their own people. It makes me sick.”

  3. Is just straight-up awesome.

  I don’t understand why [some paparazzi shots of her fondling Brian Austin Green] are so scandalous. When they first came out, it was like, Megan Fox was giving Brian a blow job in pub—I mean, uh—a hand job in public. First: Who gives hand jobs? Who’s given a hand job since seventh grade? Not me. And who does it at a café on a public street? I touch him all the time. It’s just like, if you have a girlfriend, you grab her butt or whatever. That’s all it was, but it became a big deal. I don’t know why. For me, touching Brian’s dick for two seconds—that’s not part of our sex life. That’s me playing around; you know, you just cup it a little. For a few seconds.

  4. And philosophical.
  

  I get it. This is colorful, and you want something to write that people will want to read. I get bored reading typical celebrity shit also.

  And yeah yeah yeah, it was not exactly as hard-won as "Frank Sinatra has a cold" but I am certain it is a lot better than any other Megan Fox profiles I have stopped reading after two paragraphs because I really have no idea why she's famous anyway.

  
  

  

  
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  "5-year-old knows right and wrong, and graffiti is wrong" [Great Moments In Journalism]

  Posted: September 16th, 2008, 3:57pm CDT by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  great moments in journalism  

  Newsday reporter Rocco Parascandola either drew the short straw at the assignment desk yesterday, or he sincerely believes that a five-year-old's opinion on the graffiti menace is worth 700 words. A mouthy little law-and-order kindergartener on Long Island got so worked up by an earlier Newsday story on taggers that he had his grandpa transcribe his tiny thoughts on the issue into a letter, which warranted another Newsday story, in which everybody comes off as monumentally stupid. Particularly Newsday:

  "Graffiti is very bad, dude," he says. "I'm angry about it, all the way to 100 degrees."

  Is there more?

  And this: "Make sure those two people don't escape. Try to get every graffiti person out of the entire universe. Can you please tell the policemen they did good work?"

  Rocco Parascandola's take:

  There are no police officers in Christopher's family, though Christopher would seem to be the perfect candidate. Should recruitment officers get back to him in 16 years? Maybe...

  Christ.

  [Newsday via Animal]

  
  

  

  
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  Franz Kafka: Pornographer [Great Writers]

  Posted: August 3rd, 2008, 5:05pm CDT by ian spiegelman

  Tags:  great writers  

  Franz Kafka wrote dark, brilliant, surreal works of souls in crisis, bureaucracy run amuck, dehumanizing class systems—and a lot of dirty, sexy smut. Researches have discovered a bounty of porn in the great writer's notebooks, and they mean for you to read it. "Experts have unearthed a stash of explicit pornographic material belonging to German author Franz Kafka. The erotic material has been ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the writer’s image. James Hawes, an academic and Kafka expert came across the material in copies of Kafka’s journals in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford. Hawes said that the author’s stash shows him as more human than a popular quasi-saintly writer. 'These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark. It’s quite unpleasant.'"

  “Academics have pretended it did not exist. The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol.
  
  “Of the world’s authors, only Shakespeare generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee table books. Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his diary is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant. Yet no one has ever shown his readers Kafka’s porn,” he added.
  
  Some of the author’s erotic material would be published in Excavating Kafka this month. [Hindustan Times]

  
  

  

  
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  D-List Celebrity Earthquake Moments Caught On Tape [Great Shake Of 08]

  Posted: July 30th, 2008, 12:52pm CDT by Hamilton Nolan

  Tags:  great shake of 08  

  Cultural capital of the world Los Angeles held up bravely during its earthquake yesterday, not counting its public officials. Bloggers continued their work, showings of Batman went on undisturbed, and gynecologists kept on, uh, doing their thing. But Judge Judy was not the only celebrity to suffer a disruption; the quake shook LA's indispensable horoscope reader CosmosGal (pictured, bracing herself) to distraction! Even worse, the attractive denizens of the Big Brother house were forced to flee outdoors and remove their shirts! You can see both of the stunning clips of disaster survival after the jump; we urge any other minor celebrities who may have been inconvenienced to contact us at once:

  [via Mark Lisanti, The Live Feed]

  
  

  

  
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  Los Angeles Earthquake: The Blog World Aftershocks [Great Shake Of 08]

  Posted: July 29th, 2008, 2:49pm CDT by Richard

  Tags:  great shake of 08  

  When the waters finally rise and sluice their way into New York City streets, it will be the bloggers—crazy, beautiful, typo-ridden—who become the first responders. I mean look at the reportage from the front of California's ELE earthquake today. Perez scooped CNN! Because he was there, feeling the rumble and hum of his assets shaking in his chair. So what are these intrepid shut-ins saying of the event? Take a look at a little earthquake reaction digest after the jump.

• Perez taught us lessons with a scientific earthquake diagram.
• Mary Rambin, who fancies herself some sort of fashion person and is apparently in Los Angeles, said Holy Shit! and then remarked that she hadn't "felt the earth shaking since college." Hmm.... Euphemism?
• The Superficial cursed the God that sent an earthquake but was unable to kill Heidi and Spencer. That we know of. They could be under a pile of IKEA rubble right now.
• Mollygood similarly moaned about annoying celebrities not dying.
• Worst Website In the World TMZ hasn't posted anything since 2:41. The only reasonable explanation is that they are all dead. So you heard it here first. TMZ: Dead.
• Trent from Pink is the New Blog hasn't posted anything since a 4:00 am item about Estelle Getty. Though he lives in Detroit, we're still concerned. Update! He's on the Continent, out of harm's way. Until, you know, he goes back to Detroit.