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Layoffs at newspapers tend to hit the less essential sections first. You're not going to see the sports page disappear, but you might no longer have a local science reporter. To fill in the blanks, editors use wire stories, and when it comes to science reporting, they'll apparently print anything they come across. Basing a story off whatever piece of research comes to light is the easiest way to write a science story, with "according to new research" the opening sentence of choice. Over the weekend, we learned that meat causes cancer, exercise stops cancer, sleep stops cancer and stress causes it. Is there any way to prevent newspapers from dumbing themselves into even more layoffs?
This AFP story represents everything that is wrong with the state of science reporting. The headline touts, "Exercise, sleep cuts cancer risk." In the body of the piece, actual analysis and understanding of medical issues is nowhere to be found:
In a long-term study of nearly 6,000 US women, researchers found that those who exercised the most had a 25 percent lower chance of developing cancer than those who were the least active.
But among younger, physically active women, those who slept less than seven hours a night had a 47 percent higher risk of being diagnosed with cancer than those who regularly got a good night's rest.
Reuters wrote basically an identical story from the press release. Even if these two things were somehow related to each other, how exactly we should interpret the study from the National Cancer Institute? Since the Institute clearly has an agenda of some kind, it's not hard to see why they'd want the article on their study to read a certain way. The end result is just a quick rewrite of a press release, without any context for the findings. It's just a plug for their development people to tout when they're trying to raise money.
And maybe it's a good thing for the institution that wire reporters who don't even have bylines will take whatever they say as the direct truth, but it's not helping educate the public about the issues, and it sure isn't service-y. For its part, internet media — which can impart a lot more context at its best — isn't helping. All it does is give misinformation a larger berth.
When Papers Had A Future [Gawker]
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Jennifer Aniston's face adorns the cover of this week's New York Times Magazine. Despite her current remarks in the interview therein about how annoying it is when people take camera phone pictures of her and sell them to feed their family, Ms. Aniston would like to reassure you that she loves images of herself as much as you do. After all, she's done photo shoots with about 8,000 magazines this month, most of which have already folded. Is she a hypocrite? We'll give her a break, and let the author of The Rules give her some helpful advice about dealing with her anger:
Despite posing for Vogue and every other magazine imaginable, Aniston only likes it when the mainstream media profits for her image, as she relates in the NYT interview:
Q: How much do you hate cameras on phones?
A: My favorite move is when people pretend that they’re on the phone and they kind of dial and take the picture at the same time. You hope they’re doing it for themselves — that they're not thinking, I’m going to dine out on you.
Yes, Jen, an image of you is worth about 5.2 meals in this economy. They're just doing what they can to survive.
The New York Post, perhaps miffed that they didn't get their own cover of Aniston scowling, quoted author of The Rules Ellen Fein with some advice for Jen:
"Breaking up is never easy, but it doesn't have to be humiliating...Never mention Brad's or John Mayer's name in public. Also, don't say any thing bad about him ("he's missing a sensitivity chip"). Never talk about Angelina or call her "uncool," even if she was uncool. She does not exist in your world. Never date a man or take a man back who humiliated you publicly or held a press conference to explain your breakup. Go to parties where there are lots of single men and ask everyone you know to set you up. You're going to be 40 soon. You have no time to waste if you want kids."
Yipes.
Screens Goddess [NYT]
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With the full onset of consistently declining revenues and mass layoffs, newspapers have now finally accepted the depth of their plight. Now the war wages on as to how — and whether — print can become more commercially viable through innovation. In an article discussing how industries rework themselves to stay relevant, the NYT blissfully throws doubt on her ability to survive in this economic climate. Is there at least some solution that could save the local paper?
The bitter feud between Slate's Ron Rosenbaum and new media simpleton Jeff Jarvis aside, both do agree that newspapers are in deep shit. The Times' Catherine Rampell dismisses the clamor over copies of the NYT's election issue, and doesn't see the newspaper becoming "a luxury product." Newspapers are just another industry, and as currently constituted, papers are way behind the curve in ensuring their survival:
"If you look at the history of firms that have tried to diversify their businesses, you’ll see it’s virtually an impossible thing to do,” says David A. Hounshell, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who studies technology and social change. "Usually when a firm announces a program to diversify, they’ve pretty much written their death warrant." Newspapers have faced challenges before and have adapted — including through efforts at diversification. Can these historical precedents teach newspapers how to defeat the economic forces of technological change once again?
Like previous industries fearful of obsolescence, newspapers can either develop a new product, or find a way to remarket and remonetize the old one. Right now, newspapers are doing a little of both: They’re adapting their product to the Web to attract new audiences, and they’re trying to re-monetize by delivering more targeted advertising.
Meanwhile, we’ve already seen some of the "destruction" half of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous “creative destruction" paradigm, with many newspapers cutting staff and other production costs. Unfortunately for newspapers, historians say, the survivors in previous industries facing major technological challenges were usually individual companies that adapted, rather than an entire industry.
We know an insane man (Lee Abrams, right) who works for the Los Angeles Times who totally agrees with you, Ms. Rampell. Hell, the LAT is promoting today's edition as a Twilight collectible! There is an optimistic note sounded at the end:
But perhaps the destruction will lead to more creativity. Perhaps the people we now know as journalists — or, for that matter, autoworkers — will find ways to innovate elsewhere, just as, over a century ago, gun makers laid down their weapons and broke out the needle and thread. That is, after all, the American creative legacy: making innovation seem as easy as, well, riding a bike.
A quilt newspaper might be a keepsake we'd all like to enjoy. To our thimbles, journalists!
'How Industries Survive Change. If They Do' [NYT]
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Election night might have been a hopeful triumph for most Americans, but it was an evening of screaming and insults for Canadian Sharilyn Johnson, according to the epic rant she just uploaded to Huffington Post. Johnson had to be in the live Daily Show audience on election night, because she's been watching everything Jon Stewart has ever done since 1994, is also super-into Stephen Colbert, has friends on staff, knows line-runners by name, etc. etc. Johnson (on left in photo) lined up a ticket seven months in advance, confirmed and reconfirmed, traveled to New York from Toronto, waited in line and then watched as her world ENDED.
Only maybe 21 people from line got into the studio, due to VIPs taking seats, and Johnson was approximately number 40. Out of 250. She yelled, looked for "Teri and Jessica from the audience department," called a friend on staff — nothing. Then the bitterness set in.
The Daily Show must have known this was going to happen. That's why it weirdly made everyone re-confirm on Oct. 27! And if Johnson had only known, she could have totally called in some favors and gotten VIPed. But the bastards never warned her. AFTER ALL JOHNSON DID FOR THEM!
I am owed. Not the cost of my flight. Or the cost of my hotel. Or even the vacation days I took, which I could have used to visit my family. What I'm owed is the experience of witnessing history take place somewhere other than alone an empty bar on 11th Avenue, sucking on a can of Bud Light, feeling completely emotionally empty.
Because of the incompetence of others, I was robbed of an experience that should have been sublime, moving, and meaningful.
What was taken away from me cannot be remedied with a VIP ticket — essentially a shorter wait in line NEXT time. At this point, I can't plan to have a next time. How do I stand outside under that awning again, without being reminded of what was done? How do I look at the heads of the audience department, knowing how negligent they were through this entire situation? I don't plan to ever go back.
At least her friend "Tracey" from Britain made it in. Bittersweet. OMG, this is just like that time a dolled-up Mary Rambin got ditched by Julia Allison and Megan Asha outside the Sex And The City premiere, which was also disastrously overbooked! It's also just as sad and profound.
Seriously, though, why do shows treat their live studio audiences so almost sadistically poorly like this? Don't they know the fans who show up for these tapings are INSANE and already have impossibly high expectations and told 200 of their closest friends, in advance, about how awesome everything was going to be, thus guaranteeing they will curse your name endlessly online if they ever get locked out? (NB to David Letterman: I'm still sorry I mauled your cameraman that one time, but he always set up his shots so as to MOCK YOU. You should really fire that jerk. Anyway call me!)
(Photo above from Johnson's website.)
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There's so much bad news in the print media world these days that we just have to roll it all up for you in one convenient post that you can read here, on the internet, where we are responsible for killing print. Today in the Death Of Print Daily: Big layoffs at Rodale and the Seattle Times, the death of Out Traveler, and a tipster describes just how poor the Village Voice is these days:
- Rodale, the publisher of Men's Health and other fitness-related mags, is laying off 111 employees—10% of its workforce. Most of the cuts will be in "operations, IT, customer service and some publishing departments," with no details given.
- The Seattle Times is laying off about 130 workers, 10% of its staff. No word on how many in the newsroom. The Seattle Times is a newspaper so, you know, this is just how it goes.
- Out Traveler, a gay travel mag, has just folded, according to Jossip.
- Finally, just how bad a shape is the Village Voice in? They've laid off so many people in the past year that I won't take the time to link to all of our layoff posts, but feel free to go back and search for yourself. Anyhow, a tipster tells us that the VV is—direct quote—"on the balls of its ass financially." That's bad! How bad? We hear that expense accounts are essentially a thing of the past. One VV reporter paid out of his own pocket to fly to Ohio and rent a car and a hotel room last week to do a story on the election. Normal after-work events, like a going-away party for an intern at a bar, are being paid out of the editors' own pockets. And, we hear, Voice reporters have been buying their own pens and notebooks because the paper has no extra office supplies. That's bad. If you know more about the finances of the VV or the New Times chain, email us.
Whew. [Pic via Martin Gee]
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Steven A. Smith was considered to be one of the most innovative newspaper editors in the country, Webcasting his morning news meetings, building a radio sound studio and shifting staff and focus to the online edition of his paper, the Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review. So of course the self-destructing newspaper industry had to go and ruin that, by asking Smith to fire most new online people less than a year after he hacked away 25 percent of the overall staff. Smith naturally resigned, an event that was covered by NPR. Some old newspaper hands are grumbling that Smith should have toughed it out, but up-and-coming print journalists will be looking at his decision and reaching the opposite conclusion: If this guy, of all people, can't deliver newspapers safely to the future, it's probably time to leave. (Photo via NPR)
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As Sheila mentioned earlier, decreasingly-relevant music and culture mag Rolling Stone is shrinking! Yes the old pub wasn't quite gathering the same moss of ad dollars as it used to, so they've decided to go and be conventional like everyone else. The boxy Peter Travers beat-off rag (excuse my vulgarity, but really) used to be an inch taller and two inches wider than every other magazine, making it impossible—simply fucking exhaustingly impossible—to arrange properly on a coffee table. Now, no more. It'll fall in line with the rest of 'em. And it's not the only ancient parchment publication to downsize!
The Guardian shrank in 2005:
The boring old Wall Street Journal shrank back in 2005 too, before, even, Rupert Murdoch swung aboard from his fearsome and mighty pirate vessel.
And the New York Times shrank this summer. (Though, really, things have been shrinking over there for a long while.)
In fact, lots of American papes are adopting the smaller "Berliner" European-style.
Once the tech world starts crumbling too, leaving nothing but angry and empowered robots and a few huddling, gossip-starved masses, look for Gawker to simply be a single string of 1's and 0's—at which, of course, you'll chuckle and say "Oh, ho ho. That Lindsay Lohan v. 7.6! What a card! Do you think she's really an androisexual?"
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Once upon a time, back in the days when H.L. Mencken was prowling the metaphorical streets of journalism, drinking bourbon for breakfast and smoking cigars in theaters and making women do laundry for weeks on end, a reporter could dream of nothing better than being assigned to cover the State Capitol. He'd go on up there and sit around drinking bourbon and smoking cigars and subjugating women and occasionally filing stories, after which he would go out and engage in scandalous behavior with the politicians he covered. Life was sweet. But now guess what: penniless newspapers can't even afford the meager salaries of statehouse reporters any more!
The number of reporters covering the NY state government in Albany has dropped from 59 to 42 in the last quarter century. And one count says there are just over 400 full time statehouse reporters in the whole country. The glorious days are gone!
Women were banned from being members during World War II, a policy that was not reversed until the late 1960s. Women were also not allowed to participate in the [statehouse correspondents association's] annual gridiron dinner until 1972. Now a third of the association’s members are women.
But through much of the 1980s, the organization still had the feel of a stodgy gentleman’s club. Nightly poker games with legislative staffers and lobbyists were a revered tradition, as was “the library,” a metal cart of liquor that was wheeled out every afternoon.
Today the liquor cart is gone. The poker table still sits on the second level of the association’s office space — a balcony known as “the shelf” that looks down on the main press room floor — but it is covered by a piece of particleboard stained with coffee mug rings.
Women! [NYT]
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The author David Foster Wallace has been memorialized by scores of people since he hanged himself two weeks ago. The vast majority of these people barely knew him at all, so the online trade fair of grief, initially dominated by the McSweeney's website until Elizabeth Wurtzel's silver lame leotard threw its own shadow shiva session over at New York, has struck more than a few saddish literary men as more than a little vulgar. Oh well. Today a few people who actually did know him, including his parents, share the details of his last miserable days with Salon's Robert Ito.
He'd been clinically depressed for two decades, on "powerful" medication (and apparently also Skoal) that made it possible for him to write — this may be vulgar but I have been too thoroughly inculcated in our compulsive culture of psychopharmacological comparison shopping not to wonder why they never tell you which — but the meds had powerful side effects, so he went off them in the summer of 2007, to apparently disastrous consequences. He tried electric shock therapy and other unspecified meds; nothing worked. He couldn't write or eat, and dropped to 140 pounds. He took a medical leave from teaching. A student is quoted saying his great genius was unrelated to his great depression. That student is wrong.
When David was 5, his mother recalls, he decided that he had two careers to look forward to. He would be a professional football player, for one. In the off-season, while the other players were recuperating or doing whatever it is that pro football players do when they're not running or passing or slamming their bodies into each other, he would be a neurosurgeon. His mother has no idea how, at 5, her son might have heard about neurosurgeons or what they were or did, but he had. The first day of his medical career, he promised his mom, he would take out all of her frayed nerves and fix them. "Somehow he knew about neurosurgeons," she says, "and he knew that my nerves needed fixing."
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Filed under:
Celebrity Justice Rich Fields -- the voice of Price is Right -- is the victim of identity theft. While contestants win money and new cars, Fields is trying to get back $71,000 of his own cash. It's affected the "Come On Down" crooner's cash flow -- his bank accounts...
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Is Drew Carey adding announcer to his title for the new season of The Price Is Right when the show returns on Monday for its new season on CBS. Nope just him joking around, but looks like if he did he would need just a little more training. But as a host of the classic game show he did a better a job than I thought and I knew he was going to be amazing at it!
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Apparently practically no one in New York received a Wall Street Journal today. What, did the Fed need to hijack its plant to print all that new money they're "injecting"? A customer service representative I reached after ninety six minutes on hold* just told me it's the result of a production snafu in Rochester, but if the Journal is being printed five and a half hours away they totally deserve this for having such a terrible carbon footprint. The Journal managed to put out a paper the day after its office was destroyed by terrorists so whatever it is must be pretty bad. Anyway, if you are a subscriber, here is what you missed: insurance giant AIG got taken over by that same acquisition-happy behemoth that just acquired Freddie and Fannie, but if you are a subscriber you probably knew this last night.
In any case, if you're a subscriber you'll be reminded of it again tomorrow, when you'll have probably forgotten amidst all the other crazyass shit that is already filling the Journal's annoyingly Portfolio-esque redesigned website. Hey look, the SEC is regulating short selling again, good idea! As with the rest of this meltdown, we'll keep you posted on What This Means as soon as we figure out What It Means which is to say don't hold your breath!
*Seriously, who has time to actually be calling about this right now that isn't still drunk? Just wondering.
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The Newark Star-Ledger is in serious danger of going out of business, as we mentioned earlier. Its publisher yesterday threatened bluntly to close the paper on January 5 unless it gets major concessions from its drivers' union. Even if the threat is a negotiating tactic, it also reflects economic reality. Everyone knows the business is rough, but wow: are we about to see the first major American city without a newspaper?
This would be historic. And not in the good way. As the industry has declined during this decade, almost every newspaper has suffered economically. Layoffs have become ubiquitous. Foreign bureaus have been shuttered across the board as a matter of policy.
Large metro papers, which dominate major cities but lack a national readership, have suffered the worst. Many (if not most) of them have pulled their correspondents from Washington and brought them home, to save money and cover local news, which is believed to be the wisest area of investment. The glory days are over. Salaries are down. Older, more expensive reporters and editors are urged to take buyouts. It's harder for aspiring journalists to get first jobs, or even internships.
Papers have changed physically. Their pages have shrunk. Their page count has come down. Sections which once stood alone have been combined, all to save printing and newsprint costs.
Two-paper towns are becoming a rarity. Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, and, of course, New York all support at least two sizable papers. But some of them shouldn't. Particularly in smaller or declining markets, it's a war of attrition to see which paper can hang on the longest. The idea that two editorial viewpoints are a necessity in most cities has been rendered anachronistic by the internet.
Recent buyers of newspapers or newspaper companies have been disappointed. Brian Tierney, an ad wizard, has been unable to restore the Philadelphia papers to their former glory. Sam Zell is being sued by his own employees for the Tribune company's declining prospects. McClatchy wishes it had never bought Knight Ridder.
What we haven't seen in all this, though, is a major American city with no newspaper. Everyone believes that a paper is an essential part of a city's fabric, like city hall and the jail and the local sports team. If Newark—a town with more problems than most—is left without a paper, who will tell the world what's going on there? Who will tell Newark what its own government is up to? Even bloggers should be humble enough to pray that the Star-Ledger isn't the first in a long line of papers that disappear and leave people with no forum for the local bickering, minutiae, and moments of glory that are the real American civics lesson.
Print may be dead. But it shouldn't die before something better is in place.
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This is Matthew DiPasquale. He scored fives on ten separate AP exams. "Five" may also quantify his penis somehow, you can decide for yourself because Matthew DiPasquale was born in the second half of the eighties and so he quite understandably just founded a Harvard porn magazine whose virgin issue contains naked pictures only of himself, an endeavor whose only conceivable purpose have been to solicit the snarky derision of people who have given up trying to understand the credit crisis. So here you go, just-safe-enough-for-work photos of your newest seeker of microfame after the jump. "Micro" may also quantify his penis somehow.
Even IvyGate seems to be having trouble mustering the right degree of contempt for this guy. They excerpt his interview with himself, which is so illiterate as to defy my appreciation of the absurd. Oh, some girl told him his "spooge tastes like unripe bananas." (I guess he means "splooge.")
God, I hate this job sometimes. Like, I dropped out of college precisely so I could forget people like Matthew DiPasquale even existed and this is what I get. Fuck you, Matthew DiPasquale, just fuck you.
Related, what do you think are the odds US News added an "intenet buzz" category to its annual college rankings and kids like this guy and that other guy and Lena Chen are behind the recent restoration of its supremacy in that most venerable listicle? "Entirely too high" is the unfortunate answer to that question.
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Who’s the raven haired beauty who attended the Betsey Johnson Spring ‘09 Fashion Show at Fashion Week yesterday?
Find out after the cut!
It’s Amy Lee of Evanescence!
Related Smacks
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Could the editors at the Los Angeles Times be any more useless? Their newspaper is going down in flames, with cash flow declines ranked worst among the deeply troubled Tribune Company newspapers. Their best hope for salvation is the Web, where the paper is desperately behind upstart competitors like Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood and the Huffington Post. Just last year the paper installed new publishing software that couldn't even handle hyperlinks. And yet newsroom "leaders" just spent 18 months in a fucking (ahem) committee debating what swears LATimes.com bloggers should be allowed to use, and when. The byzantine machinations involved some sort of appeal to a "ruling" of a special committee about some formal guidelines, and of course resulted in a tedious and useless memo that should make anyone who ever cared about the once-great newspaper want to slit his wrists. Its insufferable, self-indulgent stupidity lies after the jump. Oh, and it basically says no one can use "pissed off" because it's crude and might tarnish the LA Times's sterling image in the remaining months before the paper's now-all-but-inevitable collapse.
"Pissed off" is among crude language regularly removed from Times coverage as part of what McCoy acknowledges is "a conservative standard" when it comes to publishing coarse or vulgar remarks...
Clark Stevens oversees the style and usage guidelines at The Times... "It's a phrase we've all heard, and most of us have used. But is it essential to the story (or the quotation) here, and is it consistent with the overall tone and image we want to project to our readers? I think that's where conservative judgment prevails in favor of not using it..."
The policy for the first time takes into account the online world vs. the print world. As McCoy wrote in her cover note to staff when she distributed the updated guidelines on obscenity and taste, "A less formal voice may be appropriate in online stories and on blogs (as is often the case in feature stories too), but a conversational style is not an invitation to abandon The Times’ high standards by introducing gratuitous obscenities."
So whether it's on latimes.com or in print, curse words and crude language are supposed to be used only when they are essential to conveying an important point of the story.
Thanks for keeping everyone excruciatingly up to date on your slow-motion embrace of Web culture, LA Times, rather than boring us with stories about, say, philandering politicians and their mistresses!
[LA Times via Romenesko]
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It was a tricky rhetorical path before Barack Obama at the close of the Democratic National Convention Thursday and he walked it artfully. The official Democratic presidential nominee bashed John McCain hard, including rather boldly on McCain's core issue of Iraq, where the Republican opponent feels strong. The tens of thousands of hard-core Democrats at Invesco Field in Denver, all worked up into a frenzy, ate it up. Then there were The Bitters watching on their non-flat-screen TVs at home in swing states, who were reminded that McCain called them all "whiners" (so much worse than "bitter!"), that McCain wants to tax their benefits for healthcare, that Obama supports corporate welfare to teach GM how to make hybrids and that Obama's not going to coddle all these illegal Mexicans "undercutting" their wages. But the heart of the performance came toward the end.
Obama, having attacked McCain forcefully and thus corrected a key failing of his predecessor John Kerry, and having done a little careful pandering, still managed to make a signature call for something big and noble and important and post-partisan, a change of the terms for debate and thus HOPEful. He promised not to chalk McCain's positions up to ulterior political motives (over/under on how soon he regrets this?). Then he threaded the needle with the impressive "something is stirring" section of his speech, in the video below (the highlight of the speech, really).
newVideoPlayer("/obama_dncstirring_gawker.flv", 506, 423,""); 
THEN Obama managed to tie everything in to the anniversary or Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech without making himself sound sappy and exploitive, probably because he never used the routinely co-opted words "I Have A Dream:"
newVideoPlayer("/obama_dncbig_gawker.flv", 506, 423,""); The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
UPDATE: Here's the part where Obama tells a story about his grandmother and then amoothly converts it into an emotionally-powerful slap back at McCain's line that Obama is like a "celebrity."
newVideoPlayer("/obama_dncgrandmother_gawker.flv", 506, 423,""); 
Will MSNBC anchors still draw massive ratings gains yelling at each other in Obama's post-partisan world, or is everyone so tired of the viciousness (as Obama seems to be betting) that CNN will OWN the Obama years in the event he wins the presidency? Unclear. But it in the meantime it's a refreshing change to watch a speech from a national politician that sounds so darn earnest, nuanced and (once again) just reasonable.
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Focus on the Family, the official religious arm of all that is wrong and bad in America, is laying off 149 hateful scumbags. That's 21% of their workforce! They'll all be forced to roam the streets of Colorado Springs, hopefully resorting to cannibalism or possibly having the gay sex they've always secretly longed for in exchange for the drugs they're all addicted to. Also four of the group's eight magazines will now appear only on-line. Eight magazines! Jesus! Apparently donations to Dr. James Dobson's International House of Cartoonish Intolerance are way down, on account of the Christian right being demoralized by our Muslim Terrorist President-elect. So, hey, let's all celebrate! A round of abortions on us! [
This weekend featured massive layoffs at the New Jersey paper The Star-Ledger - try 50 percent of their newsroom staff. Fortunately a few new gigs are popping up. Liberal journalist Joshua Micah Marshall has no doubt requested one of the more annoying resume deluges in recent memory by 
Playboy is 
"The largest newspaper in New Jersey, The Star-Ledger, will not change hands or go out of business — at least not for a while — its owners said on Wednesday, after employees agreed to buyouts and concessions." [
As if 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan hadn't kicked up enough dirt in Iraq — she 
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is in severe financial distress, of course, because it is a newspaper. It was sold (at a loss) by McClatchy in 2006 to a private equity firm, and has reliably lost value ever since. Though it still "makes money" in the strictest sense of the term! The paper has already laid off 100 newsroom people and put its headquarters 
