McClatchy, the struggling newspaper chain that made an ill-fated purchase of Knight Ridder in 2006, has just sent out a memo announcing that it is freezing employee wages across the entire company for the next year. The message that is increasingly going out to newspaper employees: accept wage freezes (or cuts), buyouts, and layoffs, or face total extinction. The full McClatchy memo is after the jump:
James Stewart is the most respected financial journalist of our time. The author of Den of Thieves (about financial shenanigans) and DisneyWar (about corporate greed), he is on a first-name basis with corporate greed and financial shenanigans. But he also has personal finances, about which he writes a personal finance column in the Wall Street Journal and Smart Money, and today's column is a little reminder why they don't give out Pulitzers for "sage investment advice." Because he was tricked into buying those auction-rate security things! Which is, like, fair enough: I don't understand them even after reading this long explanation and consulting the helpful graphic. But, oh god, his excuse for getting suckered in!!
Did you know that charismatic Virginia governor Tim Kaine is on Barack Obama's Vice Presidential short list? It's true, according to today's New York Times! "Now the Obama campaign is eyeing Mr. Kaine as a potential running mate, seeing in him a like-minded breath of fresh air who has also shown he can win in a red state," Kate Zernike reports today. Pretty convincing! In totally unrelated news, the Washington Post reports today that the selection of former Virginia governor Mark Warner to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention is a "hint" that current Virginia governor Tim Kaine will not be Obama's VP choice. "If Kaine were chosen as Obama's running mate, two Virginians would have back-to-back prime-time speaking slots, a scenario that party officials regard as unlikely." This is great media management by Obama, right? No one knows anything! [WP, NYT]
You don't have to tell us journalists sure do love a clusterfuck. But in case you thought the credentialed journalists of the world were actually doing stuff less masturbatory with their time than repurposing news items about Manhattan Media News 'N' Gossip, well…you can stop feeling guilty! Because inspired by Michael Calderone's Politico post about some Forbes post about how there will be 15,000 journalists descending upon each of this month's political conventions — hey, clusterfuck alert: Calderone used to date my roommate! — we've officially culled a list of 14 Really Big Journalist Events. The Beijing Olympics is the biggest! (But: the Iraq War = DEAD LAST.) (No "heh"!) Click to see the beautiful graph and calculate how "connected" you are. Oh yes, and also, read my "analysis" of what events planners can learn from this.As you can see, the Beijing public relations strategy was brilliant: first, get the Olympics, then generate alarming rates of economic growth bulldozing and erecting structures and developing innumerable ambitious infrastructure projects in preparation for the thousands of journalists you are expecting for the Olympics, consuming such unprecedented amounts of energy in the process that oil prices rise more than tenfold between the year you land the bid and the year the Olympics actually happen, triggering fears of a recession in the overly developed countries whose living standards your artificially undervalued currency has been subsidizing, such that journalists feel obliged to attend the thing if only to write that last epic think piece on the Emerging Superpower before taking that buyout, while gas prices force the rest of the citizenry to sit at home and watch the Olympics. Hopefully over an ice-cold Coke Zero! But in lieu of that, cool cars seem to do the trick. A lot better if you locate them in a city that is not totally depressing.
In a post a few hours ago about the Times's 32 reporters in Beijing for the Olympics my colleague Hamilton estimated that each reporter sent to cover the event was writing one story per day for an average of two weeks. Industrious! But somewhat akin to estimating that smelting everyone's rusty pots and pans in the backyard is going to yield a dominant steel industry. Reporters need to get over their jet lag! Collect their thoughts, and convert them from hackneyed touristy "Ha ha ha they weren't kidding about that smog!" thoughts into publishably learned-sounding "Smog? You should see it when the GDP is in working order!" ones! A more realistic Olympics output has been generated by Gawker's favorite media gay couple, Timesman Andrew Jacobs and his freelancer boyfriend Dan Levin, who have in two or three weeks in the Middle Kingdom…Two stories, a man on the street scene piece about…uh, men on the street, and one piece about foreigners who live in nice houses that resemble the old houses that average Chinese used to live in before they were all bulldozed except they are nice and that's why they get to stay. We checked out some other people we knew in China, including our Times reporting friend Nick Confessore, who is actually in town on vacation, and reports on Facebook that he recently ripped off the idea of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti and climbed the Great Wall, which was "more effective against the Mongols than against the Japanese." (Not to mention opiates and naval warfare! ) Our former Beijing correspondent friend professed to be "not doing much of anything," saying she'd write more when it was more timezone-appropriate. Oh yes, and Gawker legal counsel Gaby Darbyshire is in Beijing right now, "doing a deal." Sure. Finally we received this email from a friend at Paris Review who is also in Beijing:
The New York Times has 32 reporters covering the Olympics in Beijing. Thirty-two! That's quite an investment from a company in the newspaper industry. Any big cash outlay is risky these days. Without relying on the crutch of "official budget numbers," we combined our sophisticated economic estimation skills with a patented "Media Value" formula to determine: Is this Olympics coverage worth the cost? Read on!
Reading about reading about National Enquirer founder Generoso "Gene" Pope Jr. in today's Wall Street Journal, it's hard not to wonder, how come MIT-educated CIA operatives don't start trashy tabloid publications anymore? And is that related to that other salient question, how come kids named "Generoso" don't seem to come through Horace Mann anymore? (The blanket answer to all this is that people just don't know how to have fun anymore, or else the progeny of Russia and China's mafiosos would have run DNA tests on Andrew Young's chewing gum by now, but that's another story.) Anyway, in a month that has seen so much news production "Made In China" so to speak we'd like to take a moment to appreciate the month's leading supplier of original domestic, vertically integrated, by us-for American newstrash, the National Enquirer, for some of the great techniques and philosophies of news gathering Gene brought to American publishing.1. Inculcate reporters in "When In Rome" philosophy of reporting:
Life's social dynamic never really changes beyond high school. WIth the Olympics upon us, journalists are feasting on the fit bodies of athletes—so different than their (and our) own! There was the poetic ode to the wonders of swimmer Michael Phelps in the NYT's Play magazine, and now we have (presidential cousin) Billy Bush of Access Hollywood's breathless, "stream of consciousness" description of the "glutes" of the men's gymnastics team:
The Times published two amazing corrections this morning, starting with one stating that the newspaper had erroneously called Republican presidential candidate John McCain a "fighter pilot" on Sunday and in "numerous other Times articles the past dozen years." Wow, a correction that spans more than a decade! When McCain was famously shot down over Vietnam, he was flying his usual plane, a small jet aircraft known as the A-4 Skyhawk, which the Times now refers to as an "attack aircraft." That's a safe and widely-agreed upon label for the plane pilots dubbed "Scooter" (heh), but the newspaper needn't have apologized for calling it a "fighter." Many in the aviation community regard it as precisely that, starting with the military's most famous training program, Top Gun.
With the National Enquirer taking a victory lap for correctly reporting that John Edwards had an affair with campaign contractor Rielle Hunter, it's worth noting that the Democratic politician is still disputing the Enquirer's claims that he fathered a love child with Hunter. Also worth recalling, then, how the supermarket tabloid face-planted with a 2006 story claiming Sen. Ted Kennedy fathered a love child with Carolina Bilodeau-Allen while separated from his first wife. DNA tests conducted two decades prior had already established that Kennedy was not the father, contradicting the Enquirer's paid sources. Earlier this month, the tabloid was made to pay for its front-page mistake, the Smoking Gun reports:
Roger Clark, the NY1 morning reporter who is perhaps the goofiest and most endearing working journalist in America, on some of his favorite recent stories here in our dark metropolis: "I did a story about a kids fishing derby in Prospect Park [Brooklyn], and I actually caught a fish, so that was exciting. A place I enjoyed when I was growing up was the New York Aquarium, and I got to go back and get kissed by a sea lion, which is something I don't get to do every day." Any promising news pitches lately, Roger? "I got one about an international yo-yo contest and that's a possibility, that's something that I may consider covering." Surely you will! After the jump is a must-see video of Roger inexplicably breaking into a James Earl Jones impression while covering a UN meeting. And yes, we fully expect this man to save journalism:
Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about the John Edwards affair, detailing the circumstances behind the meeting of Edwards and Rielle Hunter in a Beverly Hills hotel that ended up getting the ex-VP candidate caught by the National Enquirer. The story includes various bits of background info on Bob McGovern, a new-age friend of Hunter who set up the meeting. Just about all of that background appears to have been taken from a post more than a week earlier on Deceiver.com-although the Times didn't credit them at all. That's stealing. Full comparison of the Times story and the blog info, below: Deceiver, July 31:
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: Salkin's story on the hot ukulele trend is out, and fits perfectly in his oeuvre. His past investigations have exposed chicks who eat meat, revealed how no one goes on vacations any more, and uncovered prepsters who hang out downtown-as well as their rival hipsters who hang out in Atlantic City. We're now prepared to reveal Salkin's journalistic method to the public: He solicits you to hang out with him in casual settings and mines you for minutiae, which he then seasons with his patented significance-inflating sauce: "I see you're no vegetarian!" "Downtown is getting so preppy." "Can you believe my dumbass roommate bought a ukulele?" Lately I've been tying my shoelaces inside the shoe, to prevent those floppy strings on the outside. Others in Brooklyn are doing the same. Call me, Allen. [NYT]
Ha ha ha so it turns out that everyone in the world knew that Rielle Hunter had a (shall we say!) inappropriate relationship with John Edwards back in 2006 (when they were fucking). As we've learned, Rielle is a starry-eyed new age nutcase with a bizarre and tawdry history. So some reporters thought it was maybe odd that this weird hippie chick was apparently hanging out with the Edwards campaign and openly flirting with the candidate. After the jump, journalists on what they knewl about Hunter back in the day.
"Mr. Stelter's wonderful article on how people were working around the blackout on the Olympic ceremony began as a post on Twitter seeking consumer experiences, then jumped onto his blog, TV Decoder, caught the attention of editors who wanted it expanded for the newspaper and ended up on Page One, jammed with insight and with plenty of examples from real human experience." [Times]
Traditional media acted with predictable arrogance for ten months in ignoring tabloid and blog stories about John Edwards' philandering. Also utterly predictable: The self-flagellation now occurring on how the story was missed and what it means for the future of newspapers. Yes, if there's one story the public eats up more than a sex scandal complete with love child, it's yet another navel-gaze at media ethics and economics! Reporters for the Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all shared their thoughts on the matter. But the fact that they waited, or had to wait, so long to do so hints that their bosses are missing the point.
Here is an excerpt of John Edwards on Nightline, where the Democratic politician spent most of the time trying to explain the limited nature of his bad behavior. His affair was a brief fling he quickly told his family about, driven by "a narcissism that leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you're invincible, and there will be no consequences." He didn't have a love child with his mistress, Rielle Hunter, and didn't know anything about any hush money she may have received. He'll take a paternity test and release the results to the news media, if someone can get Hunter to participate. And, Edwards said, he only visited Hunter again recently in a Los Angeles hotel at the insistence of a mutual friend, who promised to be present, to hear a story of Hunter's "struggles." Edwards gave the careful, plausible admission of a skilled lawyer. Whether he is believed will hinge on how people react to his most vulnerable moments. Click the video icon to watch two of them. [ABC News]
Remember the article from Slate music writer Jody Rosen, who stumbled upon a little alt-weekly in Texas, the Montgomery County Bulletin, who had stolen his Jimmy Buffet article? Rosen got obsessed, did some research, and found that one of the paper's few writers, Mark Williams, had pretty much plagiarized everything ever. Now, says the Houston Press, the Bulletin is up and quitting due to the scandal. "It's no longer a publication. I'm quitting. After this Slate article and this is the future of journalism in New York City. I don't want any part of it," said publisher Mike Ladyman. (It's hard to feel sorry for Ladyman; he didn't seem to give a rat's about the plagiarism issue when Rosen contacted him repeatedly.) Good job, Slate! (A fun quote from the non-media-savvy Ladyman after the jump, plus an angry letter from copycat writer Mark Williams.)
Bernann McKinney mortgaged her home to travel to South Korea to have her pit bull cloned. Turns out, 30 years ago she kidnapped a Mormon missionary, chained him to a bed, and allegedly forced him to have sex with her. The Times of London further reports: "To add further mystery and zing to the whole story, Mr Anderson was said to have been wearing a Mormon chastity belt at the time." [The Australian, The Times]
