Today the Times reviews Calista Flockhart vehicle Brothers and Sisters, the ABC drama that anorexic Ally McBeal fans have been waiting for. The first page reads fine, but the second page? Looks like someone forgot to remove the placeholder text. But it doesn't matter what the page should say — it's an Alessandra Stanley piece, so of course it's wrong.
There's just been more value added to your TimesSelect subscription: The company announced today that "all articles dating back to Sept. 18, 1851, when the paper started publishing, are now available online at NYTimes.com. With original reporting on Abraham Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic and the landing at Normandy, The Times is now letting its readers travel through time with the click of a mouse."
This morning we mentioned the Times redesign, but we didn't tell you the whole story. Because the paper thinks you're dumber than a bag of bananas, they've included a helpful Reader's Guide to explain what things like "editorials" and "articles" are. Join us after the jump and we'll all learn together.
Patricia Dunn: Chair of Hewlett-Packard's board. Hired investigators to find a board member who leaked information to CNET. Investigators impersonated HP board members and outside reporters to get their personal call records from phone companies. Now Congress, the FBI, and California's attorney general are looking into criminal charges, possibly against Dunn.
This morning's Times "instituted a sweeping but subtle redesign, to emphasize the difference between objective and subjective journalism. Straight news will remain, well, straight: laid out in justified columns, with even margins on the left and right. Stories that have been colored by analysis, commentary or authorial whimsy will all receive the layout previously reserved for columns: a straight left margin and a ragged right one." While many of these changes seem confusing, we've marked up today's front page to help you understand how your paper of record really works. It's after the jump.
If you're in San Francisco tomorrow night and you've got $500 burning a hole in your pocket you might want to stop by The Westin St. Francis for the Bay Area Council's 61st Annual Dinner. Times Executive Editor Bill Keller will deliver the keynote address, followed by the induction of recently-deposed Hewlett-Packard Chairman Patricia Dunn into the Bay Area Business Hall of Fame.
"I will not be able to work there," said Ely Yulman, a tax auditor for the New York State Departmentportationion and Finance, which lost 40 employees in the World Trade Center.
When an investment banker and an internist find love in Manhattan, it's a natural fit for a New York Times "Vows" listing. When the lucky couple met through JDate, you've got to go the extra mile — how about a NYT "Vows" video montage on top of the print listing? We're not sure how long this "Vows" expansion has been going on, as "Lisa & Sam" is the first we've noticed. Besides looking and sounding like an extended informercial for JDate, it's a Hollywood ending. Boy meets girl, boy proposes, girl says yes, girl reneges, boy "processes," boy methodically re-courts girl, girl is finally worn down into relenting and re-accepting proposal. Somehow, this simple story makes five minutes of video seem like an eternity.
• Willie Nelson and friends have been issued misdemeanor citations for posessing about 1.5 pounds of weed and 1/5 of a pound of mushrooms. And this surprises you not in the least. [Billboard]
• Bono tells the fashion crowd to "take your fucking finger food and fuck off." Which at least implies that someone was actually eating. Baby steps. [OAN]
• Did you miss the Brooklyn Book Festival? Aren't you lucky. [Galleycat]
• Cheers to the Times for throwing in a good old spoiler for fans of The Office. [NYT]
• It always helps to have your wife working in your favor on Amazon. [Greatest Living Poet]
• Greenwich Village reaches boiling point; gay teens and cranky old potheads to throwdown before November. [WaPo]
• Robert Hughes would like to thank radical Islamic terrorists for removing that "great ugly scaleless box of a thing" from the New York skyline. [The Australian]
Should Time Warner shed Time Inc.? David Carr seems to think it should, suggesting that Time Inc. prove itself quickly or be sold. "A very large boat," says Carr, "will have to be turned around very quickly with little additional investment." It's an industry-wide problem, and not just in print media: As Les Moonves recently told the Times, "we are changing our tires on a car going 80 miles an hour." Still, when one's employer has been likened by its own employees to an "ocean liner that turns slowly but with great power," we can understand a good transportation metaphor's appeal.
There's a paean to Star Trek in today's Times that is bad enough when you take it on its own but becomes much more depressing when you realize that forty years from now someone's going to be writing something like this about The Wire. Still, the author recalls some of the interesting dilemmas inspired by the show:
Every commenter on Gawker
Has their individual shtick
Tho' there's one particular talker
On whose name we'll always click
• Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone: Old and in charge. [LAT]
• Media readership falling? (Yes.) Maybe we should change the way it's measured. [Guardian]
• Social networking: The next big thing for parents. And dogs. [NYT]
• Memo to the NYT: When a guy's your go-to quote pretty much every time a new magazine launches, you might want to learn how to spell his name correctly. [Seth Mnookin]
Last Thursday, in her personal piece de resistance, Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn could not overstate the sheer awesomeness of haute whores and popular DJs the MisShapes, stating that their Bolivian-slim frames and bowl-shaped haircuts had influenced Dior Homme designer Hedi Slimane's July runway show. Slimane, however, took issue with the attribution:
"It's about the journalism. Period. End of story." That's the motto for the New York Times' bold new branding vision, along with a revivification of 1980s slogan "These times demand the Times." Both replace the more grandiose "Expect the world," which really is too much to expect from just a little ol' newspaper. Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff may have been hating on the NYT a little harshly of late, but we have to share his confusion as to why the NYT would need a branding campaign, since the brand (as opposed to say, the journalism) is pretty unassailable in the sphere of daily newspapers. Anyway, if you feel the need to get reacquainted with the brand, enjoy the ad campaign's very own website (including a reverse-time TV spot that features a woman regurgitating part of an apple). NYT crossword master Will Shortz even gets his own little site-segment, where he regrettably does not say "It's about the sudoku. Period. End of story."
We're going to go for one more bite of the apple on that 9/11 photo story. It's been previously established that Thomas Hoepker took a photo of Brooklyn hipsters acting in a potentially douchebaggy way on the day of the terrorist attacks. Frank Rich weighed in at the NYT, saying that they weren't callous, just American. David Plotz of Slate disagreed, declaring them not douchebags but citizens engaged in discussion. One of the photo subjects, a Brooklyn artist, popped up to say that, yeah, that's exactly what they were doing, and had Hoepker looked a little more closely, he would have realized that. Now Hoepker himself emerges, rather articulately discussing the ambiguity of the photo itself. At this point we're inclined to believe that the person who comes off the worst in this scenario is Frank Rich, who used the image to promote his political agenda, but our view may change when Slate publishes the next few installments in the series ("I Published That 9/11 Photo," "I Wrote That New York Times Column," "I Flew That Plane Into The Tower," etc.). We'll keep you posted.
Plenty (okay, two) of bloggers and journalists have accused the New York Times of not getting tech. Of course the Times gets tech — every thirty minutes from CNET — but some terribly untechy stuff gets lumped in with its mixture of consumer reviews and business news. For instance, the "Online Shopper" column by Michelle Slatella.
• Pinch Sulzberger and cousin Michael Golden hope that a $4 million employee bribe might help them keep their jobs for a little while longer. [NYO]
• Jeff Koyen likes the new Times Reader software. Jeff Jarvis does not. If you're still awake after reading those sentences, send us over some of whatever you're on. [Wired]
• CBS' Les Moonves wants to buy "the next YouTube." Probably a savvy move to wait until the current one gets sued out of existence. [Reuters]
• We sort of feel like everyone who watches Nancy Grace should kill themselves; can you guess what we think about her guests? [BG]
• When a guy cites the phenomenally successful "Times Select" model as an example of "where the industry will have to go," it's probably a good idea to discount the rest of what he says as well. [Barnako]
