Off the Record
Twilight of the Media Idols
Jeffrey Bewkes was looking for something to say to the crowd that had gathered on the 10th floor of the AOL Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle on the afternoon of Monday, Oct. 13, something pithy that would explain the position of big media in the present economic and political climate.
“I didn’t have a quote, but now I got a quote,” the Time Warner president and CEO said from the podium during the kick-off of a two-day symposium here about politics and the media. “I was in the green room and I got this from Graydon Carter: ‘Journalists, like lawyers, thrive on misfortune.
NYTV
Senior McCain Adviser: Palin Did 'Fantastic' With My Buddy Katie
Before Nicolle Wallace took over the role of senior adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign, the wrangling on the evening news in recent weeks over Sarah Palin’s performance in interviews with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric might have been the kind of on-air debate she relished.
“Governor Palin did fantastic,” the 36-year-old told The Observer in a telephone interview on the afternoon of Oct. 6.
But since she took on this high-level communications job with the campaign in May of this year, Ms. Wallace has had to relinquish her spot as a G.O.P.-credentialed commentator for CBS News.
Her analysis would have been provocative: In the aftermath of the Palin-Couric encounters, pundits took turns pummeling the Alaska governor’s apparent lack of preparation and arguing about just how much the interviews had damaged her credibility as a vice presidential candidate.
Pub Crawl
Baby, It’s Going to Be Cold Outside in Book Publishing
A frost is coming to publishing. And while the much ballyhooed death of the industry this is not, the ecosystem to which our book makers are accustomed is about to be unmistakably disrupted. At hand is the twilight of an era most did not expect to miss, but will.
For now, the stifling timidity many editors and agents are predicting appears not to have taken hold. The Penguin Press just acquired a book about the history of American counterfeiters written by a recent college graduate who works at Lapham’s Quarterly. Literary agent Susan Golomb, who introduced Jonathan Franzen and Marisha Pessl to the world, is out with a manuscript for a novel by first-time author Tom Rachman, and interest from editors has been so energetic that she had trouble keeping up with the preempt offers.
Media
Chocolate News Premieres Tonight on Comedy Central
Tonight, Comedy Central will premiere its latest fake news show, a faux black news magazine series, called Chocolate News, starring David Alan Grier.
"This is the perfect chance," Mr. Grier told The New York Times' Felicia R. Lee today. "I wanted something where I could have the clearest and most unfiltered artistic and creative voice. I had done the sitcom thing to lesser and lesser degrees of success."
Back in August, we wrote about Jeremy Bronson, a writer for Chocolate News, who moved over to Comedy Central after a six-year stint working for NBC News in Washington, most recently as a producer for MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews. read more »
Empty Nast Syndrome: Condé's New Hiring Chill
Condé Nast C.E.O. Chuck Townsend informed a group of his publishers yesterday morning that if their magazines can avoid hiring someone, they should.
"If you have an open position on your team, they're going to make you stand on your head until you're blue in the face before you fill it," said one attendee at the meeting.
Mr. Townsend gathered publishers for a quarterly breakfast meeting on the 4th floor at 4 Times Square. It lasted from 7:30 AM to 9:30 AM. Scrambled eggs, potatoes, and fruit were served.
The language from Mr. Townsend wasn't entirely clear, but with more bad news released yesterday about ad revenues in the industry, Mr. Townsend and Si Newhouse have notified the publishers of each Condé Nast book to say that it's time to reevaluate things on both the editorial and business sides before swinging into 2009.
It's not quite a hiring freeze! It's a hiring chill of sorts.
"My interpretation of it is that it's not cast in stone or that the doors are locked," said the source. "But it's a request that however you're running your business now, you should continue to do that for the foreseeable future."
Major Changes at Rolling Stone; Minor, Too
As you probably already know, Rolling Stone has undergone a significant change and shrunk its size from 10"x12" to a standard 8"x 11". (In July, The Observer's John Koblin caught wind of this development.)
What you may not know is that it also significantly changed the color of Senator Barack Obama's tie. (Maybe he should've gone with purple?)
Absentminded Professors, Rejoice! The Atlantic Says Thinking is Cool Again
With nearly every headline about the future of print media a grim one, last evening seemed like bad timing for the re-branding of a 150-year-old thought-leader magazine often seen as stodgy and behind the times.
But it was an unseasonably warm autumn night, the moon was full, the Dow had recovered a historic 936 points the day before--and The Atlantic was super-excited about their new brand.
The re-branding campaign and redesign of the magazine and website had been six months and a $1.5 million campaign budget in the making, with the help of EuroRSCG and Michael Bierut of Pentagram. The result? Serious is hip! Thinking is cool! Headlines from the magazine's last two years were wrought in aggressive neon throughout Chelsea's Exit gallery, looming like Orwellian aphorisms: "THINK AGAIN." read more »
National Book Award Nominees in Non-Fiction: Faust, Mayer, Gordon-Reed, Sheeler, Wickersham
And now NBA nominees for non-fiction:
Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering (Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family(Norton)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute (Penguin Group)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (Harcourt)
National Book Awards Nominees for Fiction: Hemon, Robinson, Kushner, Mathiessen, Scibona
Scott Turow, speaking at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, just now announced the National Book Awards fiction finalists:
Alexander Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex From Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Mathiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)
A surprising list. Several omissions are notable, but the absence of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which was also snubbed by the Man Booker Prize, is likely to be especially remarked upon today.
CNN to Air Weekend News-Comedy Show Starring Comedian D.L. Hughley
CNN is getting into the comedy business.
Executives at the cable news channel announced today that starting Oct. 25, CNN will air a Saturday night comedy show hosted by D.L. Hughley, in which the comedian mocks the news events of the previous week and interviews the real-life reporters who covered the stories.
The show is tentatively named D.L. Hughley Breaks the News.
"D.L. is a news junkie who is bursting with things to say about what is going on in the world—most of them funny, all of them thoughtful, none of them predictable," said Jon Klein, president of CNN/U.S. in a release today. read more »
Booker Prize Goes to Young Free Press Author Aravind Adiga; Publishing Commentator Michael Cader Unsmiling
Michael Cader, the man who maintains the subscription-only industry news portal Publishers Marketplace, continues to be vexed by the Man Booker Prize. The committee's insistence on putting forth a "longlist" of 13 titles one month before announcing the actual nominees, and then invariably snubbing the favorite, has infuriated Mr. Cader for years.
The 2008 winner was named last night as he and many other publishing people from the U.S. watched the proceedings on TV at the Frankfurt Book Fair. "Per the traditional pattern, the favorite never wins," Mr. Cader wrote afterwards on his Web site, before revealing that the winner was debut novelist Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. read more »
Lineup for October 15th, 2008
Felix Gillette and John Koblin attended a conference of media folks at Time Warner Center and saw, "dark days. Banks, churches, newspapers, the presidency—all in decline."
Don't forget publishing, since, according to Leon Neyfakh, "At hand is the twilight of an era most did not expect to miss, but will."
Plus: Oliver Stone... Mad Men... Saturday Night Live.
Wikipedia Bandit Claims Times Krugman Dead; Krugman Alive, Still Has Nobel Prize
This morning in an front page story by Catherine Rampell, The New York Times took a moment to gush about its Nobel prize-winning columnist, Paul Krugman.
After listing the Princeton professor and columnist's many laurels, Ms. Rampell wrote:
In recent years, in his column and a related blog on nytimes.com, nearly everything about the Bush administration — from health care policy to Iraq to 'general incompetence' — has been the object of his scorn.
Along the way, Mr. Krugman has come in for criticism himself from both economists and lay readers.
One of those critics has decided to kill Mr. Krugman—at least on Wikipedia. read more »
NBC Planning Separate SNL Web Portal
