Matt Haber

Who are this year's Media Mensches? Meet The New York Times' Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, director Errol Morris, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux's Lorin Stein, and 60 Minutes' Jeffrey Fager.

Felix Gillette looks at CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips, "a seasoned, London-based reporter. But he is also—thanks to the thinly spread news-gathering operations at CBS News—the lead reporter on most of the network’s stories in Israel. It’s a beat that spans more than 2,200 miles."

Leon Neyfakh writes, "Drenka Willen was just one of many individuals—including one woman seven months pregnant and another on maternity leave—to be hastily laid off last month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt amid budget cuts. She is, however, the only one among them whom the severely troubled company’s CEO, Tony Lucki, has since asked to please come back." Plus: Baker Blitzes Bush Fam for Bloomsbury, Has Big Bash!

John Koblin checks in with Condé Nast and its chief Si Newhouse (not his brother Donald, as the photo in our print edition suggests) , where "This was a particularly nervous holiday season—what would Si do in this scary, unprecedented, in-the-toilet media year?" Plus: Change We Can Subscribe To.

Plus: Twitter... The Knit That Ate Manhattan... Harold Pinter.

In the January/February issue of The Atlantic, columnist Michael Hirschorn looks at the future of The New York Times and wonders, "[W]hat if the old media dies much more quickly? ... [W]hat if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?"

Mr. Hirschorn looks at the Times Company's difficult year—and its possibly even more difficult year ahead—before concluding that:

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist.  read more »

Just weeks after The Daily Show with Jon Stewart enlisted Hall & Oates to send off Alan Colmes—lyrics included, "Anytime you need a token liberal/ Nothing but a body to fill the chair/ The barest shadow of a person/ Alan Colmes is always there"—Stephen Colbert has enlisted the former Hannity sidekick as co-host of his Comedy Central show. (For a day anyway.)

The new show—renamed Colbert and Colmes—features a credit sequence in which Mr. Colbert pulls a Lilliputian-sized Mr. Colmes out of his pocket and holds him up by the scruff of his neck as the liberal pundit squeaks and squirms.  read more »

This morning, fans of The New-York Ghost, the weird and frequently wonderful little "Newsletter You Print Out at Work," were treated with a new issue, Vol. IV, No. 53.

But instead of calling itself a weekly, the digital-only paper of McSweeney's-like squibs, poetry, essays, and fiction (with occasional contributions from writers like The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones) is now calling itself "seasonal" due to its semi-erratic publishing schedule.

Started in 2006 by Believer co-editor and Personal Days author Ed Park, The New-York Ghost went from mini cult to the subject of a New York Times 'City' section profile by Sani Knafo in 2007, which dubbed Mr. Park The Wizard of Whimsy.  read more »

Today, The Huffington Post's Media Vertical has a huge, attention-grabbing above-the-scroll headline about The New York Times' announcement that the paper is now selling ads on A1, which reads, FRONT PAGE FOR SALE.

It should be noted that the Huffington Post, which was the subject of Simon Dumenco's Ad Age column today in which he estimated the aggregator and blog network's true value is considerably less than the $200 million figure bandied about last year, featured ads for the Blackberry Bold ("The fastest device on the 3G network," apparently), Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, an appearance by Arianna Huffington "And Huffpost bloggers" at the 92nd Street Y, and a rotating placement that has featured Classmates.com, Encore Wynn Las Vegas, Nike, and others.

Well, Ms. Huffington did tell The Times' Brien Stelter in March 2008 that her site aimed to be an "Internet newspaper."  read more »

More bad news in today's New York Times. According to a report by Dennis Overbye, after 10 billion years of record-setting growth, the universe's expansion has slowed down:

After bulking up rapidly in the first 10 billion years of cosmic time, clusters of galaxies, the cloudlike swarms that are the largest conglomerations of matter in the universe, have grown anemically or not at all during the last five billion years, like sullen teenagers who suddenly refuse to eat.

'This result could be explained as arrested development of the universe,' said Alexey Vikhlinin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led a multinational team using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to weigh galaxy clusters from far across space.

 read more »

Why are magazine companies cutting their Web staffs? According to John Koblin, in the current climate "it appears a portion of the magazine world, which was never a quick adapter to the Web anyway, is responding by shoving their Web people right off the boat first. 'You’re never going to get the traffic that really matters,' said one publisher at Condé Nast. 'So it’s a traffic thing, but also, how do you monetize the traffic that you have? It’s impossible.'" Plus: What's Behind Post Cozying Up to Caroline?

Will new on-air talent be discovered now that networks are letting people go? Felix Gillette talks to New York-based talent-development executives and found that, in the words of Elena Nachmanoff of NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC, “In these times, it’s more important than ever."

Leon Neyfakh writes: "There were a few desperate hours on Monday morning when the layoffs taking place at Farrar, Straus and Giroux seemed like they were being carried out with an unsettling degree of spontaneity. To be sure, the staff had been living in fear of cutbacks for months (who hasn’t?), but the anxiety they experienced during that period was nothing compared to how most of them felt when they heard shortly after coming into work that longtime colleagues across the company were being pulled aside and informed of their redundancy."

Plus: A 25-Year-Old Boy Wonder Wants to Make This a Tech Town... Beware L'Homme Fatale!... What Really Killed the Office Party?.

As you may have heard, Chris Weitz has been tapped to replace Catherine Hardwicke as the director of New Moon, the sequel to Stephanie Meyer's vampire love story Twilight. ("TOLDJA!," Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke shouted when the news was announced.)

By way of introduction, Mr. Weitz sent an open letter to Twilight's diehard fans—those adolescent girls and forever-adolescent young women drawn to, (per The Atlantic's Caitlan Flanagan), "the dangers and dramatic consequences of... forbidden love"—which he partially addressed to the books' characters.

From the letter:

I am very grateful to have received her permission to protect New Moon in its translation from the page to the screen.

For fans of the books and of the film of Twilight, this may come as an unexpected twist. So I want to write briefly to try to put you at ease, and to give you reason to hope for and expect the best.

For the last decade of my career as a director, I have chosen to make adaptations of complex and involved works of literature. This has always begun with the love of a book and its characters, story, and theme; and it has always involved a respect of and responsiveness to the feelings of other people who loved those books.

 read more »

There wasn't a single free seat at the Friday night screening of Che at the Ziegfeld Theatre. A sign at the box office window informed attendees that the historic 1,131-seat theater was completely sold out.

Reviews for Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic of Latin American revolutionary and T-shirt model Ernesto "Che" Guevara (played by co-producer Benicio Del Toro) had been split—The Los Angeles Times' Sheri Linden called it "extraordinary and challenging"; The New York Times' A.O. Scott called it "epic hagiography" and dinged Mr. Soderbergh's politics as "naïve and fuzzy"—but the crowd seemed fully ready to sit through the complete movie—4 hours and 23 minutes, with a half-hour intermission in between.  read more »

The New York Times correspondent Robin Toner has died at age 54, according to a Times obituary by Todd S. Purdum.

Mr. Purdum writes that Ms. Toner was "the first woman to be the national political correspondent" for the paper:

In a career of nearly 25 years at The Times, and in an age of increasing specialization, Ms. Toner reported authoritatively on almost every domestic issue, whether it was taxes, welfare, Social Security, immigration or health-care policy.

And in a craft in which small errors are commonplace and bigger mistakes a regular occupational hazard, Ms. Toner devised a meticulous personal method for checking and re-checking names, dates, facts and figures in her own raw copy, a step few reporters take.

 read more »

- Christmas Is Canceled!: "In this chilly economic climate, some companies are dumping holiday fetes—but others are still partying like it's 2007," by Elizabeth Gallagher, Page Six Magazine.

- Gender Bender: "More women are drinking, and the women who drink are drinking more, in some cases matching their male peers. This is the kind of equality nobody was fighting for," by Alex Morris, New York Magazine.

- Childless for 50 yrs, mother at 70: "Last week, Rajo Devi, from Alewa village in Haryana’s Jind district, became the proud mother of a baby girl — after 50 years of marriage. Rajo Devi became the world’s oldest woman — she is 70 years old and her husband Bala Ram is 72 — to have a child, thanks to In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF)," by Devendra Uppal, The Hindustan Times.

- Study Reports Anal Sex on Rise Among Teens: "Lack of Sex Education, Virginity Pledges, Ignorance Contribute to Risky Behavior," by Susan Donaldson James, ABC News.

- Bush is Back!: "Not in the White House. But thanks to the recession, women are skipping the Brazilian and finally growing a little hair down there," by Lisa Germinsky, Salon.

- Even in Recession, Spend They Must: Luxury Shoppers Anonymous: "Just because the sun is going down on the economy doesn't mean well-heeled women have to stop shopping. But it doesn't mean they're proud of it," by Ruth La Ferla, The New York Times.

- How Sexy is The Beast?: "Can Tina Brown salvage the dilapidated print news industry?" by Ted Johnson, Maegan Carberry, and Teresa Valdez Klein, The Huffington Post.

"[W]hen you see those transcripts, it's like out of an Oliver Stone movie. It's like somebody wrote this guy into the plot of a movie..."—Dan Barrett, quoted by Bob Seidenberg, The Evanston Review.

"I have never even seen or heard anything like this. I don’t even know if a Hollywood movie producer could come up with this script."—Tom Cross, quoted by Ben Calhoun, City Room, Chicago Public Radio, December 10, 2008.

"Putting aside the peculiar dialect of desperation that made the governor sound like a John Malkovich character in a David Mamet play, the complaint showed a man trolling the depths of darkness."— Timothy Egan, The New York Times.

"If David Mamet didn't write the profane, wiretapped dialogue for the Illinois governor's attempt to sell Obama's Senate seat, he should have." — Choire Sicha, Salon.

"[H]is alleged attempts to fill president-elect Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat in exchange for favours could have been lifted wholesale from a mafia B movie..."— Edward Luce, The Financial Times.

Who was left standing after Random House's reorganization? According to Leon Neyfakh, Sonny Mehta, whose Knopf now oversees several new imprints. "Whatever role Mr. Mehta had in getting what he got, the spoils reaped—from the unspeakably lucrative John Grisham franchise to the next blockbuster by Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown—were evident immediately."

Who brokered David Gregory's Meet the Press deal? According to Felix Gillete, it wasn't his long-time agent, Richard Leibner. "On Monday morning, with the deal finally made public, white-shoe New York law firm Cravath, Swaine, & Moore posted a brief item on its Web site, crediting two of its partners—Eric Hilfers and Robert Joffe—for handling the negotiations." Plus: Jeff Zucker's Challenge: Fire Them Before Cute Caroling Promo Spot.

John Koblin looks at the Times Company in the wake of its announced plan to use its headquarters to ease down its $400 million in debt. "The Times Company has only cut modestly from the newsroom at its flagship paper—they cut about 100 jobs back in February, long before the crash, and its newsroom remains, by far, the biggest newsroom for any newspaper in the country, with around 1,200 people. They are shutting down their print distributor, City & Suburban, which will mean job cuts for more than 550 people, and they eliminated the stand-alone sections of Metro and sports." Plus: No Bounce for Esquire in Its Anniversary Year.

Plus: Revolutionary Road... Sex and Food Face Off at Le Cirque... Obama's Internet Adventure.  read more »

According to Reuters, Paul Krugman is in Stockholm, Sweden to collect some sort of fancy prize for the work the does when not writing his twice-weekly column for The New York Times.

While we're Mr. Krugman is very excited about the $1.3 million he's receiving for this thing, we were a little surprised to see that in his absence, his Times-hosted blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, has turned into a repository for LOLCats.

Under the headline Limited posting for the next few days, Mr. Krugman presents the image at right with the brief note:

I feel guilty about not saying more re the auto bailout, the Obama stimulus plan, and more.  read more »

What's Padma Lakshmi's favorite part of The New York Times' Web site? According to a video of the model-turned-author- turned reality competition hostess, it's Bill Cunningham's 'On the Street' audio slide shows. (Weirdly, she does not mention the Books section where she might be at risk of running into her ex-husband, Scarlett Johannson-nuzzling author Salman Rushdie.)

Ms. Lakshmi's video is one of several celebrity testimonials for the paper's Web site included in a new nytimes.com campaign called Conversations, which a press release put out today announces as:

[A] new marketing campaign (nytimes.com/conversations), designed by The Times's marketing team to illustrate the depth of the site's many offerings from its high-quality journalism and extensive multimedia features, to the scores of interactive extras available to readers.

If the sight of Ms. Lakshmi reclining in her purple dress and bangles doesn't make you want to click on The Times' site over and over again, how about... Economist-turned-personality Ben Stein and a gorgeous Weimaraner?  read more »

Lifehacker's Gina Trapani brings word that Google has given magazine nerds an early Christmas present in the form of searchable magazine archives. (The announcement originally appeared on Google's official blog.)

What can you find? At the moment, it only includes New York, Popular Science, and Ebony, but it's still got a lot of great stuff.

Update, 5:05 p.m.: A Google rep emailed Media Mob (how do they keep track of everything online—oh, right) to tell us that the archive also includes Liberty, Jet, Ebony Jr., Baseball Digest, Black Belt, Men's Health, and Prevention.

Check out New York's April 29, 1968 profile of Warhol superstar Viva, La Dolce Viva by Barbara L. Goldsmith with that famous nude photo by Diane Arbus that still packs a visceral punch. (Sadly, we couldn't find Tom Wolfe's "Tiny Mummies.")

Wanna learn what it was like to fly a jetpack? See Popular Science's November 1969 cover story.

Or check out Ebony's provocative August 1965 cover story, "The WHITE Problem in America."

More bad news from the West Coast this morning comes from LA Observed's Kevin Roderick: payments to Los Angeles Times freelancers has been stopped.

Mr. Roderick writes:

If the Los Angeles Times owes you money, you might have to wait a long time. Publisher Eddy Hartenstein told the staff yesterday that the Chapter 11 filing freezes pending payments to freelancers, but said the paper will ask the Delaware judge to allow the commitments to be met. This year's hundreds of laid-off former employees have not heard those assurances and are fairly frantic to find out how long their severance payments will be interrupted.  read more »

Speaking of striking magazine covers, this month, Philadelphia Magazine its 100th birthday with a special Philadelphia Century issue that features a great centerfold of 100 magazine covers that have defined the magazine since April 1908.

The gallery (which unfortunately is not online) is an interesting snapshot of the 20th Century: April 1945's "When He Comes Home" offered a smaller take on the end of World War II; October 1969's "Revolution in Youth Fashion—featuring an Afro'd African American woman and her ring-festooned clenched fist—gave new meaning to radical chic; May 1987's "AIDS in Philadelphia" spoke to a suddenly mainstream concern among the upper-middle class; and the October 2001 cover was an almost all-black 9/11 tribute.  read more »

Who needs fancy Chief Innovation Officers (or their imaginary sons)? Wired's Clive Thompson just might've come up with the solution to all of the big media companies' problems. As Mr. McGuire counseled young Benjamin Bradock in The Graduate, we have just one word—are you listening—for the Tribune Company, The New York Times Company, CNN, and everyone else: "T-shirts."

Mr. Thompson's begins Tech Biz column recounting how the creators of Red vs. Blue, the so-called "machinema" series he wrote about in The New York Times back in 2005, went legit through apparel sales:

Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I've begun to call 'the T-shirt economy'—paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Even 10 cents for a download of something like Red vs. Blue might drive away the fans. So instead of fighting this dynamic, today's smart artists are simply adapting to it.

Their algorithm is simple: First, don't limit your audience by insisting they pay to see your work. Instead, let your content roam freely online, so it generates as large an audience as possible. Then cash in on your fans' desire to sport merchandise that declares their allegiance to you.

It's an idea just crazy enough to work!  read more »

As part of its year-end 'Top 10 Everything of 2008' package, Time Magazine's Arthur Hochstein recently compiled the Top 10 Magazine Covers of the year.

The New Yorker's austere post-Election cover featuring the Lincoln Memorial with a new 'O' moon was number one. Rolling Stone's wordless Barack Obama cover made the list at number 3, and Entertainment Weekly's attention-grabbing Barry Blitt/New Yorker parody cover featuring Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart was tapped at number four.

Somewhat controversially—since the image already won Best Magazine cover from ASME in October—number two, was New York's Barbara Kruger-designed image of disgraced former governor-turned-Slate columnist Eliot Spitzer.  read more »

The New York Observer's Man in Beijing, Tom Scocca, has a few thoughts on yesterday's announcement that Sam Zell's Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy protection.

Here he is, channeling the Tribune Company's Chief Innovation Officer, Lee Abrams:

CRUSHING POVERTY is not only a GREAT MOTIVATOR, but it is also the FASTEST- GROWING DEMOGRAPHIC in our rapidly changing marketplace.

Newspapers have always been the best HOBO BLANKETS, and we have UNPARALLELED OPPORTUNITY to LIVE the product that we make.

Many of our writers will be BUNDLED UNDER the very same WORDS THEY WROTE.

Questioning assumptions is our FIRST DUTY. 'How do I feed my children?' people ask.

 read more »

Last night, The New York Times' Bill Carter broke the news that NBC will be moving Jay Leno to 10 p.m. in 2009.

According to Mr. Carter:

The new show, which will begin next fall, is expected to be set in Mr. Leno’s longtime studio in Burbank, Calif. Mr. Leno is expected to retain many of the most popular elements of his 'Tonight Show,' including his monologue and bits like 'Headlines' and 'Jay Walking.' One 'Tonight Show' staff member said the new program would not be a variety show.

Under the new arrangement, Conan O'Brien will film his version of The Tonight Show in a new studio and Jimmy Fallon's show—which debuted online last night—will shoot in New York. (Unmentioned was soon-to-be father Carson Daly.)

Perhaps this is what NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker meant when he told the crowd at UBS's 36th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference that he was operating under a "safety first" mentality.

Lynn Andriani of Publisher's Weekly—which is on some kind of roll today—is reporting that critic John Freeman has been named American editor of Granta, the English literary journal.

As luck would have earlier this month, PW's Craig Morgan Teicher profiled Mr. Freeman, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle, and he told the reporter that the job of being a critic is "to be a public reader." He continued:

'Reading's a private, intimate experience. But to know what it feels like to read a book you haven't read, you need to have someone write to you about it, which is what a critic does: explain what it feels like to spend a few hours inside a book.'  read more »

The Huffington Post's Media vertical alerts us to the fact that The Huffington Post's founder and namesake, Arianna Huffington, has been named 'Person of the Year' by I Want Media.

According to the Huffington Post piece, "Arianna Huffington beat out contenders like Tina Fey, Rupert Murdoch and the Laid-Off Journalist to win I Want Media's Person of the Year 2008."

After quoting I Want Media's writeup ("[Arianna] Huffington had a big year in 2008, guiding her liberal-leaning news and blog site to record traffic during the U.S. election season"), The Huffington Post offered "Thanks to everyone who voted." For Ms. Huffington.

What does former New York Times reporter Judith Miller think of Nothing But the Truth. the movie partially inspired by her time spent in jail for refusing to name sources connected to the leaking of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame?

"It brought a lot of stuff back," Ms. Miller told The Times' Adam Liptak this weekend. "Parts of it were very disturbing to me."

Ms. Miller, who now works for Fox News, told Mr. Liptak that she had "nothing to do with the movie," but she did meet with Kate Beckinsale, who plays her sorta-kinda onscreen doppelgänger:

Ms. Beckinsale met Ms. Miller two summers ago for a lunch at the Century Association, a private club in Manhattan, arranged by Mr. Abrams. Ms. Beckinsale said that the lunch was pleasant but that Ms. Miller was wary. 'I know she was very gun shy about a movie being made at all,' Ms. Beckinsale said.  read more »

In these bleak economic times, Americans are being forced to give up certain comforts in order to survive. In late November, The New York Times' Stephanie Rosenbloom introduced readers to Kristen Hunt, a Safety Harbor, Florida mom who went without new designer jeans so her kids could have a Walk-In play kitchen. It was the kind of sad but hopeful O. Henry-like story readers have come to expect from the paper that dedicates itself to documenting The Neediest Cases.

Now, according to an interview with the Huffington Post's Katherine Thomson, we learn that producer Brian Grazer has been forced to cut back as well:

Do you still have a cultural attache?

That was sort of a joke title.

 read more »

Tina Brown and Barry Diller's Daily Beast (A thousand more hours, a thousand more hours!) has a video of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly dispatching a correspondent to ambush interview The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg on the streets of New York. Apparently Mr. O'Reilly felt Mr. Hertzberg misquoted his interview with Newt Gringrich, and wanted him to apologize. (This comes via Michael Calderone's Politico blog.)

What's amusing about the video isn't the low-budget Michael Moore wannabe street interview segment—because The O'Reilly Factor has featured those before—but Mr. O'Reilly strained—almost gagging—pronunciation of Mr. Hertzberg's (and later in the segment, New Yorker editor David Remnick's) name.  read more »

Before the collapse of the economy and the loss of thousands of jobs in New York, there was a time when a lone, well-dressed but overdrawn young woman captivated the world with her plucky tale of credit card debt and savvy Internet self-marketing. We're referring, of course, to savekaryn.com, the Web site launched in 2002 by Karen Bosnak, a New York City woman who asked internet users to pay down her $20,000 consumer debt because, well, she couldn't, like, do it herself or something.

In October 2002, Salon's Janelle Brown called Ms. Bosnak "The world's most successful Internet panhandler." (The article's headline was a rather unsympathetic Brother, Can You Spare a Dime for My Gucci Bills?)  read more »

Readers of the print edition of The New York Times—they're out there somewhere—were treated to a bit of creative whimsy in the art accompanying Danny Hakim's A1 story about former New York Governor Mario Cuomo's unwillingness to pose for an official portrait.

To illustrate the story, the paper used four imaginary portraits by illustrator Thomas Fuchs done in the signature styles of Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and Robert Crumb. (The images can be seen here.)

And while readers should be thankful Mr. Fuchs didn't go for, say Francis Bacon or—shudder—Jake and Dinos Chapman, the illustrator needn't have bothered with the Warhol knockoff since Mr. Cuomo has already been portrayed by the artist for the September 1985 cover of Manhattan, Inc.  read more »

Myrna Blyth, the former editor of Ladies Home Journal and self-described 'only republican in women's publishing' has been named editor-in-chief of something called Betty Confidential—a site which describes itself as "Your Best Friend. Only Better"—according to a release.

Ms. Blyth maintains a blog called Blyth Times and writes a column for The National Review called Blyth Spirit. (Are you sensing a theme?)

Full release after the jump:  read more »

What are people saying about David Gregory, NBC News' heir presumptive for Tim Russert's job on Meet the Press? Felix Gillette talks to some who say things like, “He’s got great instincts when it comes to what area of stories to probe...I don’t think there’s much of a learning curve when it comes to politics. He knows that world as well as anyone. He gets great stuff out of people" and "He can be an aggressive questioner—as he showed in the White House Press Room. He was a dramatic and good and persistent questioner. And he’s not afraid to be disliked.”

Is Tina Brown "like Schindler, in a skirt-suit"? That's what John Koblin calls her when it comes to bringing laid off writers into her Daily Beast. But what can they hope to be paid? Plus: January Groans: Mags' Lean Month Gets Downright Gaunt.

Can a 26-year-old consultant who took Columbia's Publishing Course and worked for a time at Little, Brown save publishing? Leon Neyfakh meets Eric Wolff, who says, "Truth is, there isn’t a whole lot of reason for a big media company to own a book company unless it wants to be in that business... Corporations generally want growth stories, and there’s no growth in books.”

Plus: Missbehave's new editor... Superstar avatars... Murdoch the Magnificent.