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-The long-awaited editorial consolidation of print and web finally happened at Forbes; 19 jobs were eliminated. [AllThingsD]
-Television doctor Sanjay Gupta may be the next surgeon general. Sadly, Wolf Blitzer continues to be overlooked for secretary of defense. [WaPo]
-Executives and senior managers at Village Voice Media are taking 15 percent pay reductions to help share the pain. [Westword via Romenesko]
-Excessive candor must run in the family: Chris Matthews's brother says the Hardball host, who's been publicly hemming and hawing over whether to run for Senate, isn't going to do it. [PolitickerPA].A few months back, I told you that Kevin Wall, a media entrepreneur and sometime partner of Al Gore, was on the verge of taking an ownership position in the environmental magazine Plenty.
That deal is still in the offing, but in the meantime, Plenty is feeling a money crunch. To deal with it, the magazine laid off "a little over half" its editorial staff yesterday, according to editor in chief and publisher Mark Spellun. (Gawker had reported that "almost the entire staff" was being let go.) The publication schedule is also being "adjusted": Plenty has been coming out bimonthly, but it's unclear how many print issues, if any, it will produce in 2009 ... ContinueThe mystery of why deputy managing editor Adi Ignatius is leaving Time is solved: He's the new editor in chief of Harvard Business Review. The Boston-based title has been without a top editor since last summer, when Tom Stewart quietly resigned. Stewart is now the chief marketing and knowledge officer at Booz & Co.
Here's the announcement ... ContinueDid you hear? Laura Bush got an $8 million advance to write about life in the White House! Or maybe that's a $3.5 million advance. Or $1.6 million. Do I hear $1 million even?
In its initial report on the First Lady's deal with Scribner to publish a memoir in 2010, the Associated Press, citing no sources, guesstimated that the contract "would likely be worth at least as much as Hillary Clinton's $8 million for the memoir Living History."
This even though my Portfolio colleague Sheelah Kolhatkar, writing in The New Yorker last week, revealed that most of the editors who met with Bush to discuss the project came away unimpressed ... ContinueApple guru Steve Jobs finally went public about his heath yesterday, albeit with a characteristically gnomic disclosure that shed alarmingly little light on the subject. How to parse it? If you're a newspaper, of course, the answer is to find a single expert willing to speculate wildly.
The Wall Street Journal found someone willing to consider the worst case scenario:
Michael D. Jensen, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic, said it is possible Mr. Jobs's cancer has returned and is the cause of the imbalance that led to the weight loss. Treatment could include another surgery to remove the tumor, or drugs to restore a healthy hormonal balance. Doctors said the outlook for patients with a recurrence varies widely.The New York Times, meanwhile, elicited a more optimistic prognosis from its expert, who said Jobs's ailment may be a relatively benign after-effect from surgery on his pancreas ... Continue
-A display ad in The New York Times's newest ad position -- the bottom of page one -- costs $75,000 a pop on weekdays and $100,000 on Sundays; new advertisers who want to buy the space have to commit to running 26 times a year. [NYP]
-Lionsgate Entertainment is buying the TV Guide Channel and tvguide.com for $255 million. A private equity group had made its own deal to buy those properties just a few weeks ago, but Macrovision, which owns them, decided it liked the Lionsgate offer better. [LAT]
-Critic Alessandra Stanley says ABC's controversial new reality series Homeland Security USA "is an exclusive, inside look at a recruitment video." [NYT]
-Time deputy managing editor Adi Ignatius, a 13-year veteran of the newsweekly, is leaving. [FishbowlNY]
-Borders has replaced its CEO, George Jones, with an outsider from a private equity firm, Ron Marshall. [AP].-Scribner has won the bidding war, such as it was, for Laura Bush's memoir. It'll come out in 2010. [AP]
-Washington Post managing editor Phil Bennett is stepping down in favor of a non-news job; he says it's his decision. [E&P]
-On the big business story of the day -- the health of Apple chairman Steve Jobs -- the score is disreputable blog, 1, CNBC, 0. [SAI]
-Someone who can't quite spell Bill O'Reilly's name hacked his Twitter account. Related: Bill O'Reilly has a Twitter account??? [Huffpo].Are there some people out there who automatically buy any book they see promoted on The Daily Show?
That's the best explanation I can think of for the surprisingly non-infinitesimal sales of The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. Since it went on sale Dec. 2, the title has sold 6,012 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan. Factor in sales not recorded by BookScan and the title has probably sold more like 8,500 copies, at a pre-discount price of $15 a piece.
As web-to-book crossovers go, that's closer to the sales of a modest success like Stuff White People Like than to a complete flop like The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media ... Continue-The futureheads in the electronics business say 3-D is going to be the next big thing in television. Just imagine watching Kath & Kim in three dimensions. Mind-blowing. [WSJ]
-For people who work in book publishing, Town Cars, off-sites and lunch at the Four Seasons are out; Metrocards, webcam conferences and pizza are in. [NYT]
-JPG, a photography magazine with an innovative user-generated content model, is shutting down. Or maybe not, with an eleventh-hour deal still reportedly in the works. [Folio, TechCrunch]
-Simon Dumenco considers the Huffington Post's supposed valuation of $200 million: "[A]nybody with basic math skills and a halfway-decent bullshit detector knew the figure was nonsense, even before the economy melted down." [Ad Age]
-Another endorsement deal for Michael Phelps, the fastest man in a Speedo: He'll be the face of Mazda in China. [Bloomberg].Notice something unusual about this morning's copy of The New York Times?
It features the paper's first-ever page-one display ad -- a promo for CBS whose copy playfully reads "Front Page News."
The Times, in its own story on the policy change, says it will now accept ads on the front page, but only below the fold ... Continue-While you were getting drunk on champagne in the early minutes of 2009, executives from Time Warner Cable and Viacom were hammering out a new carriage agreement, ending an ugly stand-off. [THR]
-Kathy Griffin brought a little extra salt to CNN's New Year's festivities. Anderson Cooper was simply scandalized. [NYP]
-New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn thinks Vogue has become "stale and predictable," not to mention out of touch and too obsessed with socialites. [NYT].Gawker Media has found a buyer for Consumerist, but Defamer? That's still in play.
Earlier today, FishbowlNY reported that Gawker boss Nick Denton was planning later today to announce a buyer for the entertainment-industry gossip site, which these days accounts for a mere 4.6 percent of his blog network's traffic.
But Denton (reached, as ever, via IM) insists there's nothing to announce. "We're open to offers," he says.
Perhaps he should employ Jeff Jarvis as a broker? The Buzzmachine blogger is taking credit for cuing up the Consumerist sale ... ContinueThe article that The New York Times published in February about the relationship between Sen. John McCain and a lobbyist named Vicki Iseman was, journalistically speaking, kind of a turd: a gussied-up excuse to publish what amounted to a scrap of decade-old political gossip. But the lawsuit it inspired isn't a whole lot more coherent.
Iseman's 36-page, $27 million defamation complaint against the Times, filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Virginia, contains, as Michael Calderone notes, a fair bit of media criticism, but it displays a shaky grasp of how a paper like the Times operates. Time and again, Iseman and her lawyers ascribe the actions of Times reporters and editors to sinister motives rather than to the exigencies of deadline journalism or the earnest balancing of competing interests ... Continue