Category Archives: Media

Überblog Gawker is running a house ad between the fourth and fifth entries on its homepage. "SPONSORSHIP" it says: "Gawker, part of the largest weblog media group, reaches over 600,000 media junkies each month." This comes as something of a … Continue reading →

I’ve long been a fan of Gothamist: in my very first BlogWars posting, I anointed Jen Chung Queen of the Blogosphere, with a superior site to Gawker and The Kicker. A few days later, in BlogWars III, I said that … Continue reading →

I was wrong: my report on the death of the New York Times magazine was, as they say, exaggerated. In fact, the latest issue is the best magazine of any description I’ve read in many months, if not longer. There … Continue reading →

The blogosphere is all atwitter this afternoon about an article Greg Lindsay wrote about Nick Denton, and Denton’s response. Blogfight! If you want to see Lindsay’s response to Denton (and me), it’s below. The name-calling is fun: Denton calls Lindsay … Continue reading →

I readily admit that I live in an anglophone bubble, but I think it’s probably fair to say that Piers Morgan is the highest-profile newspaper editor in the world. Make that was the highest-profile newspaper editor in the world: He … Continue reading →

It is with no small degree of sadness that I have to report the death of the New York Times magazine. When I first arrived in New York, it was a vibrant and interesting book, and its editor, Adam Moss, … Continue reading →

The front page of the Sunday New York Times is probably the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world. It’s where the Times puts its biggest investigative pieces, in the knowledge that people are much more likely to have … Continue reading →

A couple of news stories today piqued my interest with unsourced statements about financial markets which didn’t make a lot of sense to me. First of all there was a column by Ed Dravo in Slate, which said that When … Continue reading →

Over the course of the past year, I’ve had quite a lot of experience with the intersection between blogging and journalistic ethics. I have been accused, and have accused others, of blogging unethically. And yesterday, I said that one website … Continue reading →

In his profile of Larry David in this week’s New Yorker, James Kaplan finishes with an anecdote. David is sitting in his editing suite, working on a scene where he gets egged by a carful of teenagers. He can’t work … Continue reading →

The New York Times, in its efforts to transform itself into a truly national newspaper, has of late decided to beef up its coverage from the third most important city in the country, Los Angeles. LA has never had anything … Continue reading →

Stefan Geens, once a journalist himself, really ought to know better. He’s just published a bizarre essay on his website, which alternates between bog-standard European superciliousness ("Go ahead," he tells the New York Times, "become openly slanted, crusading, editorial, the … Continue reading →

Howell Raines, the former editor of the New York times, recently said that the biggest threat to US journalism was news pieces which betray a political point of view, the way things are done in Britain. (The story was reported … Continue reading →

Back when Slate first launched, its editor, Michael Kinsley, fresh from the New Republic, was still in magazine-metaphor mode. Do you remember his welcome note? We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it … Continue reading →

Before Gawker, before ElizabethSpiers.com, before freelance gigs for everybody from the New York Post to Radar, there was Capital Influx. A blog dating back to when Spiers was still a drone working for a venture capital company, Capital Influx was … Continue reading →

Magazine subscriptions are to households like cars are to roads: no matter how much space or time is available, they always fill it up and then some. Across the country, New Yorkers pile up reproachfully on bedside tables, Foreign Affairs … Continue reading →

About ten years ago, a small and fiery magazine was started up in England by Toby Young and Julie Burchill. Called the Modern Review, its slogan was "low culture for highbrows", and it was a real breath of fresh air. … Continue reading →

Seth Mnookin had quite a scoop yesterday: it looks like Penthouse is about to go under. Apparently Friday’s paychecks were slashed by 75%, and the parent company’s long-precarious finances have never looked worse. The latest issue of Penthouse could be … Continue reading →

Back from holiday (which is why this is the first blog this month) and catching up on recent blogs, I find the normally well-above-my-head Charles Stewart link to the latest cover article in the Spectator with a single word: "Unbelievable". … Continue reading →

On Sunday, the New York Times’s dry-as-dust "Week in Review" section fronted a big article by David Rosenbaum headlined "Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?". The story looked at false statements by George W Bush, such as "my … Continue reading →

After posting a query on Memefirst this morning about the different editions of the Harry Potter books, I decided to create a little matrix of them all, to see how they compared. Here it is; for the sake of saving … Continue reading →

Magazine editors are behind-the-scenes people, rather like central bank presidents. They should appear in public as little as possible, and, when they do, keep their mouths shut. Anna Wintour, of Vogue, has the right idea: only appear behind dark glasses, … Continue reading →

For a new magazine from the Dave Eggers stable, The Believer has had surprisingly little hype. It’s quietly arrived in bookstores without the Eggers name anywhere to be seen (although his influence is obvious and everywhere felt) and is clearly … Continue reading →

Once upon a time, business visionaries could look at companies as diverse as AOL and Time Warner and see synergies there. One provided content; the other the means to drive that content to consumers. But those days are long gone … Continue reading →

Last November, the New York Times played hardball with the Washington Post and forced the Post to sell its 50% share in the International Herald Tribune. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the Times wanted to create what … Continue reading →