But it hasn’t been all fun and games for this event… Check out WaPo‘s Amy Argetsinger‘s reporting yesterday. Funniest Celebrity Charitable Fund CEO Richard Siegel responded here.
Follow us on Twitter for updates (of jokes, and more likely, crashes-and-burns).
• ABC’s Terry Moran, Emmy-nominated actress Cheryl Hines, Office of Disability Employment Policy Assistant Secretary Kathy Martinez will celebrate United Cerebral Palsy’s “60 Years and Onward” at the Four Seasons. Moran will serve as the master of ceremonies to UCP’s event.
Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.
• Last time we checked, “Yeas & Nays” had yet to update its Twitter page photo, but now the Examiner makes it official. IntroducingNikki Schwab and Tara Palmeri.
• CNN’s “State of the Union” executive producer Michelle Jaconi and journo band Suspicious Package’s Christina Sevilla are among Washingtonian‘s Most Stylish People. The 18 fashionistas will be toasted at a party thrown by the mag this evening, and you can check out the complete list on newsstands.
Trading Spaces alum Mario De Armos called her “the most stylish journalist in Washington” and he just might be right. She’s the Editor-in-Chief of DC magazine. She’s stylin and we’re profilin’ Karen Sommer Shalett…
What staple outfit should every reporter own? I once got great advice while interviewing an energy expert at Jim Baker‘s think tank in Houston. Her parents had founded the famed department store Louis Boston and she had been a journalist prior to becoming a wonk. She told me to always dress for the individual you are interviewing. Match their level of formality no matter how high or low to gain confidence and trust. I’ve covered fashion, alongside every other aspect of lifestyle reporting, for a decade this January. It is amazing the pschyographics you can learn by looking at how a source presents him or herself and you can be sure that source is trying to size you up in the same way. Though I would beg news anchors to begin dressing for this millennium. I don’t know that making the mainstream audience identify with you is as important as making them believe you are sophisticated and smart. We found that with our President. People decided they actually did want someone smarter than them making the decisions and explaining them. Although, I guess that doesn’t explain Glenn Beck.
What one product could you not live without? Not to get mawkish, but my husband Scott and I lost our house and everything in it during Hurricane Katrina. I was covering New Orleans for the Times-Picayune. It is a really trippy place to be – reporting on stuff and losing all of yours, and then covering an entire population who lost theirs, too. I learned immediately that other than my family, there is nothing I can’t live without. Now, what would I prefer to have not lost? Oh, those Chanel cap-toed heels with the Mylar silver ribbons laced up the legs. It’s been four years and clearly I still pine for them.
What has been your biggest career challenge? We moved back to my hometown DC after Katrina. I was pregnant and we already had a two year old. I landed at the Washington Post as a shopping columnist. DC magazine quickly called and scooped me up, five months pregnant. That was the second time in my career that I had been hired full-time while pregnant – which to me, says a lot about our industry. However, as I was giving birth (I mean literally, as I was pushing), my features editor quit and I wound up bringing my newborn to the desk with me 10 days after he was born. In truth, I restructured the magazine after that and I think we are who we are today because of the staff that was hired in the aftermath. However, it was only after the baby was nearly two that I felt our family had truly moved beyond the trauma of the Hurricane, the move and the changes in career.
What working journalist do you most admire?Robin Givhan. I mean, she won the Pulitzer for explaining why I left politics to cover fashion, design and culture. Of all the journalists covering the way we live, Robin brings a sharp-shooting target to every issue and hits it dead on each time. When I was living in Houston and attending Fashion Week, my mom (who lives in Silver Spring) would call me and read aloud what Robin wrote in the Post every day of the shows. I was geek enough to tell Robin about it. She was lovely enough not to call me a stalker.
Find out what store Karen would choose if she could only shop at one for the rest of her life, the proudest moment in her career and what’s happening at DC magazine and more after the jump.
Michael Moore‘s been on quite the media blitz this week, so while we were on the red carpet last night, we caught up with the “Capitalism” filmmaker on his most and least favorite interviews so far (Martha Stewart gets a shout-out, guess for which) and where he’s getting his news these days (NPR and The Guardian).
He also had a lot to say about his guest anchoring experience on CNBC…
And after the jump, FBDC catches up with ABC’s Terry Moran, who was at last night’s premiere and interviewed Moore for “Nightline” last week.
This was the scene on last night’s red carpet for the premiere of Michael Moore‘s “Capitalism: A Love Story.” The sometimes controversial filmmaker made quite the entrance at the Uptown Theater, arriving with an entourage of bankers in shackles and citizen protestors.
After some intrepid investigative reporting by FBDC (and of course by intrepid investigative reporting we mean chatting over a few beers at the after-party), we were surprised to learn that the “actors” playing the bankers actually made twice as much as those playing the citizen protestors in the footage above. The bankers made $200 and the protestors made $100.
Seemed quite ironic to us considering the premise of this film, so we decided to get to the bottom of this with Moore himself… and we think you’ll get quite a kick out of his comments…
2, 4, 6, 8, Who Do We Appreciate?: Despite an extraordinarily feisty briefing that included an array of reporters’ follow-ups and several giggles (Gibbles?) from the podium, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs maintained that this week was not unusually loaded with news and that instead, “It’s been an extraordinary eight months.” CBS Radio’s Mark Knoller, asking whether RG was actually waiting for a “boring day” as Gibbs said he told POTUS recently, advised that “there’s always something.” There were a lot of somethings today, and WSJ‘s Jonathan Weisman asked whether the foreign policy issues were a distraction for the domestic ones. Reciting a common refrain, Gibbs chastised the press for pushing alternate sides and advised, “Maybe you guys should huddle and come up with one premise.” Later, when reporters pushed on a remark about the House’s climate change bill alone was proof that the “U.S. is on record” on the issue, RG said: “Again, you guys get together–” No such team huddles were scheduled.
Sweet 2016 Update: With FLOTUS already landed in Copenhagen, RG reports that POTUS will continue to make phone calls and have meetings to back “an extremely strong bid” for his hometown before and during Friday’s presidential visit to the IOC meeting. (In more troubling news out of Chicago, RG commented on the beating of teen honor student Derrion Albert by calling the “chilling” video “among the most shocking that you could ever see.” He noted that POTUS discussed youth violence and this incident as recently as this morning in the Oval.)
Quotable: RG, on Roll Call‘s report that the WH is secretly drafting health care legislation: “…neither was it, in my opinion, a very good story.” He said the WH has worked on “legislative language” for some time in conjunction with Capitol Hill. When asked the difference, he didn’t skip a beat: “Probably about 1200 pages.”
Good morning FishbowlDC! Got a blind item, interesting link, funny note, comment, birthday, anniversary or anything of the sort for Morning Reading List? Drop us a line.
A White House reporter used the made-for-SNL-word “strategery” in a question posed to press secretary Robert Gibbs at yesterday’s briefing. Funny man Gibbs, referring to the SNL newbie who dropped the F bomb this weekend, joked, “I’m going to curse in a minute.” (h/t HuffPost)
Where did the month of September go? What we know and what we’re reading this Wednesday morning…
In “Hollywood” news… HBO’s “Big Love” has been filming in DC– Bill Paxton and Chloe Sevigny have been spotted shooting at Union Station, outside the White House and in Dupont Circle. Jon got the boot from TLC’s “Jon and Kate Plus Eight.” And the “Real Housewives” have no idea who Nancy Pelosi is.
Barbara Walters interviewed Arianna Huffington on her SIRIUS XM radio show. An excerpt from Arianna: “I’m fine to be called a liberal. My problem is that with the analysis that sees everything is divided as right versus left. When you have major alliances among people who are liberals, people are who are conservatives agreeing on things like reforming Wall Street, on things like not escalating in Afghanistan, on things like providing healthcare for the uninsured. Because many people in business know that they have to carry the cost, and it’s weighing down their businesses.”
TWT‘s Christina Bellantoni: A Facebook poll asking whether President Obama should be assassinated has sparked an Internet uproar – with new polls calling for the offending poll creator’s arrest and other social-networking sites questioning their policies amid an unprecedented level of online vitriol.
NYT‘s executive editor Bill Keller on pay model in NYO: “In the end, I think it will come down to a gut call about what we think the audience will accept and how we think the market will evolve…Everybody wants it to be a well-informed, well-considered gut call, but it’s a gut call.”
Perhaps the biggest misstep (and PR nightmare) of the Economist‘s acquisition of CQ has been the firing of veteran newsman and CQ editor Brian Nutting after he questioned the layoffs of 44 staffers via email to the CQ-Roll Call newsroom.
Tips, endorsements and notes of raw emotion and respect for the beloved editor poured into FishbowlDC and made their way around the Washington media circuit throughout the day. One thing is for sure – employed or not, Nutting knows how to make a headline:
Nutting told Politico’s Michael Calderone, “I didn’t feel like I could turn my back on the people I worked with.”
Nutting’s name also hit Twitter and tweets about his firing exploded into a #cqfail “protwest” of sorts, suggesting that everyone unfollow @cqpolitics. The protwest even took on catchy slogans like “Every time CQ is unfollowed Brian Nutting gets his wings.”
While participating in #CQfail protwest@anamariecox said:
ALL HAIL BRIAN NUTTING, hero of #CQfail! “We now know the real reason was money.”
Not a good day for Economist PR at all…
I can’t help wondering what Mike Mills and Laurie Battaglia thought they were accomplishing by dismissing the one guy that seemed to be “out for” the already-shaken CQ staff. Are their executive egos that easily bruised? Were they making an example? A point? If so, what was it? That the Economist rule is dictatorial?
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