Scandals

John Mailer, son of writer and Village Voice co-founder Norman Mailer, has joined the campaign on Change.org calling on Village Voice Media to shut down the adult section of  its Backpage.com classifieds site where individuals have advertised children and teens for sex.

According to the petition, started by Groundswell, a “multifaith social action initiative”:

A Georgia man was arrested for pimping two 17-year-old girls around the Nashville area. Detectives responded to a suspicious ad on Backpage.com and drove to a motel. There, they found the teens and their 37-year-old pimp, as well as a laptop computer, likely used for the online advertising. Just four days prior to that, four people in Denver were arrested for forcing a teen girl into prostitution. They also advertised her sexual services, including semi-nude pictures, on Backpage. And last year, a South Dakota couple was arrested for selling underage girls for sex on …. wait for it … Backpage.com yet again.

Here’s what Mailer, just one of the petition’s 80,000 supporters, had to say:

“The Village Voice was born out of the desire for an independent media voice for the people, a voice that had the freedom and authority to hold those who abuse power accountable for their actions. While I understand firsthand the financial difficulties facing all print publications today, the fact of the matter is that Village Voice is making money from selling advertisements that others have used to buy and sell minors for sex.”

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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.

Whether it’s Marie Claire and Mike and Molly or airbrushing at Newsweek, readers are using the Web to talk back to their favorite mags like never before, and not even legacy pubs like Essence are safe.

The stuff hit the fan for the Black women’s bible in 2010 when it hired a white fashion director, and a similar controversy erupted recently over its hiring of a white managing editor. So, in the second installment of our Media Beat interview, we asked editor-in-chief Constance C.R. White to address whether the criticism was valid.

“My take is that Essence has always had a diverse staff,” she said. “That was last year… and I’m moving forward.”

White said her main focus in the fashion section, and all of the book, is to focus on what the reader wants, not to reflect the opinions of her editors.

“If you start to think of it as an editor as necessarily your concept of the situation, you can really get off-track. What we really do and what I really encourage my editors to do is be a proxy for the reader.”

Part 1: Essence EIC: We Are ‘Absolutely’ Looking for New Writers

Part 3: Want a Job at Essence? Be Curious.

This video can also be viewed on YouTube.

If you haven’t heard, News Corp. has been deeply mired in a phone-hacking scandal that came to a head earlier this week when Guardian‘s Nick Davies and Amelia Hill reported that News Corp.’s News of the World journalists may have hacked into the voicemail of a 13-year-old girl who went missing in March 2002. Jack Shafer at Slate pens an entertaining column that provides a big picture look at the scandal for those who want to catch up, and makes Shafer’s feelings toward Rupert Murdoch, the beleaguered head of News Corp., very, very clear.

If you’re no Murdoch fan yourself, here are our favorite of Shafer’s gleeful takedowns of the media mogul for your reading pleasure:

1. If Rupert Murdoch could be slain by a mere scandal, he would have been embalmed and entombed long ago.

2. We expect the worst from Murdoch, and he lives up to our expectations.

3. The genocidal tyrant has successfully swept away every scandal—major and minor—he has ever faced because of his special skill at normalizing his malefactions.

4. Murdoch’s instinct, of course, will be to sacrifice [Rebekah Brooks], but I doubt that the mob that is gathering will be satisfied with one body. They’ll want strong, tough, old meat, too. Something that’s fit for grilling on the barbie.

5. Send recipes for grilled Murdoch to slate.pressbox@gmail.com and monitor my Twitter feed for a prayer for Rupert’s soul.

For those of you have been following every sordid detail about the Anthony Weiner scandal, one major piece might have caught you off guard: how quickly mainstream media outlets like the New York Times reported that Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin was three months pregnant, based on the word of several sources. It’s a huge story, but normally details like that are left to the tabloid trade. Politico’s On Media takes a look at the difficult decision news outlets faced in reporting this story.

The news that Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is pregnant had been known and agonized over in newsrooms, including this one, for more than 24 hours before it was reported on Wednesday night… For the New York Times, which broke the story, the decision was not a quick one. The paper published the story a little after 5 p.m. Wednesday night on its City Room blog after Gawker published an item saying it had heard that Abedin was pregnant.

Phil Corbett, the Times’s standards editor, emailed Politico: “We try to be sensitive to privacy concerns, and we weighed that issue here, too. But Weiner’s problems were obviously a big story, and his actions and words had clearly put himself, his private life and his marriage squarely into the news.”

He also made clear that the decision was the Times‘ own. “We don’t take our cues from Gawker on a story like this.”

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A big story broke on the Daily Caller today with a series of leaked Twitter direct messages from top Sarah Palin aide Rebecca Mansour mocking major political figures like Mitt Romney and even Palin’s own daughter Bristol Palin. Mansour sent private messages calling Romney’s fans “wacky as hell,” and said conservative blogger Erick Erickson of Red State was “a total douchebag.” She also said about Bristol: “She will hold her at arm’s length. Even Thatcher was never able to disown her screw up son Mark. It’s a Mom thing,”

But an intriguing part to this story is how the direct messages were leaked in the first place. Politico’s Ben Smith wrote that he has been waiting for this story to break for a few months, as somebody tried to sell him the same emails last fall.  “Does Politico pay for exclusives?  Cause I’m looking to sell. I have 122 direct messages from Sarah Palin staffer Rebecca Mansour,” the person “Toki de la Vega” emailed.

When Smith responded with a counter-offer of “lunch and ‘undying gratitude,’” he received this response:

“Sorry, Ben, but it’s going to take more than a happy meal and a hand shake to get me to betray someone’s confidence. Only freshly printed 100 dollar bills help me get over feelings of guilt,” wrote the emailer, who continued, “Would it violate some fake journalistic ethics and standards to get me in contact someone who does pay? I know that the thought of blogging about this is making your panties wet. The topics range from Chuck Hagel to Ricky Hollywood and everything else in between. It’s a f***ing blogger’s gold mine.”

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New York newspapers and TV stations rushed to the Intercontinental Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen last night after news of the brutal murder of Portuguese journalist Carlos Castro and the arrest of his model companion Renato Seabra. The Daily News story:

The naked body of Carlos Castro, 65, was found lying face-up in a pool of blood inside his 34th-floor room at the InterContinental New York Times Square on W. 44th St. about 7p.m., the sources said. The prominent gay activist had been bludgeoned in the head and his scrotum cut off, sources said.

Castro, a gay rights advocate, has written for newspapers, magazines and performed and produced for television and radio stations in Portugal. He’s built a media empire that also includes international modeling competitions, according to his Website.

The suspect, Seabra, turned up at Bellevue hospital where he was taken into custody. Whoever administers Seabra’s Facebook fan page has changed the ‘info’ tab to:

Portugese model Renato Seabra (inset) was in police custody early this morning a person of interest in the slaying

Monica Gaudio was rather surprised when a friend wrote to her asking how she went about having her story — originally titled “A Tale of Two Tarts,” and curiously renamed “As American as Apple Pie – Isn’t!” — published in a New England-based cooking magazine called Cooks Source. Guadio, who had never so much as heard of such a magazine, decided to investigate. Upon finding that the magazine had lifted her original story without her knowledge or consent, Gaudio decided to write to them. After trading several emails, Cooks Source‘s editor finally asked Gaudio what it was she wanted. Simple, she responded: a public apology on Facebook, an apology in the magazine itself and a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism in lieu of payment coming out to $0.10 a word.

The following is an excerpt of the response she received, posted to her LiveJournal:

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Lee Abrams, the former Tribune Co. executive who offered his resignation last week after having been suspended without pay, is now talking out about his decision to have distributed an email containing questionable links to co-workers.

Forbes got its (virtual) hands on a (long, long) email Abrams sent out, specifically mentioning an Onion News Network parody video he sent to Tribune staff. One thing reads loud and clear: Abrams is not sorry for having sent it. In fact, he was simply strengthening the Tribune Co’s position at the forefront of an ever-changing media landscape: “[A]s Tribune is a multi-media company competing at the most dramatic cross-roads in media history,” writes Abrams, “I would have hoped that the use of a brilliant parody to demonstrate the ills of popular TV would have been an effective communication vehicle and that people would have taken it as it was intended; a parody that illustrates what not to do.” He just gives and gives and you all just take and take and mock and mock.

Abrams’ email goes on to offer justifications of and explanations for other criticisms that have been hurled his way as of late, including that he’d been part of a frat-like “boys’ club” with former Clear Channel employees while at Tribune.

His full email, via Forbes, appears after the jump. Grab a hot cocoa, but probably not a whiskey neat, and find a comfortable place to sit. It’s a long one. No NSFW puns intended:

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So the Tribune Co. has had to deal with quite a bit of less-than-positive attention lately: a scathing New York Times article chronicling the sort of office culture that births many, many photocopies of buttocks; harrowing discussions with creditors; and, now, fallout from a rather ill-advised email.

The Wrap has given the world this little treat today, along with a very important lesson: If you receive an email from Tribune Company chief innovation officer Lee Abrams, do not open it at work. Or ever, ideally, unless you are a 14-year-old boy who enjoy poo jokes.

Abrams, you see, has been suspended without pay after forwarding links to inappropriate videos, including one cleverly titled “Sluts” featuring unclothed lady-gyrations.

Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels, himself no stranger to accusations of creating a less than professional working environment released a memo to staff saying “Lee recognizes that the video was in extremely bad taste and that it offended employees — he has also apologized publicly. He reiterated those feelings again to me privately today. But, this is the kind of serious mistake that can’t be tolerated; we intend to address it promptly and forcefully.”

And then he spanked an intern.*

*He did not.

TheWrap has been looking into the suicide of Virginia Quarterly Review managing editor Kevin Morrissey, and it would appear that Morrissey had to contend with an extremely hostile working environment — so hostile, in fact, that some surviving family members and colleagues are wondering whether this ill-treatment may have been a factor in his death.

At the center of the speculation is the literary magazine’s editor in chief Ted Genoways, whose treatment of Morrissey has been described as “egregious.” From the TheWrap:

Shortly before 10 a.m. on July 30, Genoways sent an e-mail to Morrissey “accusing him of jeopardizing the life of a writer,” according to one account reported by The Hook, a local newsweekly. At 11:30 a.m., Morrissey called 911 to report a shooting near a coal tower in Charlottesville, Virginia. When police arrived, they found Morrissey dead, the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The University of Virginia, which operates the magazine, has launched an internal investigation into Morrissey’s death and the allegations of bullying against Genoways. “The untimely death of Kevin Morrissey has raised questions about the university’s response to employees’ concerns about the workplace climate in the VQR office,” UVA president Teresa Sullivan said in a statement late last week. “We will be undertaking a thorough review of VQR’s operations.”

Genoways, for his part, attributes Morrissey’s death to an ongoing battle with depression, and wrote in a memo to staffers that he “cannot accept the final blame he laid on me.” It had been rumored that Morrissey mentioned Genoways in his suicide note, but a look at the legible portion of the letter does not seem to make any mention of him.

Morrissey’s lawyer appeared on the Today show and said his client had indeed been depressed at the time he took his life, but did not rule out “unhappiness at work” as a possible contributing factor.