Scholarly Pursuits

Glamorous FishbowlNY readers, have you ever wanted to write for a fashion magazine? Interview your favorite celebrity style icons? Party with gorgeous models? Have Valentino declare you his muse? Drink champagne with Karl Lagerfeld on a private jet? Have Anna Wintour cower every time you walk into a room?

We can’t guarantee any of these things will happen. But, for newbie aspiring fashion writers, one way to venture into the fold is to sign up for Mediabistro’s Intro to  Fashion Writing Course. The class is taught by Nadine Rubin Nathan, who was editor-in-chief of Elle South Africa. and contributed to Harper’s Bazaar as a fashion features editor in New York. You may not have Tom Ford on speed-dial by the end of the course, but you will have a pitch letter for a fashion feature and a collection of spec clips written for a high fashion print or online magazine.

The class begins May 23rd, so read more about the class and register here soon if you’re interested. And, FishbowlNY readers, because we are so very fond of you, you will have $50 off registration with the code FBNY50. Good luck!

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.

What haven’t we learned from the New York Times? We’ve probably learned more from the Times than we’ve ever learned in a classroom. So it’s only fitting that now the Times will have a classroom of its own.

Huffington Post reports that the Times‘ Knowledge Network and New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University are teaming up to offer online courses in subjects ranging all the way from homeland security studies to global health care. The courses will be open to all students and they may be taken individually or used toward an academic certificate.

As much as we’d love to have Times‘ columnists teaching us their take on the world, the courses will actually be taught by Fairleigh Dickinson faculty (probably best to leave the teaching to professionals) but will feature content from the Times‘ digital content repository.

Just what all our readers needed to hear! It’s inspiring, feel-good stories like this that keep FishbowlNY blogging day after day.

The Daily Beast has compiled a list of the 20 most useless college degrees, and right at the top is Journalism. Well, if you’re going to be useless, we say, might as well be the best at it.

Here are the job/salary statistics for those lucky enough to have majored in the most useless degree.

Median starting salary: $35,800

Median mid-career salary: $66,600

Change in number of jobs, 2008-2018: -4,400

Percentage Change in number of jobs, 2008-2018: -6.32

Undergraduate field of study: Communications

Number of students awarded degrees 2008-2009: 78,009

Rounding out the top five most useless degrees are Horticulture, Agriculture, Advertising, and Fashion Design. So yes, Journalism students: you’ll have better luck switching to a degree in Horticulture. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Ambitious readers, do you long to see FishbowlNY write about you for a change?

If you want to write for magazines and websites and become the sort of media player we fawn over, we suggest taking Mediabistro’s Intro to Magazine Writing Class to get a head start.

The class is taught by Sue Carswell, reporter and researcher for Vanity Fair, who was also an editor-at-large at Women’s Health, a contributing launch editor for O, The Oprah Magazine, and a correspondent for People. You’ll also learn from guest speakers including author/actress Rosa Blasi, Victoria Gotti (famous for multiple reasons!), Tina Johnson, founder of Women’s Health, and literary agent Claudia Cross.

The class begins tomorrow, so if you’re a spontaneous, last-minute sort of person, check out the details ASAP.

The L Magazine, in its ongoing and successful mission to make me feel smug about the borough I call home, has put together a list of the best 50 blocks in the area for all sorts of activities, from getting groceries (that’d be Atlantic Ave. between Court and Clinton Streets in Cobble Hill) or scoping prostitutes (a time-honored Brooklyn past-time):

10.Best Block For Vice
North 4th Street between Bedford and Driggs Aves, Williamsburg
Ok, Williamsburg is clean and shiny now, but every now and then you can still spot a hooker at the corner of Driggs and N. 4th, where they used to work by the half dozen, waiting for truckers coming off the BQE heading down to the river to park. Oh, and there’s also a tattoo parlor, two bars and cheese shop (gluttony!).

Cheese and sleaze, y’all. I love Brooklyn. Check out the full list here, and if you see a pajama-clad, bleary-eyed young woman with carpal tunnel syndrome in need of having her highlights redone hanging out around spot #24, do wave hello.

As some of you already know, mediabistro.com is about much more than providing up-to-the-minute blog coverage of the most important segments of the media industry. We also host a catalog of classes to help readers brush up on their skills and, hopefully, get a job.

In fact, as signup for our fall courses gets underway, we’re offering a deal. If students enroll in any multi-week course (New York Intro to Magazine Writing, taught by Vanity Fair reporter Sue Carswell, for example) by August 27, they receive a free self-paced course (like our six-session New Media course) worth $179.

For more information on mediabistro.com’s fall courses, click here. For our fall promotion, click here.

The New York Times‘ Philip Corbett, who occasionally has the unenviable task of delivering such news as “do not use ‘Tweet’ as a verb” or “stop trying to make fetch happen; it’s not going to happen,” recently shared that Times writers have been abusing the word “hipster” and perhaps they should cut it out right now.

He writes:

We try hard to shed our old image as stodgy and out of it. Perhaps too hard, sometimes.

How else to explain our constant invocation of the old/new slang “hipster”? As a colleague pointed out, we’ve used it more than 250 times in the past year.

Some alternatives (other than the outdated, and thus probably newly popular, “hepcat”): “Every young person who doesn’t wear bootcut jeans (i.e. dungarees).” Or there’s always my father’s definition: “A person who is not likely to attract a doctor husband.” There. You’re welcome.

Here’s a bit of news for those of you with a hankering for a new place at which to dine on gilded macaroni, lobster pot pie on a lightly dressed bed of old money, and, of course, truffle fries: the New York Times has reviewed The Lion.

The review, by the once-enigmatic (and now possibly regret-filled) Sam Sifton gave the relatively new eatery but one lonesome little star.

The Lion, as FishbowlNY readers are aware, was creating a buzz long before it opened its doors thanks to recognizable investors like NBC News’ chief legal analyst and Mediaite founder Dan Abrams and Men’s Health editor David Zinczenko, as well as its chef — John DeLucie, the man behind Graydon Carter‘s Waverly Inn.

According to Sifton’s review, the place sounds like a Times Square “NY Media”-themed restaurant where the staff is perhaps required to wear such flair as buttons emblazoned with the slogan “Eat This, Not That” or clipped locks of Graydon Carter’s hair:

There is a bouncer in front every night, standing on the stairs that lead down into the restaurant’s cool, dark entranceway. The bar is crowded beyond belief with Delta Taus and other frat packers, men in distressed jeans aspiring to six-pack abs, women skating on the thin ice of fashion and yapping into mobile phones.

Nightmare. Since that’s not quite our “glass of pinot,” as Sifton puts it, and because it’s not like we were invited anyway, we will stick to eating beets and asparagus and pork belly and the like in Brooklyn. Where it’s safe. And where everyone we know in media lives anyway.

The Daily Beast has made public a voicemail left by Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone for reporter Peter Lauria in which Redstone tells Lauria he will be “well-rewarded and well-protected” should he want to give up his source at Viacom — a source whose loose lips led to an article on how Redstone was trying to get MTV to run a reality show about the Electric Barbarellas, a somewhat musical girl group whose show was deemed “unwatchable.” (Do keep in mind that that MTV is home to such fare as Blonde Women Blinking In Los Angeles and Summer’s Eve Products On Parade)

The show evidently did not pass muster with the likes of many top executives at the network, including MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath, but Redstone was using his clout to get it aired anyway, even spending thousands of dollars on flying the group’s members to New York.

Take a listen:

So, did Lauria take the bait? Nope. That “will never happen,” he writes.

People on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and elsewhere have lately been having fun with I Write Like, a website that employs statistical analysis to find literary matches to people’s writing. We were curious as to what ghosts haunt the keyboards of some of New York media’s biggest names, so we plugged a bunch of recent writing samples into the machine to find out. (Some names come from outside New York, for the purposes of rigor.)

This thing is far from foolproof. We loaded “I Write Like” with the opening paragraph from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and it said Poe writes like H. P. Lovecraft. Which is true, but we thought it might’ve said Poe writes like Poe.

• Rachel Sklar, Mediaite: David Foster Wallace
• John Koblin, New York Observer: David Foster Wallace
• Felix Salmon, Reuters: David Foster Wallace
• Emily Gould, freelance: David Foster Wallace
• David Carr, The New York Times: David Foster Wallace
• Sharon Waxman, TheWrap: David Foster Wallace
• Jack Shafer, Slate: David Foster Wallace
• Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine: David Foster Wallace

Okay, we tampered with the data. After the jump, writers who managed to write something that doesn’t sound like Infinite Jest. Spoiler: Henry Blodget writes like Dan Brown. So does Nick Denton.

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