Archives: January 2009

NYT: How to Friend Mom, Dad, and the Boss on Facebook…Safely

Independent: You Can Never Get Enough Sex, But You Can Have Too Much Money

Alley Insider: Printing the NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

Portfolio: Why Celebrity Magazines Should Be OK

NYT: The Inauguration. At Last

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.

For all the misery and layoffs in the media sector this week, it was actually an okay week on Wall Street for the 13 biggest publicly traded companies. Considering the state of the industry, that’s actually a win. Jump to see which companies profited from the continued chaos.

Read more

Currently all searches on Google appear with the warning message “This site may harm your computer.”

Only two links pop up in a search for news on the topic [more now]: one from a site called Thaindian News, which says,

“At roughly 9:40 pm on 31st Jan 2008 (Thai time GMT +7), any search result on google.com showed the message “This site may harm your computer” for all websites including thaindian.com

We wish to reassure users that thaindian.com does not indulge in these activities and this is a goof up by Google affecting all websites.

And one from iTwire.com, which currently won’t load. Meanwhile Twitter is all over it! Is this the result of a hacking, or a glitch, or merely some formal announcement that Google is officially stepping into its role as Big Brother?

UPDATE A friend in the UK says Google is working fine there.

UPDATE Just did a search at 10:28am and the problem appears to be fixed. Slightly more info here.

UPDATE Google’s explanation.

Twitter was ablaze Friday evening, thanks to TheMediaisDying, the ten-week-old Twitter account that posts news of media closures and layoffs and is obsessively followed by many media watchers. It published an item Friday evening saying the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was “officially closing.” However, the bad news turned out not to be true for the time being, and was the unfortunate result of a bad tip that spread rapidly across the microblogging platform even as its veracity was being publicly questioned.

Back on January 9, Hearst Corp. announced it was putting the Post-Intelligencer on the block and would shut the paper down if a buyer wasn’t found within 60 days. Friday’s initial TheMediaIsDying post about the P-I, however, indicated the paper was closing ahead of schedule. FishbowlNY spoke with Post-Intelligencer managing editor David McCumber shortly after the message first appeared on Twitter, and he told us TheMediaIsDying’s original report about his paper was false “as so many rumors are on Twitter.” So, we pieced together how the inaccurate story made its way on to myriad media watchers’ screens.

Read more

FBNY has learned that 23/6, the online humor site launched in 2006, has been downsized to three staffers and has closed its offices. The site will continue as a Huffington Post vertical, to be run out of the HuffPo offices, and will use freelance pieces from the staffers who have been let go. We’re told that Sarah Bernard, former HuffPo GM and president of 23/6 is not staying on.

Huffington Post acquired 23/6 earlier this month from IAC after the company pulled its support at the end of 2008.

Via TVNewser comes word that former CBS Early Show EP (and big spender) Shelley Ross has some retirement tips! In case you are not yet ready to give retirement a go now may be a good time to check out our job boards.

Today is Patrick Gavin‘s last day at FishbowlDC before he departs for parts unknown (commonly referred to as Politico). Read his goodbye to all that note here.

Meanwhile mediabistro.com has hired two bloggers to take his place: Matt Dornic and Christine Delargy. Dornic runs local PR shop 3 Dog Agency and Delargy works in broadcast news in DC. Both start Monday so be sure to check them out!

Amazingly, yes. We’re v. happy you were named one of Min’s top launches, but don’t these people know the media is dying?

Over at the NYT‘s Paper Cuts blog Adam Gopnik sums up the Internet experience (except for the hockey part.

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions — adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers — none can equal the Internet. Like everyone else, my life now is simply a string of e-mails fueled by caffeine, and when not e-mailing I am hopping from political blog to political Web site to ice-hockey fan “boards,” on one of which I live a second, secret life as an unduly opinionated commentator called “SherbrookeW.”

For those of you who don’t know, the Super Bowl is this weekend. The Pittsburgh Steelers are playing the Arizona Cardinals, whose feature star wide receiver is Larry Fitzgerald Jr. His father is a sportswriter for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder who’s been embroiled in some controversy because he won’t sit in the press box during the game. It’s a non-story, honestly, but one that came up during Bill Simmmons‘ marathon chat session earlier today with interesting results:

Pete, Mpls: Most overrated SB story?? All of articles of Larry Fitz Sr. not cheering from the press box. I’m 45 yrs old, have lived in the Twin Cities all my life and have never seen or heard of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, the newspaper Larry Sr. writes for. The real story is how Larry Sr. has been able finagle 28 straight SB trips out of this gig.

SportsNation Bill Simmons: (11:48 AM ET ) I’ve gotten multiple e-mails about this. What the hell is the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder? It sounds like one of those fake newspapers that Tom Hanks would work at in a romantic comedy or something… and all you need to know about why newspapers are going out of business is that the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder has sent someone to cover 28 SB’s. Good business plan!

Simmons later recants when he learns that the paper is a “newspaper is a longstanding African-American newspaper,” but his point remains. Isn’t sending a reporter to the Super Bowl every year a fantastic waste of money?