Well, it wasn’t as bad as last week…

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NYT: Americans Flock to the Movies, Seeking a Silver-Screen Lining

Chicago Sun-Times: Paul Harvey Dies at 90

HuffPo: Newspaper Editors Cancel Convention For First Time Since World War II

Portfolio: A Kindle for Magazines? Hearst’s Working on It

NYT: What Are You Doing? Media Twitterers Can’t Stop Typing

The Rosen Group has conducted its first ever media consumption survey to some interesting results. The Rosen Group polled 316 respondents ages 12-75, online, from February 18-23, 2009 and of the people surveyed “nearly 80 percent of respondents still subscribe to magazines and the vast majority (83 percent) find that daily newspapers are still relevant.”

Judging by the dire financial state of newspapers one imagines “relevant” is somewhat different than, say, “worth the subscription fee.” That said, 45 percent of those surveyed seemed to think newspapers and magazines will still exist in 10 years. See all the results here and the full release after the jump.

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Having chronicled the fate of the country’s biggest media stocks for the past few months, we’ve come to understand that buying into one of them isn’t a good idea. This climate is terrible and almost no one is making any money. Of the 13 stocks we’ve been following, almost all of them have gone down — many more than the market average — and it’s not going to get better soon.

The good folks at the Motley Fool seem to agree with us. They’ve published a good list of five media stocks to avoid. Their picks (or non-picks, as the case may be): CBS, News Corp., Sirius/XM Radio, Time Warner, Viacom. Not exactly brain surgery, but then again they said making money as a banker was easy too, and look how that turned out.

Most readers have heard by now that today will be Denver’s Rocky Mountain News‘ last. With the San Francisco Chronicle hanging in the balance, and Seattle holding discussions about what it would be like to be a no-newspaper town, one can only hope the RMN‘s closure isn’t just the first sign of what is to come. Meanwhile the RMN has put together this (well worth watching) good-bye vid which covers the last month of its existence and is currently running on their homepage.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Before the Internet was around as an tool with which to fight back, or start them in the first place, writers had to resort to, gasp, letter writing. The Beast has a collection of letters penned by the late Norman Mailer to people who took a less than favorable view of his writing. One can only imagine what Mailer could have done with Tumbler (Twitter, come to think of it, may have been a useful exercise for the loquacious writer). Anyway! Here’s part of what he once wrote to then NYT publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger after one-too-many nasty reviews (including one ill-researched one) from infamous critic Michiko Kakutani.

Over the last ten years, Michiko Kakutani has reviewed every one of my books published in that period. In order, they were Oswald’s Tale, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, The Gospel According to the Son, The Time of Our Time, and The Spooky Art. All five were given bad reviews (The Spooky Art perhaps the least awful), but three of those five could make the claim that the ugliest review all received came from Kakutani. What underlined the procedure and could give it a willful subtext was that four of those five reviews came out a week to two weeks ahead of publication. Michiko was first with the worst. One of the basic tricks in book criticism is to get out early if you really detest a book. Still, four out of five! Kakutani was abusing her privilege.

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The other night near the end of the David Carr/Tina Brown conversation Brown turned the tables on Carr and asked him for his thoughts on the elephant in the room, namely the future of the NYT, and whether he had any ideas to add the to the ongoing paid content debate.

Not surprisingly Carr had plenty of interesting stuff to say. For one, he says that long term he feels very bullish about the Times, but that the key in the meantime is “scarcity.” “Scarcity and adjacency have historically driven us as a business.”

Today on the Menu we welcome CNN’s former chief technology and environment correspondent Miles O’Brien live from Denver where he is working on an upcoming documentary for PBS (and reading the last issue of the Rocky Mountain News).

O’Brien had been with CNN for 16 years and was let go in December whe the entire Science and Technology department was shut down. Then, a plane landed in the Hudson, and a plane crashed in Buffalo — and O’Brien blogged and tweeted it all to huge response.

“I was pretty bowled over by the response…I just sort of sat down and did what I would do if I was still at CNN…and put it on my blog. It just bowled me over how the world beat a path to my blog. There’s a lesson in all of that, that first of all people are thirsty for information from sources they can trust. And they will seek you out.”

As more and more experienced journalists find themselves out of work O’Brien wonders whether we will see a collection of individual niche reporting sites on the web, such as his blog, that may someday find a way to band together. Also, he says we shouldn’t be scared of flying. Also! How will we pay for newspapers online?! O’Brien gives us his take. You can listen to the podcast live every morning at 9amET on BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321. You can also subscribe to the iTunes feed of the podcast by clicking the “iTunes” button.

Per the release: The Slate Group, publisher of Slate, The Root, The Big Money, and Foreign Policy, today announced it has named Peggy White the Publisher of Double X, a women’s online magazine launching later this year. Double X will provide provocative, lively, in-depth commentary across politics, culture, family, and other topics, while focusing on a woman’s perspective.

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