Archives: May 2009

FishbowlDC: The LA Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun (Tribune’s Washington Bureau) might all be moving to the Scripps bureau office.

FishbowlLA: A good use for all of those empty newspaper boxes: planters for pretty flowers.

WebNewser: Al Roker Tweeted himself into a corner when he posted pictures from his trip to jury duty on his Twitter feed yesterday.

Forbes: New York Times “is leading a charge among big newspapers and magazines to create gripping digital ads that interweave marketing images with editorial content and respected journalism brands,” like those annoying ads that take over the whole homepage.

Reuters: Private equity firm ZelnickMedia Corp. is reportedly no longer interested buying Austin newspaper the American-Statesman. But current owner Cox Enterprises said it had found a buyer for two other Texas papers, The Lufkin Daily News and The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches.

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.

Romance publisher Harlequin is celebrating its 60th anniversary with an exhibition of book covers over the years, and we couldn’t help but want to celebrate with them.

Today, we stopped by the opening of “Heart of a Woman: Harlequin Cover Art 1949-2009″ at Openhouse Gallery on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, a stunning display of hundreds of classic Harlequin cover art over the years, complete with little history lessons about the art and artists and an interactive wall that puts your face on the cover.

(Fun fact learned from the exhibit: “The trend toward featuring photographs of scantily clad, contemporary men rather than painted images of historic heros suggested that women had grown increasingly interested in the objectified male body.”)

On hand to toast Harlequin’s diamond anniversary today were New York Times best selling authors Gena Showalter and Debbie Macomber, as well as Harlequin CEO Donna Hayes.

Hayes told FishbowlNY that the point of the exhibit was “to represent through our covers how women’s lives have changes since our company has been in business.”

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Air America Media announced this week that it is launching its own in-house network sales division, which will represent all of the company’s shows and products — including radio, video and online content — directly to media agencies and buyers.

The new business structure means Air America is taking over work once done by Westwood One radio network to create direct relationships with advertising agencies in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, Air America Media CEO Bennett Zier told FishbowlNY. Previously, Air America dealt with some advertisers directly but let Westwood One handle relationships with agencies.

“Agencies are sophisticated in their planning and their creative approach in making strategies for their clients, which will hopefully become our clients,” Zier said. “Because Air America is a particular type of company, and a left of center company, there are certain companies that want to advertise with us, and we want to be able to facilitate that and work with them more directly.”

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Today on the mediabistro.com Morning Media Menu podcast Keith Ferrazzi, author of “Who’s Got Your Back,” talks networking with Steve Krakauer and Rebecca Fox.

Ferrazzi is the author of “Never Eat Alone” and his latest book, “Who’s Got Your Back” hit number one on Amazon.com last night. He compared networking to organizations that encourage support from those in similar situations, like Weight Watchers and Alcoholic Anonymous. “In the olden days…there were certain support structures that were built around you in your life,” he said. “The problem is that, particularly in this very displaced, very virtualized world, you don’t got any of that any more…You have to recreate the safety net and the support structure…you need to create this for yourself.”

His book talks about ways to build honest, candid relationships with a few people who can support you and hold you accountable. Ferrazzi will also be speaking about relationship building on Wednesday, June 3 at the Mediabistro Circus.

Also discussed: Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper plan, romance novels performing well and what position Ferrazzi is currently looking to hire someone for.

You can listen to all the past podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321.

Confession: We were one of the 9.8 million viewers who tuned in to watch the season premiere of “Jon & Kate + 8″ on TLC Monday night. Although we have long found control freak Kate Gosselin and henpecked husband Jon a bit difficult to watch, the train wreck of a big family reality show has nevertheless kept us riveted for four seasons.

This week’s viewership was up 4.4 million from last season’s finale earlier this year. The jump is undoubtedly linked to the Jon and Kate scandal that has been splashed across tabloid magazines, television shows and Web sites for the past few weeks.

Not surprisingly, this scandal has meant big bucks for a tabloid media industry that has been searching for a golden goose since Angelina gave birth to her twins. Today, the New York Post‘s Keith Kelly jumped on the bandwagon by reporting that putting Jon and Kate on the cover of Us Weekly for the past six issues has helped the celebrity tabloid bump up newsstands sales dramatically.

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Hot on the heels of news that newspaper executives from across the country met secretly in Chicago yesterday, the Newspaper Association of America released troubling revenue numbers for the first quarter of 2009.

According to the NAA, total revenues for papers in the U.S. dropped 28.3 percent during the first quarter of the year, down to $6.6 billion from $9.2 billion during the same period last year. (For reference, first quarter revenue hovered in the $11 to $10 billion range for the five years prior to 2008.)

This precipitous drop is due to a 29.7 percent decline in print ad revenues (down to $5.9 billion from $8.4 billion in Q1 of 2008) and a 13.4 percent decrease is online advertising revenue (down to $696 million from $804 million last year).

Reportedly, executives at yesterday’s meeting discussed ways to monetize online content, but they have be careful in describing what the confab was about in order to avoid antitrust scrutiny. NAA president John F. Sturm told Nieman Journalism Lab that antitrust counsel was present at the meeting and noted that “the group discussed business topics such as protection of intellectual property rights and approaches to the Congress and Administration to address these and other issues.”

If the revenue numbers from the first quarter of 2009 are any indication, something needs to be done to ensure that newspapers will be around in the future — and fast. Otherwise, we’ll be seeing more papers go the way of the Rocky Mountain News in the near future.

Despite what the title of this post suggests, we are quite fond of our colleague from WebNewser and TVNewser, Steve Krakauer. So, when we heard he was competing in the “I’m a Blogger…Get Me Out of Here!” contest, we wanted to help him out.

The winner of the contest, which is part of promotional efforts for NBC‘s upcoming reality show “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!”, will get sent to Costa Rica to blog during the show. And since Steve professes that this is his “lifelong dream,” we had to do our part and vote. And you should, too!

Here’s a little bit more info about the contest, from its Web site:

We pit bloggers against each other in a contest to see who can survive to the final round, and win a trip to live blog behind the scenes at the “I’m a Celebrity” set in Costa Rica!

Three rounds will present our bloggers with challenges about bugs, beauty, being a celebrity and surviving the jungle. And you decide who makes it to the next round.

Check out Steve’s first post about bullet ants (no thank you) and botflies (yuck). We were worried that, were he to win, Steve might encounter these scary creepy crawlers when he gets to Costa Rica. But thankfully, bloggers don’t get to go outside much. But unfortunately, we think Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are more scary than bullet ants anyway.

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FishbowlLA: Alternative newsweekly New Haven Advocate has outsourced to India.

Associated Press: ESPN cut 100 jobs.

The Atlantic: Newspaper publishers held a secret meeting today reportedly about how to monetize online content moving forward.

New York Times: Women’s magazines debate: to retouch or not to retouch?

Businessweek: Time Warner broke up with AOL.

Ladies’ Home Journal named a new entertainment director today: Susan Pocharski, a 20-year industry vet with experience wrangling celebrity interviews for magazines like People and Us.

Pocharski most recently worked for Reader’s Digest, booking their entertainment coverage. She also worked as a senior editor at People, where she produced the magazine’s first Oscar Daily feature, and served as executive editor for Teen People, George and Maximum Golf, which she helped launch in 1999.

Pocharski will be replacing Marisa Fox, who recently left the magazine. But we’re wondering, will this mean more high profile celebrity interviews in LHJ?

Full release after the jump

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