Archives: October 2009

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'For Fox Sake!

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TVNewser: Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” devoted nearly 12 minutes last night to discussing the Fox News vs. White House feud and a mocking analysis of Fox News’ distinction between news and opinion programming.

MediaJobsDaily: Reporting its third quarter earnings, the Washington Post Co. posted a $7 million increase in income while revenues at the company’s newspaper decreased 20 percent to $156.3 million.

WWD: Richard Beckman, president and CEO of Conde Nast‘s Fairchild Fashion Group, which publishes WWD and Footwear News, is taking over control of W as well.

Daily Intel: Days after Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger compared print media to the Titanic, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham tried a different analogy: “Forgive my possibly overly facile analogy here, but when we are looking at the digital delivery of the printed word, we are kind of where the Sony Cassette Walkman was,” he said. “There will be, I think, an interim step that will be a CD Walkman. And then it seems to me there’s going to be an iPod.”

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We made it through almost a whole week without any other higher-ups dipping out of BusinessWeek now that it’s been bought by Bloomberg LP. But nothing good lasts forever, especially not in the world of business magazines, and today BusinessWeek president Keith Fox announced he is stepping down from his position.

Unlike the other staffers who have jumped ship since news about the sale broke mid-October, Fox will be staying on with the magazine’s former publisher, McGraw-Hill.

Fox’s official statement about his departure, after the jump.

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Esquire might be testing out augmented reality, but it’s not the only magazine trying to get its readers to interact with the magazine online and off.

Indie music pub Death + Taxes has paired with Mobot — a visual image search company — to create an interactive version of its November/December issue, on newsstands next week. Mobot’s technology can be activated by readers to create an interactive experience with 10 stories in the issue.

This is how it works: take a photo with the camera on your phone of a page from one of the interactive stories and text or email the image to D+T. In response, you’ll get access to additional content available for download. For example, take a photo of guitarist Marnie Stern and you’ll unlock this video of her playing.

Mobot has used its technology for advertisements before, but this time the project is completely edit-driven. And the whole project is funded by Scion, with no additional cost going to the readers. The technology may only reach D+T‘s small audience (it has circulation of 54,000 with 135,000 total readers), but it may not be long until we see some bigger titles testing out this interactive option or something similar.

Related: Esquire Continues To Bring Multimedia to Print Issues

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal announced that it was closing its Boston bureau.

“That there has been truly great reporting under the generalship of Gary Putka out of Boston over many, many years is not in doubt,” Journal managing editor Robert Thomson said in a memo yesterday. “But we remain in the midst of a profound downturn in advertising revenue and thus must think the unthinkable.”

The bureau’s contributions to the business paper, and journalism, won’t be quickly forgotten. The bureau contributed many long-form investigative pieces for the business paper and covered Boston-based mutual-fund firms, education and other local industries like biotechnology. And several reporters based there were part of team that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for article about stock-option backdating.

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The Huffington Post has asked its readers to help pick the top 100 “game changers”: people who are “using new media to reshape their fields and change the world.” But as the site has revealed two new lists each week, we were surprised not to see founder Arianna Huffington on any of the them, especially this week’s list, Media Game Changers. We thought that HuffPost not putting its founder on the list rings just a little bit of false modesty. Come on, if Arianna isn’t at least one of the top ten game changers in media, who is?

Read on to find out

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You only have a few more hours to take advantage of this special one-day promotion being offered by mediabistro.com’s education department.

Sign up today for this class, a five-week course on writing for New York publications taught by former New York Daily News columnist Betty Ming Liu, and receive 30 percent off.

Just follow the link below and use the promo code SAVE30 when submitting payment to receive your discount.

Writing for NYC Publications

Earlier this week, we got a chance to chat with Steven Gray via Skype. Gray is a Time magazine correspondent based in Time Inc.‘s new Detroit bureau, established earlier this year in a house in the Motor City.

Gray is the only person living full time in the house, but many reporters from across the company come and go to work on stories as part of Assignment Detroit. The project is year-long commitment to living in and reporting from the city, with reports appearing in various Time Inc. publications and Web sites, including Time magazine, Time.com, Fortune, Fortune.com, CNNMoney.com, Sports Illustrated, SI.com, Money and Essence magazine.

Gray gave us some background on the project, talked about what he’s been working on and told us what it’s like to live and work in the house/bureau. In the clip above, he talks about covering Detroit and blogging for Time.com. “Detroit offers one of the few places in the country where I can write about all of the issues that I care about personally, in terms of writing about society and politics and business and the economy,” Gray said. “So why not Detroit?”

More of our interview with Gray, after the jump

Related: Time Inc. Launches Assignment Detroit

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Boo! It’s Halloween eve on the mediabistro.com Morning Media Menu podcast, and hosts Jason Boog of GalleyCat and AgencySpy‘s Matt Van Hoven opened the show with some scary news about The Wall Street Journal‘s closure of its Boston bureau.

“This unit in particular was working on longer form investigative pieces, and there’s just not too many outlets for that anymore,” Jason said. “And to watch them lose some resources at a paper that is doing better than other papers is kind of scary. People are worried about the future of investigative journalism.”

Also discussed: WPP’s earnings and Walmart’s book pricing battle with Target and Amazon.

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

With possible layoffs putting The Associated Press on the top of our layoff watch, employees at the newswire are understandably anxious about losing their jobs. Silicon Alley Insider reports that an AP “Town Hall” meeting will be held next month, and that those concerns will probably be on the top of the list of issues addressed by CEO Tom Curley.

Curley says addressing employees via Q&A sessions are business as usual, but there is obviously one question on most workers’ minds: Will they have a job come Christmas?

Update: AP spokesperson Paul Colford has notified us that the town hall meeting has been scheduled since October 1, and that it’s primary focus will be on “the outcome of the AP’s recent management retreat at Lake Placid.”

Official memo about the conference after the jump.

AP Bigwigs Host Town Hall To Ease Paranoid Staffers — Silicon Alley Insider

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Mark Wildman is leaving Reader’s Digest to join magazine publisher Bonnier Corp. as senior vice president of corporate sales and marketing. Wildman was most recently vice president of integrated marketing at Reader’s Digest Association, but his replacement, Maureen Polo, was announced last week. He will start at Bonnier on November 6.

While at RDA, Wildman worked to establish the integrated sales and marketing group for the company’s Food & Entertaining Affinity. Before joining Reader’s Digest in 2007, Wildman worked as executive director at Conde Nast Media Group.

“Bonnier is a strong, forward-thinking organization with more than 50 consumer media brands like Saveur, Popular Science, Field & Stream and Parenting,” Wildman said. “As consumers continue their shift toward real and meaningful, the Bonnier brands are very well-positioned, delivering specific well-defined audiences which are highly engaged and emotionally invested in the content.”

Full release after the jump

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