Archives: June 2010

• FishbowlLA: Kathie Griffin and her mom are getting drunk and saying “gay” and “vagina” a lot in front of a crowd in Los Angeles.

• MobileContentToday: Here’s a demo of how Hulu Plus works on the iPad and iPhone. What a fun way to watch obscure Lifetime made-for-TV movies.

• Twitter: I have yet to read a Tweet that seemed as uncomfortably relatable. I tip my French bulldog’s tiny hat to you, Dana Vachon.

• Design Blahg: To this list of must-have accessories for annoying subway riders, I would add “evidently massive testicles that prevent gentlemen from sitting with their legs together so that some smallish young lady could perhaps sit without being squished against the wall.”

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.

— DIANE CLEHANE

While the regulars in the dining room at Michael’s chatted about their plans for the upcoming holiday weekend, it seemed only fitting that my lunch today was with Laurie Haspel Aronson, president of Haspel, the quintessential American company responsible for the creation of the classic seersucker suit. Laurie tells me it was the brainchild of her great grandfather, Joseph Haspel, who wanted to turn the fabric once favored by laborers for its cool comfort into a natty summertime staple of bankers and businessman everywhere.

Haspel, which was founded back in 1909, has dressed some pretty iconic fellows including Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. Jimmy Smits, who wore Haspel during his stint on The West Wing, will be sporting seersucker this weekend when he hosts PBS’ July 4th special and on his upcoming series Outlaw that premieres this fall.

Laurie explains how the venerable label remains a current fashion favorite (Russell Brand is a fan) but hasn’t alienated its old school clientele this way: “The great thing about it is it can be worn by everyone and looks good on everybody. It takes on the personality of the wearer.” Indeed.

Here’s the rundown on today’s crowd:

1. Former Chanel president Arie Kopelman and his wife Coco with Pamela Fiori (in Chanel) and a distinguished looking gent we didn’t recognize.

2. A very blonde Peggy Siegal and a handsome young fellow.

3. Scribe Phoebe Eaton, looking very glam

4. Abernathy & MacGregor’s Jim Abernathy

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Despite the Garden State’s meteoric rise in pop culture currency, The New York Times has folded its hyperlocal New Jersey site. Like the paper’s locally-focused project in Brooklyn, the site was called “The Local.”

After running for a little over a year, The Local published the following:

More than a year and a half ago The New York Times set out on an experiment in hyperlocal and collaborative journalism. We devoted two full-time reporters to the effort, as well as an editor and a number of support and advisory staff journalists. And we picked two fascinating and vibrant communities to launch our little enterprise.

From the beginning, we described this as a pilot, a test, an experiment, because we knew that our path in community journalism couldn’t be paved with sites staffed by full-time New York Times journalists. Nevertheless we were committed to pursuing the journalistic lessons to be found in web-based community coverage, and made this an editorial priority.

The site will be taken over by another New Jersey-based site, Baristanet. And they could not be more pleased:

We’re thrilled that the Times has passed their hyperlocal baton to us and we will run with it. First and foremost, we are your local homegrown online community. And to that end, we are bringing these new towns into an expanded “Baristaville” by staying local. Journalist and Maplewood resident Jolie Solomon joins the Baristanet team along with community contributors from Maplewood, South Orange and Millburn.

Whatever. I blame Snookie.

There is much strange possibly-a-musician versus magazine drama idly circling the crusty pop culture drain today. Earlier, it was Wavves gently propositioning the New York Observer, and now it’s what’s left of Playboy magazine suing Drake.

Playboy Enterprises has filed a suit against Drake (n&eacute Aubrey Graham), Cash Money Records and Universal Music Group for copyright infringement, claiming Drake illegally sampled the 1975 panty-dropper “Fallin’ in Love” — to which Playboy owns the rights — in his single “Best I Ever Had.”

We hope Drake’s song rings true after all this is over, in any case.

Seventeen.com has revamped its website in order to, as editor in chief Ann Shoket explained to us earlier this afternoon, better reflect a “new evolution of social.”

It’s not that the site has implemented social networking capabilities where none existed before — allowing for the easy sharing of content has always been a major goal at Seventeen.com because, as Shoket points out, the generation currently visiting the site has never not known a world where the internet played a huge focus. They expect to be able to keep in touch not only with one another, but also with magazine and website editors. For these girls, a back-and-forth relationship with the media they consume is nothing new.

With that in mind, Seventeen.com made sure that the content on their site was easily integrated with Facebook, via Facebook Open Graph, and Twitter, so that visitors could continue to share content with one another. To take that level of instant communication to the next level, however, Seventeen.com has also collaborated with Meebo. Meebo gives readers the option of sharing content by dragging and dropping information into a Meebo Bar that follows readers across the site. Meebo is platform agnostic, and thus allows users to connect with their friends across various social media networks and with site editors through instant messaging.

Other changes to the site include expanded video content on every page, a quiz tool that integrates content across Hearst Magazines Digital Media Teen Network and allows users to share results across social media networks, and a celebrity news and gossip hub that lets visitors easily navigate and find constantly updated information, gossip, pictures and more about their favorite celebrities, both mainstream and up-and-coming.

And that’s not to say that the print edition of the title has been forgotten — Seventeen.com, in fact, helps drive print subscriptions, with other half a million or so having been sold through the website.

The changes, says Shoket, mirror Seventeen‘s commitment to be “Seventeen Everywhere.” That is, to reach readers wherever they may be, be it at their laptops or perusing a newsstand.

The Associated Press has named Steven Gutkin as their official oil spill editor. He will be succeeded as Jerusalem chief in Israel by Dan Perry, who is currently the AP’s London-based Europe editor.

Senior managing editors John Daniszewski and Mike Oreskes‘s memo to staff about the changes appears after the jump.

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Last night, the UCLA Anderson School of Management announced the winners of the Gerald Loeb Awards, which recognize outstanding reporting on business. Cable-news channel CNBC, newspaper/website The New York Times and culture magazine Vanity Fair each took home two Loeb awards. The Times actually won a few more if you count one for M&A reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin‘s book Too Big to Fail and a lifetime achievement award for the paper’s assistant investigative editor Walt Bogdanich.

A more complete list of winners is available here.

Wavves (described by the New York Observer as a “pop punk stoner band”) dedicated a special song to the Observer at last night’s Fader magazine party. Cute!

Although we’re not familiar with the work of Wavves — helmed by Nathan Williams — Williams did refer to the song as “Fuck the New York Observer,” so we’ll infer that it’s a sexy tune about making love.

The dedication was most likely in response to a recent article the Observer ran which painted Williams in a less-than-flattering blacklight:

Whether the anti-intellectual rhetoric that Wavves employed onstage on Thursday was an affectation calculated to project an image of recession-era no-collar punk rock is unclear. In interviews Mr. Williams does come off as an accredited slacker who, until musical success earned him his own apartment in Los Angeles, spent his days at his parent’s house playing video games and smoking a ton of pot. So it’s absolutely possible Mr. Williams really is or was that kind of loser. Plenty of people are.

In a write-up on last night’s show and the heartfelt ode to the Observer, contributor Leon Neyfakh returns the love with a quip about The-Dream — the act Wavves opened for, as well as their Fader cover mate:

Mr. Williams indicated that he did not want to be interviewed by the Observer, which is too bad because it would have been rad to find out whether he got to hang out with The-Dream at all.

Ouch. To quote another bastion of musical genius: Love hurts!

Photo via Buddyhead

Yesterday’s post gave an overview of the New York State Department of Labor’s On-the-Job-Training program. In brief, the OJT program offers businesses up to $50,000 in grants to offset the cost of training new employees for newly created positions, with a maximum of $5,000 per trainee. A request for information from the department revealed some interesting details.

To participate in the program, employers submit a description of the job they are looking to fill. The Labor Department then uses that description to suggest candidates from their talent pool, which is compiled on their database of unemployed workers called Skills Matching And Referral Technology, or SMART 2010. Once the OJT participants have conducted their interviews and made their hiring selections, the Labor Department will assist them in developing a training plan and filling out all the necessary forms.

Launched in October 2009, SMART 2010 supposedly reads entire resumes – not just keywords – and matches workers to available jobs according to their strengths, skills and talents. Both the employer and the applicant receive e-mail updates when they’ve found a match.

Applicants usually enter this system when they visit a One-Stop Career Center and fill out an ES-100 form. A labor department job counselor enters the data into the system on behalf of the applicant, who may also provide a separate resume for more detail.

Whether this system could work for media industry startups remains to be seen. As with any analytical software, if the right employees want to be found, they will have to be smarter than SMART.

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Having been on both sides of the editorial process as an editor (Wall Street Journal) and a freelancer (The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times), Kyle Pope of The New York Observer has learned a few keys to being a great writer and reporter: Never take no for an answer, develop your own voice, and be nimble.

That final lesson, of course, he experienced firsthand as deputy editor of presumably the most infamous magazine launch (and shuttering) of all time, Conde Nast Portfolio.

Although critics blamed its demise on everything from the mag’s cover choices and operating expenses to its overall disorganization and low staff morale, Pope has a simpler explanation: “When the world changed, we didn’t adapt quickly enough.”

Part 1: Kyle Pope on The New York Observer‘s Web Problem

Part 2: Observer Editor Kyle Pope on His ‘Necessary Tension’ with Jared Kushner