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Tuesday, Oct 11
Media Minutiae, Still Creeped Out By The Doll Story Edition
You Oughta Be In [a magazine about] Pictures: The NYT is launching a shiny glossy pretty movie magazine, OnMovies, pocket-sized a la Playbill to be distributed in major-market Loews theaters (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Dallas and Seattle). The editorial content will be culled from the paper's culture pages. Sigh. The celeb-interviewing proclivities of Edward R. Murrow are clearly to blame for this. [NYP]
Playboy to cut rate base, raise cover price; number of wet T-shirt shots to remain constant: Playboy will cut its rate base down 4.7% to 3 million, its first such move in 10 years. It will also hike its magazine cover price higher than the miniskirt of one of its centrefolds, up $1 to a whopping $5.99. Belt-tightening here notwithstanding, they will be no doubt be happily loosened abroad as Playboy launches editions in the Ukraine and Argentina, brining its foreign issues up to 20. Is it me, or does Playboy seem somehow less sexy after that damn doll article? [MarketWatch]
Nip/Tuck at the WSJ: The Wall Street Journal is trimming its pages by a column-width, or 20%, in a move that will save a planned $18 million per year. The mini-WSJ will debut in January 2007. This move follows the switch from broadsheet to tabloid size in the WSJ's European and Asian editions announced back in May; you may recall that publisher Karen House did not rule out the possibility of shrinkage here. Either way, hopefully the cost savings will allow the WSJ to send off 22-year veterans of their publication with a little more than pretzels and cheese. [AP via NYT]
Hockey, the great unifier: Canadian writer Rondi Adamson thinks it's cute that the resolution of the NHL strike helped bring the labor strife at the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) to an end, but finds little else cute about the CBC. I find it strange that she characterized the NHL as "a primarily American organization," which may be technically true but hello, if you live in Canada you ought to know that your countrymen think hockey is kind of important. Unlike here; the NYT Sunday Sports section didn't mention hockey, the NHL or the Rangers (or Islanders!) ONCE. Lots of baseball articles though, obvi. But still. Hockey does, you know, exist. [CSM]
MUG brings it to David Brooks: Manhattan User's Guide, primarily known for restaurant recommendations, museum round-ups and excellent NYC minutiae, totally threw it down yesterday in a salvo flung at NYT columnist David Brooks, criticizing him for major miscalls ("senior members of [the Bush] administration are capable of looking honestly at their mistakes", "The Bush administration has become addicted to candor and forthrightness"), encouraging "morally hazardous" hand-dirtying actions in Iraq (prior to the Abu Ghraib revelations) and generally castigating him for being wrong wrong wrong. They also call him Bobo. Do other people call him Bobo and I missed it, or did they make that up? I think an investigation into the columns of other op-ed writers from as far back as 2003 (as this one goes) would probably reveal some bad calls as well; we can let Brooks off for not being a fortune teller but "addicted to candor and forthrightness" may push it just a tad. Update: "BoBo" stands for "Bohemian Bourgeois," a term Brooks coined for his book "BoBos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There" which I'd obviously never heard of. You probably have, so I give you permission to feel smarter than me...until the show-tune off, that is! [MUG]
Does this cellphone make me look fat? FYI: dating tips from the New York Post. On the bright side, this can also be read as a how-to for ensuring that an awful date never calls again. Another date-killer: talking about your blog. "And then one time, on Fishbowl..." [NYP]
But where's Canada? These United States, ranked from smartest to, uh, not as smartest. [CNN/Netscape]
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Amanda Ernst
