Ha Ha Ha

Okay, this is just strange.

The Washington Post is getting a feature in the April Issue of Vanity Fair. An excerpt shows how investor Warren Buffett thinks that the Post’s business model is not working: “The Washington Post is a local newspaper,” he said. “The newsroom, kindled by what happened at Watergate, liked to think of themselves as national. And they are national, in an important respect, but they’re not national as a business. And they don’t have a business model that works nationally.”

As proof, he cites an anecdote about punking Katharine Graham, publisher of the Post for two decades.

““We were flying one time to Omaha on United Airlines, back when I used to fly commercial,” he recalls. “I said to her, ‘Kay, that pilot looks a little inexperienced.’ I said, ‘I’m not sure he’ll really be able to fly to Omaha.’ So, I said, ‘Do me a favor. Would you mind drawing a map of the United States that we could help him with, showing where Omaha is?’ Well, she started drawing a map, and of course she got as far as Chevy Chase, Maryland, and she didn’t have the faintest damn idea.”

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And yes, we realize the irony of posting this, but come on. They’re basically daring us to.

According to today’s issue of satirical newspaper The Onion, a 25-year-old employee “died Wednesday after being sucked into the website’s powerful news-repurposing turbine, where his body was immediately torn to pieces.

“The 200-ton content-compiling device, developed by Greek multimillionaire and site co-founder Ari­anna Huffington, sucks up original articles from around the web with its massive rotor assembly, re-brands them with the Huffington Post name, and then spits them back out on the company’s home page.”

I heard this grinding noise, and then I saw all these Washington Post stories, sexy pictures of people in the workplace, and celebr­ity anti-vaccine editorials start to back up on the factory floor,” said Huffington Post editor Emily Paxton…”We couldn’t shut it down,” continued Paxton, adding that the smell of mutilated remains mixed with raw Internet media was gag-inducing. “If we had, it would have taken a full day for the technicians to reset it, and we couldn’t risk missing a breaking story on Brody Jenner.”

Since The Huffington Post was founded in 2005, its headquarters has consisted of two rooms: Arianna Huffington’s spacious, lav­ishly appointed office overlooking New York City, and the windowless 10,000-square-foot subterranean warehouse that houses the turbine. More than 700 low-wage workers, known as writers, clock in every day, and, dressed in their Huffington Post hard hats and coveralls, work in dark, unsafe conditions to ensure the machine runs smoothly and constantly churns out content.

…”In a way, though, maybe it’s a good thing he was ripped to shreds and killed,” added Thomas, later saying that because The Huffington Post didn’t provide Evers with health insurance, he wouldn’t have been able to afford his hospital bills, anyway. “Working the HuffPo turbine is no way to live.”

Plenty more at the original source.

The above recruiting video for Twitter is bad. Purposely bad, of course, but it’s still cringe-inducing. Hey, nobody wants to work at a company that takes itself too seriously to make a video this bad, right?

Most of the social network’s open positions are for engineering jobs, as you’d imagine, but we found a few for media pros, like this one for a copywriter/editorial manager.

Turns out that pretty much everyone Susannah Breslin writes about ends up getting a job.

She discussed this phenomenon on her blog Monday. She doesn’t frame it like we are doing.

She first gave Lauren Rae Orsini $100 to write a piece for Breslin’s blog. Orsini soon landed a job at The Daily Dot. “I don’t think I got Lauren that job. I think Lauren got herself that job,” Breslin says.

Okay. But then Breslin wrote about Frances Bridges, who kept bugging Breslin until she got some decent advice out of her (which is all she wanted to begin with). Bridges then landed a blog on Forbes.

Finally, Breslin wrote about seeing a needlepointed “Hire me” sign in a window. The creator of the sign had almost no experience (working in a popcorn shop for $9 an hour excepted) and no college degree. After Breslin wrote about him, he got three jobs. Three! Two are more physical (baker and robotics teacher) but he’s also doing web design, web programming, and social media marketing.

The moral of the story is that if you want a media job, get Susannah Breslin to write about you.

Thanks to the blog Letters of Note we now know what it’s like to edit a magazine.

After William Saroyan wrote to H.L. Mencken in 1936 to ask the man’s advice on starting and editing a magazine, Mencken responded with the following:

Dear Saroyan,

I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine. I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to hell and learn from other editors there how dreadful their job was on earth.

Glassdoor is a pretty neat site, honestly, even if the reviews almost certainly skew toward the extremes. And we usually don’t mind when companies send us ridiculous “top 10″ lists, especially when it’s a slow news week.

But their latest top 10 list, “Top 10 Jobs That Burn Calories,” which is arguably one of the most ridiculous lists we’ve been emailed*, they got something seriously wrong. Okay, two things—first they ranked “firefighter” lower than “valet”—you guys are joking, right, Glassdoor?

But more relevant to this blog’s audience was #4 on this list: news photographer. Yeah, it’s a gym workout and a job all at once, though as prosumer cameras get more and more capable, there’s a lot less gear-lugging than before. But here’s what Glassdoor said:

“Breaking News! Who responds? News Photographers, that’s who. With fewer newsrooms these days and a 24/7 news cycle, news photographers are on the move at all times to capture life’s moments unfolding before it’s too late. They’re constantly moving, running, rushing and lifting heavy equipment to make daily deadlines. You’ll burn some bulge with an 8-hour cardio workout (aka: your normal shift).”

Yep, they said an 8-hour shift is “normal.” Ha ha.

In case you were wondering, the other calorie burning jobs (in rough reverse order) were: personal trainer, landscaper, retail sales, firefighter, nanny, tour guide, roofer, furniture delivery, and the aforementioned valet.

*Who’s seriously going to change their cushy desk job for one where you move furniture around all day? There are easier ways to trim your waistline than making a career change.

John McIntyre has worked as a copy editor for more than thirty years. In this interview on Copyediting.com, he talks about how he got his gig and what advice he’d share for other editors who would like to edit copy at newspapers:

“Consider a vocation in a religious order,” he said. “Then at least someone might feed you.”

Tee hee.

After the jump, a few more choice excerpts from the interview:
Read more

“Years ago almost every major newspaper in the country had its own travel section, which was a rich source of sales for full-time travel writers. But in recent years a lot of the big newspapers have gone out of business. There just aren’t as many travel sections available as there used to be.”

The year this was written: 1991.

Things don’t change fast, do they?

Image is from Writer’s Digest, May 1991. Thanks to a friend of MJD for the scan.

An art director takes to the Xtranormal (talking animals) movie engine to make this clip of an art director home for the holidays trying to explain to Mom what it is, exactly, that he does. “Did you take the picture of the steak in the ad?” “No, a food photographer took the picture.” “Did you cook the steak?” “No, a food stylist cooked it.” And so on. Har har. Having a job nobody outside the ad world understands is definitely a bummer.

This really sounds like a prank, but it’s not: Sweden has officially made its Twitter account the most democratic in the world, handing complete control of the feed over to a different Swede each week.

“The idea with Curators of Sweden is that each curator will share both their own and relevant third party’s thoughts, stories, information and other content that is somehow linked to Sweden. The idea is that the curators, through their tweets, create interest and arouse curiosity for Sweden and the wide range the country has to offer. The expectation is that the curators will paint a picture of Sweden, different to that usually obtained through traditional media,” says the website explaining the change.

That’s an understatement. The first guy to have taken over @Sweden describes himself as “Writer and marketer based in Stockholm. Has been called fascinating as well as ass face.”

His Tweets…are clearly not screened. They’re coming over the official feed raw and uncensored, and in our opinion, hilarious. But we’ll let you see for yourself:

Yet this is NOT performance art, as far as we can tell, or even a way to give the “official” voice of @Sweden a vacation. It’s bold, to be sure, and is certainly polarizing opinions across the ‘Net. What do you think? Is this a viable social media strategy?